Idiocracy came out when I was still in high school, and back then, the movie didn’t appeal to me at all. Fox was apparently embarrassed that the film even existed and quietly set it up to fail. But Mike Judge was behind it—the same genius responsible for Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, and the cult classic Office Space. I recently gave it a shot on Hulu.

The movie is based on a concept I’ve heard discussed before. In American culture today, it seems the more intelligent someone is, the less likely they are to have children—and if they do, it’s rarely more than one or two.

Meanwhile, it’s more common for people with low IQs and limited financial means to have more children than they can realistically support. This raises the unsettling suggestion that the general population may gradually become less intelligent as generations pass.

So, in the film, Luke Wilson plays Joe Bauers, a man of average intelligence who works in the military and volunteers for an experiment in which his body is frozen for the future. He was only supposed to be frozen for a year, but instead, several centuries pass, and he wakes up in a complete dystopia.

Joe quickly finds himself in serious trouble. Everything about him sticks out like a sore thumb—even the way he talks. But he soon realizes that people have become so shockingly idiotic that even escaping from prison is fairly easy for someone with basic common sense.

My biggest issue with Idiocracy is that the society it portrays is so dumb that, realistically, nothing should function at all. They use a Gatorade knockoff to water crops, punish poor people just for being poor, and put absolute imbeciles in charge of the government. Honestly, it doesn’t feel too far off from what we have seen during the Trump administration.

Though if it was between this guy and Mango Mussolini, I’ll vote for Terry Crew’s wacky character.

While I liked Idiocracy, I didn’t love it. The concept is fairly unique, but the delivery of the jokes just wasn’t strong enough for me. I think Mike Judge might have had more success if he had used Hank Hill from King of the Hill and sent him on a mind-bending journey through a similar dystopia for an episode. That might’ve worked better than this big-budget film. It’s definitely a cult classic for a lot of people, but I probably won’t be motivated to watch it a second time.