Week 14: Satire and Sci-Fi

“Idiocracy” 

Mike Judge

 “About Time"

Richard Curtis

For this week, I watched two movies Idiocracy and About Time, both of them a science fiction film that give out a complete different feeling to many other science fictional movies. Idiocracy is simply a comedy film about two people going through hibernation experiment and ending up waking up 500 years later where the society had become a place only for entertainment with no responsibilities and intellectualism. This comedy film could be entertaining, but I wasn’t really entertained by it since in this world there are a lot of people who prefer entertainment rather than thinking to do the right thing. This also brings back to our presidential election in the USA this November. Many people were drawn by the entertainment during the presidential debates and the jokes in social media that even those who knew who would make the least worse choices didn’t vote because they believed even if they didn’t vote things are going to go well somehow. And here we are now sitting here waiting for 2017 with fear. Idiocracy simply is a joke, but now that I watched it after the election it doesn’t sound like a joke. Climate change is being denied and international relations, sexism, racism, and homophobia are the problem ’that’ man is thinking of bringing back to cause more chaos to this world. 

About Time, on the other hand, is about Tim, a young man who holds a special ability to time travel and tries to change his past to improve his future. The story is so subtle and because it concentrates on only his life and some of those around him that this story looks very real. It is mentioned in the movie that he could only time travel to a time he has experienced and know the exact time, date and location of the time period he wants to return. As the story goes and Tim grope his happiness, he stops time traveling and go through his daily life. At the beginning he wished his love life to go smoothly as well as to help his friends with his ability to time travel and once everything was set, he had allowed himself to live a complete normal life like all other people. I really enjoyed the subtlety of this movie and the fact that it looked very real.