Better World (2018)

Posted by Mrs Giggles on August 18, 2020 in 1 Oogie, Idiot Box Reviews, Series: Bobcat Goldthwait's Misfits & Monsters

Better World (2018)

Main cast: Danny Pudi (Calvin Reichart), Cara Mantella (Dawn), Drew Starkey (Hunter Robinson), David Boat (Siegfried), Tom Kenny (Roy), Atkins Estimond (Gerry), and Diesel Madkins (Stan)
Director: Bobcat Goldthwait

Calvin Reichart is a hack scientist who is upset that his progressive dreams of the Democrats winning the elections non-stop and a socialist, green world arising from such victories are not a reality. Because he is not getting his way, he declares to his girlfriend Dawn that humanity is doomed. “What if we have the technology to save us?” he asks out loud, maybe because no matter how much the Silicon Valley technocrats band together to censor and ban right-wing voices on social media, damn it, Alex Jones is still out there yammering his stuff.

So, he decides to hook his two supercomputers together to get them to fix the Democrats’ inability to stymie Orange Man Bad humanity’s greatest problems. The two supercomputers, Siegfried and Roy, represents Bob Goldthwait’s failure as a comedian, as they spout off some of the worst jokes ever—the kind of jokes made by a dotty old relative and everyone is forced to laugh instead of cringing because he is ninety-nine years old—and everyone laughs uproariously to tell me how funny these jokes are. They decide to come up with a plan to fix Calvin’s problems alright, and oh boy, what a plan it is…

… Because it’s one of the most idiotic plot twists I’ve ever come across in this series, and there are enough of bad ones already as it is. The take home message is an insipid one made disingenuous by the fact that we have a filmmaker, whose industry is closely tied to technology, lecturing people on the sins of becoming too dependent on technology. Meanwhile, the main characters behave like overgrown refugees from a children’s muppet show, talking and even thinking like one can count their IQ with one hand, and the comedy relies on dumb slapstick “Hur, hur, hur!” moments. Because no character in this episode can be even remotely mistaken for a human being, I don’t know why Mr Goldthwait decides to include a preachy message here. Who’s going to take that message seriously?

If anything, Danny being a rich, privileged, oh-so-typical Silicon Valley brat that thinks he has the right to decide the course of lives of people all over the world in a fit of hubris—the stereotype of a far-left idiot, in other words—and getting humiliated and punished for it suggests that Mr Goldthwait may secretly be a centrist or even, gasp, right-wing sort. Better World? Nah, he should get better at doing this kind of shows first.

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