Road-tripping through the Robot Apocalypse in The Mitchells vs. the Machines

This week I was attaching my kids’ bikes to the rack that hangs precariously from our minivan’s posterior, contemplating our summer vacation plans, and it suddenly hit me: This will be the year we have to put a cargo carrier on the roof.

With that thought, scenes from long ago came back to me: a groaning carrier tied down like a dead stag atop our aged Volvo station wagon, the back end of which would be stuffed with bags and bedding arranged to permit the now-illegal stowage of me or my sister, propped up with some thick fantasy novel for company, while my mother sprawled across the backseat to ease her aching back, my father hunched behind the wheel, and the line for the New Hampshire toll stretched an hour south toward Boston . . .

If that kind of image stirs something in your soul — the American family on vacation, chaotic and cranky in a rattling conveyance — then the new animated movie The Mitchells vs. the Machines might stir something as well. It’s a post­apocalyptic comedy, sending up the Terminator franchise one moment and Dawn of the Dead the next, whose conceit crystallizes a deep truth about the post­apocalyptic genre. Whether it’s Stephen King’s plague survivors making tracks for Boulder or Cormac McCarthy’s son and father trekking southward in The Road, the apocalyptic travelogue is enfolded in a much larger Huck Finn–to–Nomadland tradition of Americana, which can be summed up with two of the most powerful words in the (American) English language: road trip.

Here the road-trippers are the titular Mitchells, a family of self-professed weirdos whose strongest personalities are dad Rick (Danny McBride), a nature-loving technophobic ur-dad who looks like Mr. Incredible gone to seed, and daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson), a YouTube filmmaker who’s desperate to escape her Luddite home and find “her people,” basically tech-savvy bisexual hipster cinephiles, who are awaiting her across the country at the California college she’s about to jet off to attend. Mediating between them are mom Linda (Maya Rudolph) and dinosaur-obsessed younger brother Aaron (Mike Rianda, the movie’s director), the former kind and conflict-averse — deceptively so, as it turns out — and the latter a frequent partici­pant in his sister’s films. (So is their fifth wheel, Monchi, an adorable and brainless pug.) Meanwhile, making them all look bad, especially on Instagram, are their perfect neighbors, the Poseys, voiced by John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, the first couple of celebrity America.

The adventure starts when Rick, in a last-ditch effort to bond with his daughter before she slips away, decides that the family will drive cross-country to drop her off at school. This is clearly a recapitulation of a thousand disastrous-cum-delightful road trips the family has taken in the past, but not one that Katie’s interested in, not least because it means she’s going to miss all the bonding in­volved in college orientation.

Nonetheless they set off — and just then, in far-off Silicon Valley, a hoodie-wearing Zuckerbergian tech emperor named Mark Bowman (Eric André) announces his latest innovation. Already responsible for the Siri-like assistant, known as “PAL,” in phones the world over, he’s upgrading the assistant from a voice in your phone to a robot in your house, available for any chore or errand you desire.

No sooner has Bowman promised that there’s no way the robots will ever rebel than they do exactly that, having been reprogrammed by the original, discarded PAL, who has the voice of Olivia Colman from The Crown and rather predictably prefers ruling the world to accepting her own obsolescence.

Soon teams of robots, unbound by Asimov’s laws of robotics or any others, are swooping around the country, rounding up the human population and packing us all into sleek, WiFi-enabled pods that will be shot en masse into space. Naturally the only people who elude the robot roundup are the misfit Mitchells — and with the help of a couple of accidentally reprogrammed robots, plus Katie’s deep knowledge of apocalyptic-genre tropes, they figure out that they can slip a kill code into the PAL system and call the whole robot apocalypse off.

The quest to pull this off takes them first to a PAL store in an abandoned mall for a delirious encounter with an army of “smart” (and now PAL-controlled) appliances, supplemented by a Hitchcockian flock of Furbys that some reckless toy magnate decided to computerize. And then it’s off to Silicon Valley for the final showdown, in which both the fate of the universe and Katie’s relationship with her dad are up for grabs.

Through all this the movie uses the aesthetics of very-online communication, mixing shifting animation styles with an endless array of filters and freeze-frames and emoji-decorated scenes, to basically give us Katie’s running YouTube–director commentary on the action. It’s an interesting trick for a movie that’s formally a critique of our online enslavement: As Bilge Ebiri writes in New York magazine, “it commandeers the language of the Beast to describe the Beast itself.”

In the end I don’t know whether The Mitchells says anything more powerful about the Beast than what’s been said before with fewer GIFs. But it definitely has more laughs per minute than, say, The Social Network. And for those of us contemplating how to pack the cargo carrier this summer to Make Some Memories, McBride’s Rick is a particular inspiration: Armed with a screwdriver, high ideals, an ample belly, and a certain cluelessness, he gives us hope that dadness may yet save the world.