the Machines is, if it were just another scolding cinematic tract about the dangers of too much screen time or Facebook or whatever, it wouldn’t amount to much. It’s all fun and very funny - the smart home goes homicidal - but the dark subtext is undeniable: When we cede to machines the things that make us human, we ourselves become not just replaceable but downright redundant. In one hilarious battle set inside an empty mall, Dawn of the Dead–style, the Mitchells face off against an army of wired, PAL-enabled household items, including carnivorous dryers, angry microwaves, and fiery blenders. (Note how, when Katie tells us early in the film that she has “always felt a little different than everyone else,” hand-drawn rainbows flash behind her.) There’s a warning here, of course, about putting all our emotional lives into the objects around us, be they physical or virtual. the Machines, which premieres today on Netflix, portrays a reality in which the background noise of technology often reveals our true feelings.
In so doing, it commandeers the language of the Beast to describe the Beast itself.
Rianda and co-director Jeff Rowe (working with producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have such animated masterpieces as The LEGO Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse to their names) use speed, wit, and a delirious combination of animation styles - mixing variations on 3-D, hand-drawn, and even live-action - to turn these familiar elements into something surprisingly … uh, surprising. The film achieves a start-stop, herky-jerky rhythm all its own as it remixes the nauseatingly recognizable textures of our screen-obsessed, extremely online world in inspired, inventive ways. Dare I say, this thing should be insufferable. It’s Little Miss Sunshine meets I, Robot meets The Host meets Zombieland meets WALL-E meets Kill Bill meets, well, all the other movies. The Mitchells, with their clumsy, bickering, unpredictable, and embarrassingly dorky ways, wind up being the one family that doesn’t get harvested by the killer robots, and it falls to them to save civilization. Within literally seconds (“So we promise you, they will never ever, ever, ever, ever turn evil … Oh no!” - the way the film briskly leans into its clichés is one of its more disarming qualities), the robots take over and start collecting and encasing all humans into individualized, Wi-Fi–enabled pods, which the now-rogue PAL will use to launch us all into space forever. Mark Bowman (Eric André), the hoodie-wearing tech-bro billionaire head of an Apple-like company called PAL (named for its ubiquitous, artificially intelligent digital assistant, voiced by Olivia Colman, who appears to be embedded in the mobile device of every man, woman, and child on the planet), has introduced his latest innovation: a trusty personal robot that will cook, clean, and basically do everything for you. Katie, needless to say, is mortified.Įlsewhere, the apocalypse is afoot. On the eve of Katie’s leaving home for good, her father tosses the girl’s plane ticket and organizes a cross-country road trip for the whole family to drive her to college instead. Earnest, eager-to-please mom Linda (Maya Rudolph) and klutzy, outdoorsy loser dad Rick (Danny McBride) just don’t understand their daughter. Katie (voiced by Abbi Jacobson) is a college-bound film nerd who loves to make goofy videos featuring her dinosaur-obsessed younger brother, Aaron (voiced by director and co-writer Michael Rianda), and their adorable mutt, Monchi. But its emotional design and trajectory are crystal clear, and the chaos feels like part of a grand plan.Įven the plot is cobbled together from any number of other popular movies, which makes sense given the generally spoofy quality of the whole enterprise. It’s filled with IG filters and GIFs and emojis and memes and freeze-frames and flying blocks of text, and at times it can’t seem to stick to a single story thread for more than a minute. Here, then, is a picture whose mixed-media cacophony leaves every other movie in the pixelated dust.
Which makes the cluttered, go-for-broke distract-a-thon of The Mitchells vs. That can be a dodgy endeavor: For every Ralph Breaks the Internet, we usually get several Emoji Movie–style disasters. Photo: NetflixĪnimated films often try to reflect the aesthetics of our culture back at us.