Premise: A family goes on a road trip just as the robot apocalypse happens and they are the only humans not captured.
Animation is one of the places where I have a hard time dealing with the Netflix brand. I have a hard time wrapping my head around Netflix the way I do other studios. I get the Disney, Pixar, or DreamWorks Animation brands. I know what to expect. When Sony Releases a film under their Screen Gems shingle, I get how that differs from Sony Pictures Classic. With Netflix, they’re too big and diverse. I keep wanting to think of them as a network or studio when I should be thinking of them as a cable package. The Netflix model is to offer a little of everything in order to attract everyone. This has been successful for them. With their TV shows, I’ve gotten good at filtering out the offerings. There isn’t a Netflix brand of shows the way that HBO or FX has, but I have a sense of their strengths, weaknesses, and focuses. In the film space, it’s still wide open. I often reference how their films come from the bottom of the stack of screenplays rather than the top. Filmmakers use Netflix for the films they either couldn’t get made elsewhere (The Irishman, Roma) or the ideas they don’t think are good enough for the legacy studios (Mascots, the Adam Sandler deal). They are slowly improving on this. The Power of the Dog might end up being my favorite movie of 2021 when the dust settles and is the most deserving Best Picture option in my mind. But overall, when I watch one of their movies, it’s not as the top option. If they make an action movie, I don’t expect it to be as good as the action movie I’ll see in a theater. If they make an animated movie, I don’t expect it to be on the level of the new Pixar movie. I go to them for my RomCom fix, since they are the only place making them, but I haven’t seen one with real staying power.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a big step toward me believing in the Netflix animation brand, but I still have reservations. It’s a Lord and Miller production. Even though it has different writers and director, it feels like a Lord and Miller movie. It’s slightly meta. It’s very jokey. It plays with genre a lot. And it feels sincere. I feel like the go-to move for Disney competitors in animation is to take a Disney story and make if funnier. That’s exactly what Shrek is, for example. Or look at what Illumination wrought on the world with the Minions. The Mitchells vs. the Machines has some of that. The setup is very family focused. You know the story will ultimately be about getting them all on the same page. Then they inject as much joke tonnage as they can get into it. I appreciate that. I just don’t think it was very efficient. This movie is 1h54 minutes and I felt that. The setup is too long. The ending lasts too long. There’s really only enough story for 90 minutes. The extra time is to fit in the jokes. I mostly liked the movie. It was just a slight step back for Lord and Miller as animation producers. The LEGO Movie had better anarchy and Into the Spider-Verse had more success playing with narrative and winking at audience expectations.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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