Our collective anxieties about artificial intelligence — our worries that our machines will eventually surpass, and perhaps even exterminate, us — go back to the origin of the word “robot” itself. The word was coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his 1921 science fiction play R.U.R. (or Rossum’s Universal Robots), in which scientists create artificial beings that end up annihilating the entire human race. Since then, similar fears have been stoked by Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey), and the writers of The Terminator franchise, The Matrix (1999), Ex Machina (2014), and even The Simpsons.
In real life, artificial intelligence has so far proved itself pretty benign — Siri and Alexa haven’t tried to kill us, even if Netflix’s content-recommendation algorithm can at times be a little creepy. But the fear that our present-day technological wonders could one day bring about our downfall is never too far from our minds. And if it ever does get very far from our minds, Hollywood is always there to remind us that the robot apocalypse may be right around the corner.
The latest iteration in this line of AI-panic movies, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, comes to us courtesy of Sony and Columbia Pictures and is now available for streaming on Netflix. Refreshingly, and unlike most other entries in the genre, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, written and directed by Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe, is an animated comedy more in the spirit of the wry, genre-subverting The Incredibles (2004) than The Terminator. Here, humanity’s hopes for redemption are in the hands not of a single Herculean hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Will Smith, or Keanu Reeves, but of a family that is the incarnation of mediocrity.
As Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson), our protagonist, acknowledges, “Most action heroes have a lot of strengths. My family only has weaknesses.” A high school senior who can’t wait to leave her exasperating suburban family behind for film school in Los Angeles, Katie tells us that she feels lonely because her parents have never understood her. Her mother, Linda (Maya Rudolph), is inadequately supportive; her father, Rick (an exuberant Danny McBride), views her as foolishly impractical; and her younger brother, Aaron, calls up random people in the phone book to ask them if they want to talk about dinosaurs. Katie has no friends to speak of except those she’s hoping to make in film school.
To Katie’s great chagrin, her family cancels her plane ticket to L.A. so that they can instead take a family road trip to drop her off at college. When she complains that this will result in her missing orientation week and getting a head start on bonding with the friends she’s dreamed of for so long, her father, desperate to repair his relationship with her, replies, “What about hanging out with your family, alone, for hours, in a car?”
Meanwhile, Mark Bowman (Eric Andre), the CEO of Pal Labs, a tech company responsible for PAL (Olivia Colman), the world’s first prototype for a Siri-style personal assistant, is making a big announcement: the creation of PAL MAX, the first-ever humanlike personal assistant, a sort of Alexa implanted into a machine equipped with two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. Instead of just playing music on command and ordering you a new pair of socks, PAL MAX can clean up your room and make you breakfast. To ensure his potentially anxious audience that the robots will not turn evil, Bowman lets them know that there’s a “kill code” humans can use in case their PAL MAX malfunctions. “So,” he declares confidently, “we promise you they will never, ever, ever, ever turn evil.”
Faster than you can say, “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” the PAL MAXs, commandeered by the old PAL, who is out for vengeance against her human creators for discarding her in favor of a new model, have rounded up the entire human race in preparation for launching them into space, somehow neglecting only four people: the Mitchell family, plus their pug, Monchi, who seemed to have escaped by sheer dumb luck rather any ingenuity of their own. And so, of course, it falls to humans who can barely get along with each other to come together to save humanity.
The idea of the movie, a family-friendly sendup of robot apocalypse films, is promising, but the execution is a little uneven. It alternates between witty satire and insipid pastiche, juggling so many parodies and references — Terminator, Quentin Tarantino, 2001, Tron, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings — that the only thing holding it together is the inexorable unfolding of its predictable plot.
The PAL MAXs who attempt to exterminate humanity are so advanced as to seem like representatives of an extremely advanced alien civilization, but as preposterous as are the specifics of their plans and capabilities, the scenario the film imagines for how evil robots will be introduced to the world, in a cheery press conference akin to the one in which Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, is rather plausible, as is the idea that our future artificial overlords will be the creations of one of our favorite social media or online shopping companies. “Who would’ve thought a tech company wouldn’t have our best interest at heart?” Linda quips after learning of the robots’ plans to make the world safe for machines by making it menschenfrei.
Writers and filmmakers have now been addressing the promises and perils of artificial intelligence for a full century, and with the dawn of self-driving cars and autonomous robots, we’re only likely to see more of these cultural products in the future. While it won’t win any awards for originality, The Mitchells works as a fun, family-friendly comedy that manages to land a few satiric punches on Big Tech as well.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer, rabbi, and scholar from western Massachusetts. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
