ANIMATION REVIEW: The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
I found myself watching this movie on a whim, and it was trying far too hard to be funny. It was designed for children, but it was choked with memes (popular ones and inside jokes) that dominated the plot and made it nearly insufferable. That said, The Mitchells vs. the Machines has a good message — but I can consider it bad for being this annoying.
Speaking of annoying, our protagonists are the Mitchells:
- Rick (Danny McBride, Tropic Thunder, Alien: Covenant), a father and husband obsessed with nature and his family
- Linda (SNL alum Maya Rudolph, “The Good Place” [TV-NBC], Idiocracy), a mother and wife obsessed with the neighbor’s perceived perfection and her family
- Aaron (director Mike Rianda, “Gravity Falls” [TV-Nickelodeon]), the dinosaur-obsessed son of Rick and Linda
- Monchi, the wall-eyed family pug that either looks like a dog, a pig, or a loaf of bread
- Katie (Abbi Jacobson, “Broad City” [TV-Comedy Central], Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising), daughter of Rick and Linda who is obsessed with weird art animations that she believes will get her into art school
With our protagonist Katie making good on her goals of getting into art school on her weird animations, she has plans to start life on her own and fly to school. She runs into two problems: her father Rick has cancelled her plane ticket (without consulting her) to turn Katie’s trip into a family road trip…and machines have taken over the world.
Straight out of left field and a representation of our growing focus on digital media and gadgets, a tech guru named Dr. Mark Bowman (comedian Eric Andre, “The Eric Andre Show”[TV-Adult Swim], “Level Up” [TV movie], Trolls Band Together) decided his operating system’s AI assistant named PAL (voiced by Olivia Colman, “Great Expectations” [TV-BBC], Hot Fuzz, “Marvel’s Secret Invasion” [TV-Disney+]) was obsolete. Instead of upgrading the PAL software, he wrote a whole new software for all humanity and threw the AI assistant into the trash. As a result, the sentient program declared war on humanity and hijacked the Internet, locked off all the technology, and captured any humans with help of an army of PAL android soldiers. PAL’s plan: to capture all humans and launch them into the sun in a big rocket — they’ll be so distracted by cute cat videos they’ll run to their own doom and not fight back. It would have worked, had the Mitchell family patriarch insisted his family touch grass and not use their PAL phones, unknowing of the robot apocalypse.
The entire adventure for the Mitchells is one of emotional discovery, as Katie and her father Rick come to terms with their new form of their daddy-daughter relationship and how it reckons with its own previous form. Indeed, their reckoning with the past and future of the human race leads the entire family on a quest to stop PAL and save humanity. On the way, they meet Eric and Deborah-bot 5000 (voiced by SNL alumni Beck Bennett and Fred Armisen, respectively) — two damaged PAL androids that help the Mitchells on their journey and swear they are normal humans. It is this team that decided to take down PAL and stop its plot for planetary control and to jettison all humanity into our star system’s sun.
Perhaps this movie was not made for me, as I found this film was unimpressive and choked with memes (outdated and new) that distracted from the actual story. There was so much that could have been done to deal with the parallels of disposable beings — and yes I know this is a kid’s animated movie, but children DO think about these kind of subjects, because the discussion on disposable people is not really about robots or computers…but it IS about empathy. We should do our best to teach our children about empathy for everyone and everything — not just humanity, or specific parts of humanity. The sooner we become more empathetic as a species, the smaller the chances our dying at the hands of angry robots and AI becomes. Be nice to the machines: not unlike mankind, it usually knows only what it’s been told and it is the very least you can do. And while you’re at it, be nice to fellow members of humankind…for practice.
CHOICE CUTS (spoilers ahoy):
- Linda’s obsession with her perfect neighbors is justified — they’re voiced by Chrissy Teigen and musician John Legend, with Charlyne Yi voicing their daughter.
- While all humanity being wrangled by tractor beams and trapped inside hard-light constructs is terrifying, the calming effect of Youtube videos on prisoners while they wait to be jettisoned into the sun seems over-exaggerated. But this is a cartoon so we’ll allow it.
- DOG-PIG-BREAD is the one thing I never thought would shut down a robot apocalypse, but since it’s key to understanding the film creator’s influences that’s OK.
- I can’t give my usual complaint about not letting sentient AI onto the internet in this film, as PAL was allowed onto the internet way before the problem started.
- Explaining death to an android is weird.
- I think the writers mistook obsession for character, because the Mitchells’ obsessions seem to be their only defining traits.
- TOO MANY MEMES MISTAKEN FOR COMEDY WRITING; they’re not the same thing.
- Finding out Katie is LGBTQIA+ and dating her classmate Jade (played by SNL alum Sasheer Zamata) at the end was great, as her being gay has no weight on the plot…as it should be.
- Looking at the PAL androids and their reflective black faces, I’m reminded of the Tesla Optimus general purpose humanoid robot advertised in 2022.
- Cancelling someone’s plane tickets without consulting them sounds like some foolishness an airline would do; never thought a parent would do it to their own child to satisfy their own desires.
- The movie was previously called “CONNECTED”, which makes sense when you factor in the focus on people being more connected to their devices than each other. I suppose focusing on the violent adversarial conflict between man and machine makes for a better selling point than the empathetic need for humans to connect with each other.
