Office Space 20 Years Later: Still Relevant And Still Funny
Well folks. Office Space turns 20 today. One of the best comedies ever put on film, is celebrating a birthday today, since it had its premiere on February 19th 1999.
And what is to be said about the Mike Judge’s movie 2 decades after the premiere? Well, it’s still funny and relevant for one. For a movie that barely scrapped of the budget money on the box office, now it has a cult following among the average Joe.
The blue collar, cubicle stuck average Joe that’s working a mundane boring job just to make ends meet. We’ve all been in Peter Gibbons’ shoes. We’ve all been stuck in a rut, frustrated and unmotivated in a job that we’ve grown to detest. Whether it’s because of our asshole boss or the job itself, we’ve all been there. We’ve all reached to the point that we just don’t care, and we just want to leave and watch the place burn.
Office Space really nailed the depiction of ordinary working middle class men in blue collar working environment. Peter, Michael and Samir are in the IT sectors, but the very same working conditions can be said about almost every aspect of a big company employment. Stuffy regulations, lifeless work attire, meaningless small-tack and the daily shenanigans of your soul-sucking boss who thinks that he’s a God’s gift to humanity.
And in Joanna’s (Jennifer Anniston) have you ever had a coworker or a boss to tell you to smile more? Or demanded that you work more demeaning work conditions than in the previous week? And did you dreamed of quitting by flipping your boss? Or breaking the copy machine with a baseball bat? I know I have.
Two decades later, Office Space is still relevant because the average Joe (or Joanna) are still dealing with shit. Yes, things have been a lot more relaxed in some industries, but cubicles like the ones in Initech still exist big time.
The cubicle world in Office Space was magnified and studied to an almost anthropological level, but that’s what made it funny. The banality of our everyday mundane life, put through a magnifying glass. Hey, even Ron Livingston admits that people to this day are approaching him to say that they’ve gathered the courage to quit their life-sucking jobs because of that movie. Many people’s lives were improved because of Office Space, and you really can’t put a price tag on that. Office Space is still great, and if you have the chance please go and watch it all over again.