The Mitchells vs. the Machines
Directed by Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe
Running time: 1hr53 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
The machine apocalypse.
Welcome to the machine apocalypse, Olivia Colman style. In The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Colman brilliantly voices a Siri or Alexa-like personal assistant/evil overlord who kind of has a point. What’s so great about humans? The way she has been treated by her Mark Zuckerberg-like creator, named, er, Mark (and voiced by Film of the Week favourite Eric Andre!), despite catering to his every whim for years, absolutely merits some kind of machine uprising.
This witty animation, from the talented producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who also brought us The Lego Movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and the live-action Jump Street films) is a supremely agreeable family fable which is good at acknowledging emotional complexity, without getting too bogged down in it. The protagonist is a young woman (voiced by Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson), about to head off to film school. Her practical, traditional dad, worried about her prospects, hasn’t quite got his head around the fact that she’ll probably end up making big-budget features for Sony Pictures Animation (okay, the film doesn’t quite come out and put it like that, but it does feel like an autobiographical piece, right down to the adorable photographs in the end credits of the families of all the creatives involved in the film).
His fatherly concern stems from not really understanding the world she inhabits, and that makes for a nice universal parent-child dynamic to help anchor a story stacked with delicious sight gags, absurd one-liners and deliriously silly set-pieces. It’s a real watch-it-with-family film, probably not suitable for very tiny kids, but otherwise containing enough caffeinated, mixed-media, hyper-frenetic fun to satisfy all but the most jaded of attention spans. Missed a joke because you glanced down at your phone? Don’t worry, there are another ten coming right up.
THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES (2021) Written by Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe | Character and production design by Lindsey Olivares | Edited by Greg Levitan
Available to watch on Netflix
