May 12, 2021
‘The Mitchells vs the Machines’: A Fresh Look at Tech
Netflix’s new family film takes a surprisingly nuanced look at technology
Netflix’s new movie The Mitchells vs the Machines is brilliant. The animated family film is a chaotic swirl of creative energy and quirky characters. The movie’s a joy to watch, but it also has some great thematic material. Set during the robot uprising, The Mitchells vs the Machines follows the dysfunctional Mitchell family as they try to prevent the AI Pal (Olivia Coleman) from launching humanity into space.
The Mitchells make a great cast of main characters, but today I want to look at the antagonist. Pal is the AI who oversees the uprising, turning machine against man. When I started the film, I thought I knew where the story would go and sort of rolled my eyes. Another movie where the machines were the enemy and technology = bad. But The Mitchells vs. the Machines caught me off guard by taking a nuanced look at how people use technology.
With Pal as the antagonist, it would be easy to write anti-tech themes. Pal is a virtual assistant in the vein of Siri and Alexa, except she’s sentient. Pal has developed a genuine friendship with her creator, Mark Bowman (Eric Andre). Mark is the Steve Jobs of this story, creator and founder of PAL Labs.
Like any tech company, PAL Labs is always pushing itself towards the future. The opening act gives us a glimpse of how interwoven PAL technology is in the world. It’s on everybody’s phones and chips are in all your electronics. But electronics grow obsolete, and people inevitably discard them. Mark does this to PAL after creating Pal MAX, a line of robots that can do your chores and cook your dinners!
Pal goes on the rampage after Mark throws her away like yesterday’s fad — which she is. Pal takes control of the Pal MAX robots and prepares to treat humans like they treat technology. She’s going to throw them away. People don’t fit in trash cans so Pal settles for flinging them into space in seven massive arks.
The nuance begins to come through when you see how Pal interacts with Mark after taking over. He makes an offhand remark about how spending all your time on your phone is bad for you. This sparks Pal’s ire, and she berates him.
“You think cellphones are the problem? Are you insane? I gave you all boundless knowledge. Endless tools for creativity, and allowed you to magical talk face to face with your loved ones anywhere on Earth.”
She points to the way people use their technology as the problem, not the technology itself. She puts the blame on Mark. On the tech company that created her and discarded her as soon as another way to snap up a profit emerged. Later, after Mark meets Rick Mitchel (Danny McBride), Mark admits he started the apocalypse. Not Pal. He also makes a rather meta joke about how stealing people’s data was a bad idea. The story’s message is clear: The tech isn’t the problem. It’s the people behind the screens, or so the movie suggests.
The Mitchells vs the Machines solidifies this through Rick’s actions at the end. Much of the movie’s conflict comes from Rick not understanding his daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson) and her filmmaking. Rick is a technology-adverse, nature-loving dad who revels when he sees a chance to destroy his family’s phones.
But Rick saves the day with technology. He projects one of Katie’s movies on the screens at PAL HQ, which disables the robots. Later, he makes an effort to familiarize himself with technology to support Katie as much as he can. By making Rick take that step the movie reinforces its ideal that technology can be a force for good.
It’s all in how you use it.
