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I laughed. I hated myself. Then I laughed some more. And let's be fair: Mike Judge, like many good satirists, isn't in the business of offering solutions. But when the humor is this savage, it does make you wonder what he's implying. Ten years later, Idiocracy's real achievement isn't how much of it has come true, but how much it continues to disturb.

Mike Judge's scathing and hilarious Bush-era satire Idiocracy portrays the apocalypse not as a sudden and violent occurrence, but as a gradual self-inflicted plague that progresses over centuries of breeding.

Culturally speaking, this fantasy might be regarded as something close to an inversion of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., with the absence of culture playing the equivalent role that classical piano music did in the Dr. Seuss movie; there are also a few rough parallels with the subsequent animated feature Wall-E, especially regarding passivity and obesity.

There are too many barbed jokes to ingest on one viewing, but Judge explicitly blames dumbed-down media, ubiquitous advertising, anti-intellectual Bushian politics, brainless entertainment and technologically induced laziness. In other words, Rupert Murdoch — Fox News, of course, takes a drubbing, but virtually every arm of the News Corporation, which owns 20th Century Fox, is also lambasted. And Judge takes no prisoners — his style is often crude and cruel, which is as it should be.

Despite what feels like obvious interference, it's clear that there was no Ambersons massacred here. Idiocracy is too thin and one-note to match the tone of universal resonance thatOffice Space hit, and an hour of Beavis and Butthead has as many laughs. But for sharpness of sting and bullseye accuracy of target, Judge's satire can hang comfortably with sloppy irreverent spit-takes like Putney Swope or Romero's Land of the Dead.

One of the greatest films of last year. And not just one the greatest films barely anyone saw, but one of the greatest satires to hit screens in a long time. Truly, the movie could be paired as a double feature with Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. Only, unlike the lack of children of Cuarón's tale, there's too many kids in the dystopian future ofIdiocracy—kids and adults who are dumb— really dumb. And yet, for anyone who's walked among the masses in a strip mall, they're all believably dumb.

The film is too scattershot and compromised to push the conceptual bleakness beyond the realm of lowbrow comedy, though Judge's cultural ire remains bracing throughout: For all the characters' slapsticky imbecility, Judge makes it clear that it's their docile acceptance (read: political inactivity) that makes them true dumbasses.

Though several set pieces seem extremely clever on the surface, they tend to deflate not long after they begin. In any case, there are only so many times when it's funny to watch fat men and women who can barely speak beyond a grunt and generally know few words beyond "ass" and "fuck"; after that, the chortles fade... [Still,] Judge bravely bites the hand that feeds him and his movie, with all its problems, is a rare piece of rebellious political spoofery from a major studio.