At the end of the day it was a comedy. Sometimes subtly is a virtue.
It’s pretty clear that the movie satirizes and critiques the corporate world.
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DaGeek247@fedia.io 5 days agoThe other part is that they depicted the corporations as completely innocent idiots too; "the computer said the money went away so I had to fire people and now they're all rioting in the streets!" As if the company wasn't at fault for all of that.
Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 5 days ago
DaGeek247@fedia.io 5 days ago
I'll give you 'satire'. But I don't really agree with 'critiques'. The lesson i got from the movie was "stupid people can't really have empathy, so they just need to shut up and let actual smart people do the important work", and also eugenics.
If it was critiquing the modern corporate structure, it would have included actual critiques of the modern corporate structure, rather than a single poor idiot in charge of a big company who should have just let the smart guy fix it all for him.
Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That’s a fair point. I am just sharing my interpretation.
From the first time watching the movie in 2006 to a recent re-watch, I always got the impression that the eugenics piece was never meant to be taken seriously (or literally). If anything both parties were made to look rather silly in the intro (in their own way). Felt like more of a story setup.
There were definitely many critiques of US corporate culture (I was living in the US around that time after living in Europe and Asia) and the complacency of US society. The TV commercials/shows/ads, the Fox news show, the overboard consumerism, costco university, the Brawndo slogan. It made all of them look bad and stupid.
One could argue that an average guy solving all the worlds problems while the corporate types failed is a damning take on oligarchy.
The director, Mike Judge, didn’t emphasize the more sociopathic and dark elements of oligarchy, but the movie was meant to be a comedy.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Also the eugenics stuff. Yeah, it was just a low-effort way to set up the premis, but eww (and also very incorrect). They had to make sleepwaling into that kind of thing seem plausible with some explanation. Instead, we didn’t actually need that.