The Mitchells v The Machines (2021)
Katie Mitchell has always been a bit of an outsider in life, with both school and family due to her love of uniquly funny filmmaking. Despite having a loving father daughter relationship when she was much youngers, as she got older she slowly drifted from her technologically illiterate dad Rick, who much prefers the outdoors and building things. Neither were able to really understand the other,and the pair now frustranted each other constantly.
Also in the family is hHer mum Lin, who has a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ relationship with the bougy neighbours, and younger brother Aaron, who has an obsession with dinosaurs have always been the intermediate between the two.
When she is accepted to a film college halfway across the country, her world finally makes sense. She befriends people who finally see her creativity for what it is, and enjoy her art.
After a bad fight between her father the night before she leaves, she is extatic that the day she flies out to college has finally here – but her dad has other ideas. He instead plans an across country road trip.
Meanwhile, a planned upgrade of the local mobile device goes awry when the robot assistants that will “never” go evil, go evil and start to kidnap all of mankind. The only ones on the planet who don’t get taken are the Mitchell family – and it is now up to them (along with two malfunctioned robots who have become good again) to save all of mankind.
The voice talent is terrific (I could listen to Maya Rudolph read the phone book), the stand out voice talent for me is Oliva Coleman as PAL, who sounds like she had a great time filming her scenes.
Heart-warming and genuinely hilarious, is easily rewatchable and relatable for the whole family, especially now that I have a daughter of my own.
There are plenty of homage’s to other movies that will go over kids heads, but understood by adults, some may even predate the younger parents of today.
The only real negative is that at 113 minutes, it is a tad overlong, and could have used a bit of an edit to trim it down.
Our family thoroughly enjoyed this film, and has been on repeat in our house for the better part of a week, so this was the obvious choice for me to post about.
4 ½ /5
Parenting Autism in Adelaide 