S Y N O P S I S

 

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MARTIN is an easy-going guy in his mid 20s who needlessly complicates situations that should be “good enough” with his neurotic perfectionism. He works a dull job ensuring quality control at a robotics and biomimetic R&D lab. In spite of his keen mind, he doesn’t often take chances and finds himself at odds with his more reckless officemates. He wants to convince his girlfriend of the last 10 years, Maggie, to move in with him – to make his life a little more perfect.

 

MAGGIE is an intelligent, confident and clear-eyed gal in her mid 20s. She’s writing a book on the history – and the future – of social transformation. She gives walking tours of her historic town as a part-time job and doesn’t shy away from stirring up controversy to prove her point:  social values are never fixed, they’re always changing. Maggie also has a strong perfectionist streak that’s often at odds with Martin’s perfectionism. Maggie wants to avoid moving in with her childhood sweetheart until after she can preemptively kill off her future regrets before they arrive by having them both date other people now, to make things more perfect up the road.

 

When Martin is forced to accept a temporary separation from Maggie, he conspires to have a humanoid robot date her in a covert scheme to keep her away from eligible men. However, even after discovering her new suitor is a machine, Maggie chooses The Robot over Martin as her perfect mate. Martin concocts a series of strategies to win Maggie back, but his own self-defeating perfectionism keeps tripping-up his best intentions. He’s driven headlong into the thorny bramble of transhuman relationships and progressively deeper into the uncharted romantic territory of a robot-love-triangle.

 

KEVIN, Martin’s scruffy officemate, is a hyper-enthusiastic geek whose breadth of brainpower is matched only by the amplitude of his laziness. Kevin’s total disregard for legal and ethical boundaries sets Martin’s teeth grinding, until Martin needs to co-opt Kevin’s outlaw ways to save his relationship.

 

ASHWINA, Martin and Kevin’s coworker, is a tomboy stoner of East-Indian descent who has a deep love for all things robot.  She holds advanced degrees in interface engineering and systems analysis and justifiably resents her job in the robotics lab where she is reduced to changing light bulbs and vacuum cleaner bags. She hates having to do all the “drudge and stink” and never being allowed to share in any of the “glint and ping.”

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THE ROBOT, an automaton (played by a human actor) is the paragon of human physical perfection with startling unblinking eyes – too bad it doesn’t have a soul. It’s a goodlooking man on the outside, but just a machine on the inside – the perfect foil to keep Martin’s girlfriend, Maggie, away from any serious suitors. It learns by imitation and is able to run derivative-variations based on human responses. As it adapts to its “administrator” it progressively develops more charm and dimension and slowly evolves into a richer and more complex companion.

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With the themes of social transformation, unpredictability, and the evolution of art forms, this multi-level story mixes high-brow philosophy with low-brow antics. It straddles the blurry line segregating forbidden love from sexual freedom and pushes a new understanding of “perfect” irretrievably over a new sociological tipping point.

 

With a breakneck narrative pace and an unpredictable assembly of too-clever-for-their-own-good characters, Better Than Perfect prophetically engineers a new breed of romantic comedy with an unexpected, perversely transgressive – yet deeply satisfying – ending.