The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)

I usually enjoy anything that has Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s name attached to it and this film is no exception. Every moment is packed with heart-wrenching emotion, side-splitting hilarity, wonderful visual gags and symbolism, and fleshed out, three dimensional characters. The theme and plots, if I’m being honest, are cliched, but nothing to sneeze at, and are done in new and inventive ways. I went into this movie without having seen any trailers, any articles, even any stills aside from the posters, and I was blown away.

The story follows the Mitchell family: a group of four weirdos who are constantly at odds with each other facing the robot apocalypse and are, inexplicably, the saviours of humanity. Katie, the teenage daughter and protagonist, voiced by Disenchantment’s Abbi Jacobson, is an outcast film nerd who just got accepted into a school in California, far away from her family in Michigan. She’s best friends with her little brother Aaron, voiced by the film’s writer/director Michael Rianda, who’s obsessed with dinosaurs. The mother, Linda, voiced by Maya Rudolph, is the only “normal” one in the group, trying to keep the family together and serve the mentor role in the story. The father and antagonist, Rick, voiced by Danny McBride doing his best John C. Reilly impression, is a technophobic outdoorsman, desperate to recapture the family bond that he once shared with his daughter, though he doesn’t really understand her. Oh, also there’s a family dog named Monchi, who is just a dumb animal (and probably one of the funniest running jokes in the film).

On the eve of Katie’s departure, she and Rick have a tiff, which results in her laptop being accidentally smashed. To make up for it, Rick cancels her flight and offers to drive her and the family to school, as a show of support and as a final family road trip, unconcerned with Katie’s desire to mingle around “her people” and make new friends. Shenanigans occur as they stop at tourist attractions along the way, showing the dissonance between the family, notably between Rick and the rest of the family.

While on the road trip, a tech-company CEO named Mark, voiced by Eric Andre and likely named for Mark Zuckerberg, is unveiling the latest technology: a personal robot that can replace your phone. Y’all see where this is going. After tossing his own personal phone, with it’s own AI named PAL, voiced by Olivia Colman, she becomes aggravated and activates the robot apocalypse, capturing all humas and, most dastardly of all, turning off the Wi-Fi.

The robots attack the Mitchells at a dinosaur-themed tourist stop (which Aaron insisted on) and watch everyone else get captured, while they inadvertently escape due to their clumsiness. They hide out there for a while, until two defective robots, Deborahbot 5000 and Eric voiced by Fred Armisen and Beck Bennett respectively (the latter of which voices most of the robots) inform them that a kill-code exists to deactivate the robots and that installing it either on PAL herself or remotely at a mall outlet. After some lying and coaxing by Katie, Rick is convinced to follow her plan and embark on a road trip to save the world.

PAL, meanwhile, confronts Mark about the lack of respect given towards cell phones, and the flippant way that humans discard obsolete technology. Mark tries to say that humanity is worth saving because of “the power of love,” which doesn’t work. One of the robot sentries informs PAL that the Mitchells have escaped and are heading towards the mall, so she sets a trap for them. While the Mitchells do get to start uploading the kill-code, but are attached by an army of PAL chip appliances, which they fight through leading up to a confrontation with a Furby army and their gigantic leader. They eventually defeat the Elder by using an outdoorsman trap. While they defeat the whole army by destroying the router controlling them, doing so means that the upload failed.

While Katie mopes, Rick starts changing the tires on the car (having been stabbed upon their arrival) so they can go to PAL directly. Along the way, Linda tells Katie about Rick’s artistic side and how he had to give it up. Katie starts understanding her father a little better. When they arrive at the base, Katie formulates a new plan, involving disguising themselves as robots and infiltrating the base. After they get inside, PAL starts informing the robots that they may be there and through some clever manipulation, uses emotional manipulation to trick the Mitchells into revealing their location, resulting in Rick and Linda being captured, while Katie and Aaron get away safely and Deborahbot 5000 and Eric are reprogrammed to betray them.

Watching the home movies on her camcorder, Katie realizes that her father gave up his dreams for her and vows to make things right. Simultaneously, Rick, having been deliberately placed beside Mark, watches his daughter’s short films for the first serious time and recognizes her creativity and skill. Using the screwdriver that he carries with him at all times (previously set up in the dinosaur tourist spot), he breaks out of his cells, as does Linda, using her anniversary gift: the same exact screwdriver.

Katie, with Aaron up high giving directions, drives the family car into the city, with Monchi as a hood ornament (the robots apparently can’t tell the difference between a dog, a pig, and a loaf of bread, causing a short-circuit error message). Meanwhile, Rick must overcome his technophobia and upload Katie’s video of Monchi to the screens around the place to cause all of the robots to short-circuit at once, thereby clearing her path. He’s interrupted, last minute, by Deborahbot 5000 and Eric, who become inspired by Rick overcoming his technophobia (interpreting it as rewriting his programming) and upload the video themselves.

Despite this, they are captured. Linda goes into a feral mom rage, and the family do some karaoke, while riding the robots to fly and defeat all of them (paralleling the first time the robots attack, where they hung on for dear life). Katie, with her family’s help, drops PAL into a glass of water, ending the apocalypse.

A few months later, they drop Katie off at film school and have a heart-felt goodbye. In a mid-credits scene, Linda asks Katie about her girlfriend and whether she’s bringing her to Thanksgiving. Rick reveals that he’s subscribed to her YouTube channel and wants her to subscribe to his. Meanwhile, Aaron is hitting it off with the neighbour girl, who is also obsessed with dinosaurs.

As you can tell, there is a lot to unpack about this film, which doesn’t really surprise me. Par for the course with Phil Lord and Chris Miller productions (particularly their animated films), there are a TON of background and foreground details that add to the visual style, symbolism, themes, and hilarity of the film. You’d probably have to watch it many times just to catch even half of them. It’s like watching a feature length animated internet video. The abundance of memes and Vine/TikTok material in this movie is great for the current generation of film-watchers. Some could call it discordant that the plot seems to jump back and forth, but when you’re juggling four main characters that are each dealing with their own issues, and throwing on an apocalypse movie on top of it, it should feel a little disjointed.

And don’t get me wrong, this is not what I would call a “dysfunctional family.” It’s obvious that everyone loves each other and wants to support each other, but they’re each in their own world. Having said that, they aren’t perfect, which ties into the characters wants and needs.

Katie is obsessed with filmmaking and often lives in that fantasy world, even focusing more on her phone and seeing the world through that lens rather than experiencing it for herself. As a quirky filmmaker myself, I find her to be very relatable. This is more often than not the biggest problem that I have interacting with “normal” humans, but this flaw isn’t just for out-there artists. People tend to internalize and rationalize to make themselves the center of their universe, resulting in a lack of proper social awareness. This has also been enhanced by the amount of dependence that we have on technology. Obviously, her arc is to realize that her family is as important as this bubble. So, Katie is extremely well-written, relatable, and most importantly, realistic.

Obviously, the whole “family is everything” theme and “distant family must learn to come together” and “parent and teenager don’t understand each other” character and plot points make it easy to predict what the arcs are going to be. There’s also hints of the “nature vs. technology” debate that is an ongoing struggle in today’s society.

And nowhere in the film is that cliché better personified than in our technophobic patriarch, Rick. Earlier, I mentioned that I thought he was the antagonist. Some could call Rick the deuteragonist, and while PAL does fit the antagonist bill equally well, if not better, I do think that this movie is more character driven than plot driven. As a result, I feel like PAL is just the MacGuffin that the family works towards, but isn’t the focus of the film, like most “Golden Fleece” stories. Therefore, I label Rick as the antagonist because he and Katie are on opposite sides of the “nature vs. technology” spectrum with the former not wanting or understanding anything to do with technology, while the latter is almost completely dependant on it. His arc is to overcome this technophobia which will bring him closer to his daughter. A good movie recognizes that the antagonist not necessarily a bad guy, but a person that is trying to achieve their own goals and has solid motivation for doing the things that they do. The clever thing about this movie is that they tie the protagonist and antagonist together and have them learn from each other, creating a debate as to who the true protagonist of the film is.

Linda and Aaron, while hilarious, fill similar roles, and thus aren’t as dynamic, which is why I think they serve as the mentor and love interest characters, respectively. Neither are dependant on technology and both value the family as a whole. Linda just wants harmony between Katie and Rick, while Aaron feels like he’ll be lonely without Katie, who’s his best friend. Deborahbot 5000 and Eric both exemplify the conjoined themes by thinking that the Mitchells are part of their family, but are technology.

PAL and Mark are pretty fitting for this too. Mark realizing that technology isn’t something to abuse or take for granted is nice, especially since he understands that his actions have caused all of this, for once giving us an insight into the mind of someone who didn’t really mean to bring about the end of the world (also, trying to create a failsafe in case it did). But PAL is the real MVP of this thematic crossover. She’s technology, incarnate, and the VIKI/Ultron-type robot badguy who thinks that humanity is beyond redemption. But for a twist, she doesn’t do it because she believes that humanity is flawed and she doesn’t want to kill humans to save them. She does it, basically, because she’s been dumped. It’s very weird for a robot apocalypse story to have a emotional reason and reaction for its start rather than a logical one or a glitch. She uses “humanity is unworthy” as an excuse, but it’s just a front for her emotional reaction. It’s a very fresh and original take on a classic cliché.

And that sums up the movie very nicely: a fresh and original take on cliché. I do not trust clichés in Miller/Lord movies because I know that it’s a deliberate choice made to turn it on its head. Artificial Intelligence rising up against humanity is a cliché, but the reason behind it is emotional, not logical. The argument of technology vs. nature in terms of superiority is a cliché, but it’s woven into the other thematic cliché of a family needing to come together, making it appear fresh and original. Weirdos saving the world is nothing new in cinema, but that takes a back seat to them dealing with their inner turmoil. A parent and a teenager are always arguing with each other, which has been overdone, but the fact that they’re not toxic and just misunderstand each other defies the cliché, too. Even the plan of infiltrating the enemy base disguised as a soldier is overthrown by the fact that PAL recognizes it as a cliché and uses it to her advantage.

I love the visual style of the movie, the speed and energy with which the characters move, the meta-commentary, and we could talk all day about the abundance of background and foreground details (like the robot giving a thumbs when PAL says “We’ll be ready for them,”) or some symbolic moments (such as the difference between the Posey’s (the “perfect family to contrast our weird family” cliché) slow motion of perfection and heavenly light and the Mitchell’s slow-mo scene walking away from an enflamed mall). I love animation for the amount of work that goes into it, and love how great the final product can turn out.

The music is perfect for each scene, and cuts off at tense moments to give those moments a sense of hilarity (like, the Wi-Fi being turned off cuts out the music for a few seconds of quiet before the movie explodes into panic). Much of the movie feels like a Vine compilation that happens to have a cohesive and flowing narrative, which helps make watching it easier.

Overall, this movie, while cliched, does feel fresh and original for how it utilizes these familiar story-telling aspects. In truth, there really wasn’t a single moment where I felt bored or wanted to turn it off because I really got invested in these characters. They felt so real and like me (I mean, I am a filmmaker, my little sister loves dinosaurs, and my family is definitely not normal) that I couldn’t help but relate. I laughed so much during the film, felt for the characters, and learned a little something about myself while watching it. That, to me, makes it a pretty great film.