The Mitchelles vs the Machines [2021]
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6.1
The Mitchells vs the Machines tells the story of a quirky, (ab)normal family dealing with a technopocalypse the best way they know how... poorly. This movie is a little Scott Pilgrim vs The World with a dash of iRobot and the soul of a Lampoon event. Every character is fun in their own way and I think it handles some elements of inclusion fairly well without ever throwing them in your face by saying LOOK AT HOW AWARE WE ARE OF THESE ISSUES.
That being said... I didn't love this film.
The beginning sets up the character and the stage for anything to come next and the end has one of my favorite animated scenes since some of the action shots in Spiderverse. The middle... seriously drags and I think that this movie could have been about 15 minutes shorter. The bits are mostly funny and the designated comic relief characters are absolutely to die for. Where this really fell short though, is in the emotional impact through visual storytelling.
We get several little moments throughout the film where Katie [the main character] does or says things and we get very Pilgrim like bursts of color or stars or little creatures or otherwise extra-real emotive elements that burst forth from her. These are brilliant and a very, very fun way to tell the story of her emotional journey. The issue is that she's the only one that does it, and those scenes are few and far between. It's difficult to pontificate on it without you having seen the film, but when you do, come back and read this next part again because I think it will make more sense.
All throughout the film we get bits and pieces of Katie having these very comic book-esque colorful outbursts and cartoony companion pieces to her actions. She shares them in a very minor fashion with her brother, Aaron, with whom she is obviously the closest with in the family. There are some moments of pure insanity when the entire screen is taken over by dancing possums and zigging lightning with massive title letters proclaiming something ridiculous while silly music plays. These. Scenes. Are. Brilliant. We needed more of them though. Because they were so sparse, they almost felt out of place; noncommittal. What we needed instead, was to have them show Katie's growth as a person, and her family's growth as a unit. We have one amazing scene towards the end of the film where her and her dad finally connect and manage an impossible feat while bringing back old, loving memories. It's the best scene in the film, and top 10 of animated moments in the last several years. The issue with it, is that we didn't have enough context to really make it have an impact within the rest of the film. If you aren't wowed by the technical aspects of the scene, the emotional weight of it just isn't there.
To fix that, all we needed was MORE of the outside emotive comic book bits. We start with Katie exuding them as she does things in her daily life (red/yellow/green with rapid upwards motions for happy thoughts and feelings - blue/purple with slow, dripping downwards motions for sad). Then we see that she's the only one that does this. Other characters don't, and that establishes Katie as the person we're really a part of, really inside of and seeing this story though. Once established, we get a scene of her and her brother being close, and they both share these little emoji bits together. He doesn't do them on his own, only when they interact with each other. Slowly, throughout the film, the range of her pieces changes and becomes more dynamic, expanding to small relations with her mother, and even more with her brother. But never, ever, with her father.
The only scene where we get anything involving her father is the scene in the car when he tries to do their singalong from childhood. HE exudes a hopeful little emoji character towards her, but when she doesn't respond, it fades away into sadness. When she realizes that what she said was hurtful, she also exudes one weak attempt towards him that also doesn't connect. We get nothing more between them for the rest of the movie. Nothing more, that is, until the scene in the end when they fight the robots together. Then, with all the buildup and connections that we've seen before, their explosion of teamwork and emotive little pieces mean SO much more than they did in the film as it stands.
I really liked this movie, it just didn't commit enough to some of it's more gimmicky aspects and that's what made them gimmicky. They could have been used to tell an emotionally involving story, and instead were just sort of used frivolously. All that being said... I don't know that I would recommend this film, but I certainly wouldn't caution against it.
