The Mitchells vs the Machines

This is a film that takes a Pixar-style narrative and puts a cheeky and irreverent spin on it. Plus it’s on Netflix. The story is about a phone-based AI which turns against humanity, and the line “It's almost like stealing people’s data and giving it to a hyper-intelligent AI as part of an unregulated tech monopoly was a bad thing” just shows who is in the firing line here.

But the Mitchells though. A nuclear family who’s chaotic and tempestuous, and they think they’re the only dysfunctional ones, and that everyone else has it together. The focus is teenage film-maker Katie (Abbi Jacobsen) who is particularly embarrassed by her family, except perhaps her brother. Her father Danny (Rick Mitchell) struggles to connect with her and he makes things ‘worse’ by planning her trip to college for the first time as a family affair—much to her annoyance.


It all takes a turn for the better after things get worse. A tech billionaire who has developed PAL (the voice of Olivia Coleman) has a big problem when the system becomes hyper-intelligent and takes revenge on a society of humans that’s addicted to the glowing screen. 


Pixar has gone for a more thoughtful and introspective set of themes there days, which doesn’t suggest that they’ve gone “off the boil”—and the people behind this movie Lord and Miller, were fired from Solo: A Star Wars Story because their script was too much of a zany comedy around Han Solo. This film shows what that might be like: Abbi loves the tropes of an action film, and is well-schooled, so when she finds herself living in one she knows how to react. This is a mainline straight into the nerd geek dream. Other films about AI gone wrong (Such as Her and maybe Robot And Frank as well of course as 2001: A Space Odyssey) are always seem to do better critically speaking when they take a shot at humanity. But maybe humanity has something going for it. It owes a lot to The Incredibles other than that the family’s super-power was always there but needed to be revitalised. This is a film with a wonderful, colourful and humorous visual style: and it’s got a fun, irreverent spin on the family comedy genre.

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