Media Studies Blog

The Yes Men Fix The World review

By: Sam Caldarone

In The Yes Men Fix the World, world-renowned pranksters Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum attempt to ‘fix the world’ through their creative hoaxes. The whole theme of this movie, and of the ‘Yes Men’ is to show good and evil, and how any evil can be good if they just put in some effort. The film does not follow a particular structure: although it does show many flashbacks to accentuate just how bad some of the companies are, it never follows a real, solid structure. However, the way they set up the structure is effective in the film, and it helps to have the aforementioned flashbacks.

The Yes Men Fix The World is, for the most part, an expository documentary. It does share some elements with reflexive documentaries, but it is mostly expository. The film is mostly shown through Andy and Mike’s perspectives. Although, their identity is constantly changing, which allows other people’s perspectives to be shown. For example, the journalist who knew of the impending Bhopal disaster, or even the man who lived and grew up in Bhopal. The film was a little biased, but it was biased against the bad companies, who deserved all the bad karma they got.

I thought that one of the main strengths of the film was the way it was set up. I thought that the cinematography was great (in particular, I liked the scenes where Andy and Mike went swimming in their suits, and got out and went to their ‘headquarters’). I enjoyed all those breaks they had in the film. They lightened up a pretty dark documentary.

The Yes Men Fix The World is important in our society because it plays the role of the everyman rising up against a cruel corporation. Obviously, the negative components of the film were DOW losing a ridiculously large amount of money in stocks, and even when the people of Bhopal had falsely believed that DOW had actually apologized for the incident. It is unfortunate that they had gotten their hopes up just to be shot down like that. However, the positives are great: it shows that anyone can do what Andy and Mike did, which is very inspirational to some. All things considered, it was a great documentary.