Rating: PG
Runtime: 1 hour, 53 minutes
Directors: Michael Rianda, Jeff Rowe
Quick Impressions:
We’ve been meaning to watch The Mitchells vs the Machines for more than a month and finally found an opportunity this weekend. Both its directors, Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe worked as writers on Gravity Falls, one of the only shows that all three of our kids will happily watch. My soon-to-be-six-year-old just doesn’t care much for TV, to be honest. He prefers YouTube videos about gaming or science, so he usually approaches all television and movies with barely concealed resentment (at best), but his sister loves Gravity Falls so much that it’s rubbed off on him. Gravity Falls was the theme of her eleventh birthday party, and since then she’s been trying to decide if she’d rather be Mabel or Wendy. (It’s a tough choice! She’s twelve-and-a-half now and still vacillates between them.) And her stuffed Waddles proved so enviable that we had to “make our printer into a replicator like Grunkle Stan’s copy machine” and produce an identical Waddles for her little brother.
My daughter didn’t realize the connection between the movie and Gravity Falls at first, so when the movie started, she was thrilled with the type of humor she started getting. “When I heard the premise, I was skeptical,” she admitted. “Usually when they’re like, ‘We’re a modern family. We use the internets,’ then it turns out so cringey, but in this case, the humor worked, and I was pleasantly surprised.” I always love getting her perspective on movies. (For one thing, as her mother, it’s nice to know what she’s thinking. Also, as someone who is no longer a teenager, it’s nice to have the honest reactions—which I share with her permission—of someone who almost a teen now.)
Even my son, who pointedly relocated from the couch to the stairs when we displeased him by turning on a movie, soon began watching despite his best intentions to pout. When the movie gave us the line, “Every kid leaves home. It’s not the end of the world,” a small voice chimed in knowingly from the stairs, “Apparently it is.” My husband and I exchanged pleased glances. Apparently, despite his protests, a certain skeptical somebody was watching after all.
Even my dad (who is not that into animated stuff) was watching. Later my daughter observed, “I don’t think Grandpa was really watching the movie.” And I told her, “Oh, I assure you, he was.” The father/daughter storyline really spoke to him. I know because he kept speaking to me. “I wasn’t controlling like that, was I?” No, Dad. “I didn’t crush your dreams like that, did I?” No, Dad. “I didn’t make you feel like I wasn’t proud of your achievements, did I?” No, Dad.
Let me just say something here in writing. My father always encouraged me to pursue my dreams. I started writing a novel when I was four because he was writing a novel. When he gave up his dreams of becoming a professional musician/poet/DJ to earn a more stable living to take care of me, I always appreciated eating. When he burst into tears every time he tried to tell somebody I was valedictorian, I got the distinct impression that he was proud of my achievements. And, just in case anybody is wondering, he never gave me a screwdriver as a sweet sixteen present. Plus, that time he did give me a Weird AL CD still in the Sam Goody bag as my only present on my actual eighteenth birthday, I forgave him immediately because my mother was very sick (and refusing to go to the doctor, as usual), and birthdays at our house always dragged on for a month and a half, anyway. Just to be clear, I love you, Dad. You are a great father.
The Good:
All of us felt we had a lot in common with this family.
The mom reminded me of my mom. She wasn’t a first grade teacher, but she should have been. (She would have been if she hadn’t gotten scared to talk to somebody about changing her major and dropped out of college instead.) My mom loved teaching Sunday school and never failed to reward everyone with stickers, homemade keepsakes, and (especially!) candy which she passed out at the end of her class, right before church started. (The parents were always like, “Thanks, Miss Susan,” with slightly murderous smiles. But she just kept doing it. I guess it made her happy.) Rest assured that if you ever got a card from her, it would explode glitter and punch-outs all over your house the moment you opened it, and it would be signed with a trail of adorable stamps and stickers.
The cue cards that Maya Rudolph’s Linda made in the movie reminded me so much of how my mom always strove to be a peacemaker in the family, right up until the end of her life. (After COVID forced us to trick-or-treat in the house last fall, my mother made a point of telling me, “Sarah, your daddy said, ‘Look what a wonderful Halloween she made for everybody.’” She could have just told me how much she had enjoyed Halloween. Instead, she made sure that I heard that my father was proud of me.) My sweet mother!
Katie (voiced by Abbi Jacobson) reminded me of my daughter who can never decide if she wants to write novels, create video games, or become a film or art historian. My daughter doesn’t make short films (yet. She did make a string of videos she wasn’t happy with that she’s started turning into a novel). But she does make the craziest Google Slides presentations to entertain her brother. (He’s always asking her, “When is it time for the next installment of Lion Superhero!?”) She identified with Katie, too, and was especially happy about certain aspects of her character.
The dad is nothing like my husband (who is the most wildly supportive and encouraging person you could imagine. The movie dad really wants to focus on practicality. My husband constantly says that he just wants the kids to be happy. He would probably be thrilled if they ended up living in a commune making wind chimes if that’s what they wanted.). But Danny MacBride’s Rick did remind me (fondly) of a cross between my dad and my grandpa. Well, it was really just his driving that reminded me of them. My dad would do anything (anything!) to keep me from being late for school (no matter how late I woke up). It was a good thing for everyone else on the road that we didn’t have access to an Inspector Gadget car. Everybody else was stuck in traffic, and we were living The Dukes of Hazzard. Meanwhile, my grandpa used to get lost for entertainment, just for the pleasure of discovering new routes. (Once when I was thirteen, he took this excessive detour on the way home from school. When I pointedly hinted that we had been in the car for a long time, he cheerfully replied, “Don’t seem like it, does it?” I think he was secretly trying to cheer me up because that particular school wasn’t working out so well for me. It’s never fun to jump into seventh grade somewhere the week after spring break!) Rick’s berserk (and useful) driving technique was a highlight of the movie for me.
Even Aaron (voiced by director Michael Rianda himself) reminded me of my own son, who also obsessively loves dinosaurs, and, though he is the world’s most tender-hearted sweetie, would also jump through a plate glass window rather than admit he has a single feeling. (We’re working on that.)
I also appreciated all the times we see the heightened, extreme, imaginary (internet clip like) version of what the family is doing. I found these moments funny. My daughter had a more insightful take, noting, “This whole movie seemed very meta, like something she could have made herself based on her other movies. Maybe we’re seeing the story that she made about what it meant to her to go to college and what her family means to her.” She added, “I appreciated that it focused more on the family than the apocalypse because I always find apocalypse movies hard to take seriously. When something does take the apocalypse seriously, I think, ‘How boring!’”
The voice acting is always good. I especially liked Beck Bennett and Fred Armisen as the two defective robots and Olivia Colman as PAL. Her name reminds me to mention that the film also features countless allusions to classic sci-fi films and television shows. (At one point, someone even yells out the word “robots” and pronounces it the way they always do on the original Twilight Zone. I don’t know if that’s a coincidence and just a regional dialectical difference, or if it’s a deliberate Twilight Zone reference, but I took it the second way, and it made me laugh.)
The movie has lots of action, and though the plot advances in a methodical, deliberate way, all of the internet meme/Katie’s films jokes give it a winning frenetic energy that holds the attention even of almost-six-year-old YouTube gaming fanatics like my son.
It’s also pretty funny to cast Chrissy Teigen and John Legend as the perfect Instagram couple. In the same way, we get a tech wizard who runs a huge corporation named Mark (Eric André) who gives us a lesson about the perils of the dark side of giving AI (and large corporations) unbridled access to everyone’s data. The statement being made here is nothing revolutionary. Still, Stephen Hawking would approve. And Mark gets an extremely funny moment early on when his speech ends in a way that is quite unexpected (to him only).
Best Scene:
The father/daughter stuff in this movie works so well. (And I’m also a lot like the mom when someone comes after one of my kids.) For me, the scene featuring Rick’s cabin was so touching. My daughter also liked the scene where we first see the cabin, too, for slightly different reasons.
“I love it when there’s a realistic sibling relationship,” she said. “When Aaron starts crying and blaming Katie, that’s what would really happen. I wondered if they would just gloss over that, but they didn’t. That’s how my brother would react, too. He would get angry at me because he was scared. And then we would work together to make a plan.” She added, “I just think it’s refreshing to see a realistic movie about family that’s intended for kids, one that doesn’t make you sad. It’s nice to see a movie that shows you the good things about family. Usually, movies about dysfunctional families for kids stress the negatives, and it sucks that some people have to deal with tragedies. But I think it’s good to have a movie point out the good things that can be in people’s lives, not just the bad. Families can love each other and work together even though they’re not perfect.”
Best Scene Visually:
My daughter loved all of the realistic details—down to the salt shaker, the ranch dressing, and the pin Katie wears. My dad says he liked how “the animation showed how every member of the family viewed the world differently, and yet they all had to come together to save the world. That’s like real life.” I loved all of the sci-fi tribute imagery. My son has just chimed in that he loved the robots’ reaction to seeing (and trying to process) the dog. I’ll just stop there because now that frantic series of images is running through my mind, and if my head explodes before I get everybody’s grilled cheeses made, we will all go hungry tonight!
Best Action Sequence:
I loved it every time the Rick Mitchell Special comes into play, especially in the scene when they first try to escape on the road. The disguise for the car is brilliant.
Best Use of Subtitles:
Some scenes are much funnier because of the captions. Because we always watch with the captions on at home, I don’t know if anything is captioned when you’re watching without them. Surely the collection of lines that begins with “Behold the twilight of man,” is subtitled for everyone. Otherwise, I can’t imagine the point of having such witty lines there.
Scene that Made Every Single One of Us Laugh the Hardest:
Very late in the movie (basically in the epilogue), Katie’s dad tries something new, and his attempts to make this work cracked up everybody in the room (from my five-year-old son to my sixty-eight-year-old father). Possibly we laughed because (except for my husband) all of us behave just like this when attempting to do anything. My dad said to me with a knowing nod, “That was me this afternoon before you fixed my screensaver.” Yes it was, Dad. You’re welcome.
I found this moment surprising because it’s based on such a tired, old cliché of a joke, and yet in execution, it made us all laugh out loud.
The Negatives:
The last act of the movie brought me a lot of distress, but my daughter thought that was the best part of the movie, and she probably knows what she’s talking about. (I just feel so sorry for Katie and her dad that they’ve made so much progress, and then they have to go through all this torment!)
Also, as with Cruella, I thought the movie was a tiny bit on the long side. There was no pacing problem, but when we paused it half-way through so someone could use the restroom, I thought, “Really?! There’s an entire hour of this movie left!?” But that’s a small complaint. It’s not really the movie’s fault I’ve been letting the laundry pile up!
“Did it ever say how old the brother was?” my daughter asked repeatedly afterwards. She then explained, “That was confusing me the whole movie. He could have been six, or he could have been ten. It always upsets me when they make the little kid have a love interest. I find it unnerving because it’s a child. I don’t think that kind of thing belongs in a kid’s movie.”
“But you were thrilled when it turned out Katie had a love interest,” I reminded her.
“Yes,” she said, “but Katie is eighteen. And your romantic feelings are something you should be able to sort out for yourself. I don’t think children should be shown that they have to be in a relationship. That’s like forcing ideas into kids’ heads. They should be allowed to figure out who they are without movies trying to jump in there and tell them the rules of their lives.”
I think the relationship between Aaron and the girl next door is pretty innocent, but she had strong feelings about it, and I see her point.
Overall:
My daughter and I are very much on the same page about being kind of burnt out on animated movies recently, but this one is excellent and definitely worth watching with your kids. (And you can watch it so easily. It’s on Netflix.) The Mitchells vs the Machines is not only funny, but it contains really poignant material about family relationships that should speak to a lot of people. This is a great family movie for a Saturday evening together.