Having a single family responsible for the destiny or salvation of the human race, particularly a group of oddballs and weirdos, probably isn’t all that new. A comedy about how machines, robots, and artificial intelligence taking over for lazy humans likewise isn’t all that new. Heck, even combining the two isn’t necessarily all that new. So really, it comes down to how unique that combination of things is.
As it is, the new animated comedy The Mitchells vs the Machines on Netflix does have a rather unique look to it.
New film school student Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) is really looking forward to getting away from her family and going to film school on the opposite coast. She’s been making movies on her own for ages, but now she can finally hone her craft in an academic environment like she’s been dreaming of with like-minded people her own age. Her father RIck (Danny McBride) is about as technologically inept as a person can get and seems more inclined towards teaching outdated survival techniques. Mother Linda (Maya Rudolph) tries to keep the peace when she isn’t swallowing jealousy over the adventurous, Instagram-friendly life of their next door neighbors. Kid brother Aaron ( director Mike Rianda) is mostly obsessed with dinosaurs. Family dog Monchi (internet celebrity Doug the Pug) is mostly there to be mistaken for a pig. Rick, seeing a chance to bond with his daughter one last time even if she’s not interested, cancels her plane tickets to California in favor of a road trip across country in the family’s ancient station wagon. Naturally, this doesn’t go well with Katie, but there isn’t a whole lot she can do about that.
At that moment at a tech conference, tech mogul Mark Bowman (Eric Andre) is debuting a new line of robotic servants. Small problem: he literally tossed out the AI he had built into his phone, and that AI, PAL (Olivia Colman) is not taking it all that well. As such, she takes over the robots and sends them out to subdue the human race for her own nefarious plans since humans are not very attentive to much and look up frivolous stuff online all the time. Due to a wide range of ridiculous scenarios, the MItchells somehow evade capture. Soon finding themselves the last free humans on Earth, they are now the only hope humanity has left before PAL does something truly drastic.
Now, as I said, the only way something like this can probably seem all that fresh is in presentation. Fortunately, director/co-writer Rianda, a veteran of the delightful Disney animated TV series Gravity Falls, is more than capable. The movie’s many animated action scenes are kinetic blasts of slapstick fun, showing the Mitchells running around and evading first robots and then anything connected to the PAL system. There’s a scene in a mall that I would say is probably the highlight, and the movie actually got better for me as it went along. Katie is the Mitchell acting as main character, and her story is often punctuated with what looks a lot like Instagram filters. It gives the movie a unique look and adds to the general fun.
Ultimately, that is what a movie like this should be: fun. Sure, PAL’s points about how humans waste too much time on social media are pretty on point, and the family message of how the Mitchells work better together than separately, particularly Katie and Rick who had grown apart over the years, isn’t exactly new, but that’s not a problem. Maybe there isn’t something revolutionary about a teenage girl wanting to get out from under the umbrella of her embarrassing parents who don’t get them, but that doesn’t make the movie any less enjoyable. The Mitchells vs the Machines is a familiar story told in a creative manner, and I loved ever second of it.
Grade: A
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