The Mitchells vs. the Machines (TMVTM) is a really good movie.
TMVTM is, above all, hilarious. Genuinely. I am not a person who usually sits and just watches a movie — I’m almost always on my computer, doing a cross stitch or a puzzle, or listening to my roommate read the IMDb trivia. I usually start out sitting on the floor by the coffee table with a snack or an activity, only to retire to the couch and look at my phone sometime near the end of the second act. But with The Mitchells, I stayed on the floor, glued to the screen and actually crying with laughter. Every joke gets time to build up and land, and is supported by a rich, illustrative art style and dynamic animation that, in my opinion, is quickly distinguishing Sony as one of the best computer animation studios in North America (yes, better than Disney). TMVTM is also the first movie I’ve ever seen that seems to really understand the internet and engage with it in a way that’s familiar to me. While there are almost no allusions to actual internet pop culture, it’s obvious that this movie was made by people who watched a lot of pre-influencer YouTube back in the day.
TMVTM is about a pretty standard dysfunctional movie family — Katie, a teenage girl who wants to leave home as soon as she can; her awkward younger brother, Aaron; her dorky mom, Linda; and her father, Rick, who is mad about them not being as close as they used to be, yet completely unwilling to engage with Katie’s interests or interact with her as a person rather than a project. They are on a mandatory family bonding road trip when the robot uprising, led by an AI named P.A.L., begins, but when they’re passed over by the robot abduction squads, they’re left as the only people who can possibly defeat the robots and free humanity.
TMVTM is a Sony film, but the main distribution rights were sold to Netflix when the pandemic made a theatrical release an uncertain prospect. It was made by the creative team behind Into the Spider-Verse, and has a similar animation style, with hand-drawn textures layered on top of conventional CGI. However, TMVTM goes one step further. The main character, Katie, is an aspiring filmmaker who sees and interprets the world through the lens of film, animation, and pop culture, and her perspective is layered on top of the movie in something the production team calls “Katie-Vision.” Her feelings are superimposed onto every scene by photos, memes, and 2D cartoons. We even see a lot of the movie through her video camera. This convention is not only cute and funny, but it invites viewers, even adults — or maybe especially adults — to identify with Katie. And while this is a major strength of the movie, it makes its moral a little underwhelming.
For a movie that puts so much work into highlighting Katie’s feelings, and is ultimately about her mending her relationship with her dad before going away to college, it’s disappointing how little emotional gratification Katie gets as a character.
There are other plot holes in the movie, but the only one that bothers me is why Rick, as we learn, had to give up his dream of living in a cabin he had built in the woods when he and Linda had Katie. This is the backstory that’s supposed to make Rick sympathetic; it’s kind of implied that either they had to move to the suburbs for work, or that the log cabin was part of a larger off-grid type of lifestyle the couple deemed unsuitable for a baby, but it’s never fully explained.
TMVTM ultimately seems to excuse Rick for allowing resentment and his own unresolved feelings about the cabin to get in the way of his relationship with Katie because he made a responsible decision as a parent. Katie’s birth made him give up his dreams which makes the way he reacts to her dreams — which is, at a couple points, downright mean — justified. And parents are human, and resentment is a human reaction, so this could have been a great starting point, except it doesn’t go anywhere; Rick never tries to really understand Katie. He learns to accept her, but he doesn’t “get” her.
TMVTM’s Chekov’s gun is the family’s ugly dog, who is so hideous he breaks the AI’s image recognition system, making the robots short circuit. The climax involves Rick finally learning to use a computer, and playing Katie’s YouTube videos about the dog on giant screens to keep the robots off Katie’s back long enough for her to enter the kill code that will deactivate them. However, neither of these victories — Rick seeing value in Katie’s videos or learning to use a computer — has anything to do with Katie. They’re purely utilitarian. Rick and Katie’s relationship is supposed to be seen as mended when they sing a song that they sang together when Katie was little, but that moment is about nostalgia, not about Rick meeting Katie where she is now, as an almost-adult. These beats of the plot are also supposed to be emotional beats, but they always hit just a little to the left of the mark.
As a viewer, this is frustrating because the emotional conflict of the movie is resolved, but only from Rick’s point of view — not Katie’s. And Katie is the audience’s perspective character, so this is important. Rick never really learns to engage with Katie’s point of view, but Katie engages with Rick’s. Throughout the movie, he tries to teach her to drive stick shift, and she ultimately uses those driving lessons to maneuver through the barrage of robots. Rick could have done something similar — for example, remembering a movie Katie had forced him to sit through and relating it to their situation to guide her through danger. But he doesn’t. In the end, he promises to back her up no matter what. There is something to be said for loving and supporting someone even when you don’t understand them, and Katie does end up going to college, where she finds the kindred spirits she’s been aching to meet. But it would have been really moving — and as groundbreaking as the rest of the movie — to see Rick relate to Katie on her level.
Despite its worn-out conclusion about father-child relationships, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a hilarious and ultimately heartwarming movie, and will definitely be a frequent flyer on my rewatch rotation. If you like animated movies, or if you just need a laugh, I highly recommend it — just make sure to internalize the part about billionaires giving personal data to advanced AIs with little to no oversight being bad; that’s a moral we should all take to heart.
Image: Netflix
