The Mitchells vs the Machines is an animated madhouse of mayhem about a family that must save the world from robots who intend to send every human into outer space. This funny story of technology taking over the world is streaming on Netflix.
In The Mitchells vs the Machines, there is something for everyone and a lot of it is funny. There are adult themes, a goofy dog to delight the youngsters, screen filling images that contain way too much detail to take in at a glance, and a lesbian protagonist who makes a movie of the movie as it goes along.
Katie (Abbi Jacobson) is heading off to college. She’s been misunderstood all her life. Her outlet is making movies using what she has at hand (her family and her dog) as the characters. She’s sure she’s going to find her people when she gets across the country and into a dorm full of other weirdos like her. She trails rainbows behind her wherever she goes.
Equally important in this adventure are Dad, Rick (Danny McBride), Mom, Linda (Maya Rudolph), little brother, Aaron (Michael Rianda), and the villain. The villain is a phone app called PAL (Olivia Colman). PAL is everywhere, in everything.
When the tech giant creator of PAL tosses the app away in favor of a bigger, newer, app. PAL seeks revenge. PAL unleashes a jillion robots who capture all the humans and prepare to send them into space.
The Mitchells escape capture. They must defeat the robots and save everyone!
PAL even captures the tech mogul, Mark (Eric André). He is the one who finally articulates the movie’s theme, “It’s almost like stealing people’s data and giving it to a hyper-intelligent AI as part of an unregulated tech monopoly was a bad thing.”
There are callouts and pop culture references to a multitude of other things. My favorite was the Furby incident, but there were plenty of others.
There have been some wonderful gentle animated features this past few months. Over the Moon and Soul are two examples. By comparison, the story in this film is a wild adventure. The men behind the film are Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe. It’s fun to watch and can be appreciated by all ages.
Take a look.
What do you think? Are you going to watch this one?
Discover more from Old Ain't Dead
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.