directed by Mike Rianda
written by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe
How do you follow up a groundbreaking, giant-killing, Oscar-winning animated film like 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse?
The short answer is, you don't; you try something completely different.
The Mitchells vs the Machines is a sweet little family comedy about the Mitchells, a slightly off-kilter suburban family of four living in Michigan. Aspiring filmmaker Katie Mitchell (Abbie Jacobson) is about to head off to college, and it's a moment of fear and frustration for her father Rick (Danny McBride) who feels unable to connect not only with Katie but with his wife Linda (Maya Rudolph) and son Aaron (Mike Rianda) who spend most of their time together buried in their gadgets. It comes to a head when Rick accidentally breaks the monitor of Katie's laptop, and decides to make it up to her by driving her all the way to college on the other side of the country.
Meanwhile, at an event in Silicone Valley, Mark Bowman (Eric Andre) a sort of Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg mashup, creator of the revolutionary, phone-based virtual assistant PAL (Olivia Colman), launches her replacement, PAL MAX, which is housed in a fleet of robots, only to discover that hell hath no fury like a virtual assistant scorned. PAL takes over her would-be replacement by taking control of Bowman's robots and uses them to round up apparently every human in the world. Through a combination of accident and idiocy, the Mitchells, right smack in the middle of their road-trip from hell, somehow manage to evade capture and it ultimately falls on them to save humanity; if only they can get their s ** t together first.And for the first time, they'll have to set (almost) all their gadgets aside to do it.
Kudos to Sony Pictures Animation for telling a story that, in this day and age of people needing more than ever before to connect with one another, dares to point out our collective slavery to gadgets (like the laptop on which I'm typing this review ) and our collective lack of actual human connection. It's a hilarious little fable about a family that, just like any other, struggles to keep it together, with a frustrated artisan of a father not wanting his daughter to repeat his mistakes and endure his heartbreak, and a daughter who wants nothing to do with her seemingly out-of-touch dad. There are, of course, lessons to be learned in the end, by both father and daughter, and by humanity in general as they come this close to being launched into space by a phone app.
It's not quite the gobsmacker that Into the Spider-Verse was, but it never aims to be, and like most Sony Animation pics (yes, even the Hotel Transylvania pics) it has its unique visual sensibility that would prevent anyone of accusing them of being Pixar wannabes. The script is loaded with its fair share of tropes, with one third-act revelation of an eavesdropped conversation feeling particularly cringe-inducing, but it's still an engaging script.
The film has, in a remarkably subtle way, broken ground. It features the first ever openly queer lead character, without the hated "virtue signaling" or anything particularly ostentatious in the script. This stands in stark contrast to Disney's habit of trumpeting its "first ever" gay extras or peripheral characters in films from Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel. Good work showing up Disney yet again, Sony.
With Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse Sony Animation, as a creative force, had finally arrived, and while The Mitchells vs the Machines is not quite on the same level, it shows that they're here to stay.
8/10
