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szdaily -> Culture -> 
The Mitchells vs the Machines
    2022-01-12  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

The Mitchells are an awkward and weird family well before they have to fight against a technological apocalypse on their own. There’s oldest daughter Katie (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), who’s set to go to film school in California where she thinks she’ll find her people, those who appreciate her oddball and anarchic creative spirit. It’s nothing against her parents Rick and Linda (Danny McBride and Maya Rudolph) – they love her but don’t really seem to get her. Katie’s younger brother Aaron (co-writer and director Mike Rianda) is as odd as her, with an obsession with dinosaurs so keen that he calls random people in the phone book to see if they want to talk with him about the extinct creatures. After Rick decides to turn Katie’s flight to film school into a family-bonding road trip, they wind up being at the center of an AI-driven uprising, as a Google/Apple-like company’s personal assistant Pal (Olivia Colman) engineers a revolt to rid Earth of all humanity.

Katie narrates the story, first giving us a look at her homemade films, in which her odd-looking dog Monchi stars as a canine cop. Rianda and co-writer Jeff Rowe deftly balance a sense of the personal and a sense of the outrageous. Before the uprising begins, they effectively create a dysfunctional family in the Mitchells while carefully seeding ways in which the family will be stronger and closer to each other by the end.

Once the robots rise up against their human masters, “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” goes into high gear. It’s only through a case of dumb luck that the Mitchells end up fighting a group of devious robots. Their first encounter at a roadside rest stop includes them watching their perfect neighbors (voiced by Chrissy Teigen, John Legend, and Charlyne Yi) attempting to fight the bad guys before being captured, and then stumbling their way into battle. Each of the big action setpieces offers an incredibly smart blend of tension and comedy; none is funnier than a scene at a mall where various appliances and toys, including a line of revived Furbys, come to life to try and stop the Mitchells from saving the day.

The deftest element of the script is that the film never turns into a lecture about the evils of technology, or about its dehumanizing qualities. Rick is the Luddite of the family, frustrated by technology and wishing his family would ignore their phones at the dinner table to have actual conversations. But the core emotions of the film are rooted in Katie’s relationship with her dad, which means that while they both change throughout the course of their adventure, he has to shift a little bit towards embracing technology — or at least learning how to play videos on YouTube. As in “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2,” there’s a celebrity-like guru spearheading cutting-edge technology, though this one (voiced by Eric Andre) is less villain and more well-meaning. Though technology is the villain of this film, that doesn’t turn its message into an argument about how all tech is bad.

The film is an unbeatable combination of humor and heart. (SD-Agencies)

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