(PG) ★★★★½
Director: Mike Rianda.
Cast: (voices of) Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Mike Rianda, Olivia Colman, Eric Andre, Fred Armisen, Beck Bennett, John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Charlyne Yi.
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| Driving past a school at drop-off time is hell. |
Families are weird. Tech is dominating our lives. Parents don't understand their kids. Kids don't understand their parents.
Roll all that together, sprinkle on some modern meme culture, feed it an adrenal gland, and you've got The Mitchells Vs The Machines - the latest CG-animated masterpiece out of the Lord/Miller mini-empire of CG-animated masterpieces. It's a brash, non-stop Energiser Bunny of a film filled with big ideas but an even bigger heart.
The film follows the very normally dysfunctional Mitchell family on a cross-country road trip until they're interrupted by a robot uprising. The Mitchells soon discover they're the last hope for humanity, which is not great news for humanity.
Director Rianda doesn't do subtle here, and the film is all the better for it. The CG is topped up with a hand-drawn look, that is further added to with a mix of notebook-style jottings, cutaway jokes, and a smattering of video memes. This mish-mash visual styling is part of the frenetic energy of the film, which also stems from its astute comic timing, exaggerated character design, and a plot that rarely takes its foot off the gas as it crosses an apocalyptic America.
But as with other Lord/Miller productions, the visual eccentricities are nothing without strong themes and emotion to go with them - think The Lego Movie 1 and 2, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse. and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. Thankfully there is heart to go with the fit-inducing imagery and ugly pug gags. The film's relationships - most crucially the one between daughter Katie (Jacobson) and dad Rick (McBride) - are powerful and feel real, and their as-anticipated conclusions are no less powerful for ending where expected.
Family aside, the other big theme is how tech is taking over our lives, with no better metaphor than an AI uprising. It deals with this in big ways and small - the big being the whole robot apocalypse thing, but the small ways are fascinating and include the mum who wants to put a filter over her family so they resemble the Insta-perfect neighbours, and the Mitchell's inability to converse at dinner time. But it also admits tech can be good, especially in a creative sense - it just needs to maintain humanity at its core.
Perhaps Rianda's only mis-step is casting himself as the youngest Mitchell, the dinosaur-loving Aaron, rather than using an actual child voice actor. It's distracting hearing what it is obviously an adult voicing a kid, especially when everyone else is so perfectly cast and does such a great job. The other characters feel real - Aaron less so.
What The Mitchells Vs The Machines does beautifully is remain very human, even in the face of monkey memes, slow-mo car crashes, killer robots, and wall-to-wall eye candy. Much like its heroes.
And by god it's funny.
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