114 min | PG | April 22, 2021 | Netflix
A dysfunctional family roadtrip collides with a robot apocalypse when a spurned AI assistant decides humanity needs rounding up. The Mitchells are barely holding it together as a family. They are the planet’s only hope.
Katie Mitchell is a film-obsessed teenager about to leave for college and escape a father who does not understand her. Rick Mitchell cancels her flight and turns the goodbye into a cross-country road trip nobody wants. Then every smart device on Earth turns against its owners. The film is a robot uprising on the surface and a story about a father and daughter who have stopped speaking the same language underneath. It uses the end of the world as the only pressure intense enough to force these two people back into the same conversation.
Abbi Jacobson plays Katie with the specific exhaustion of a kid who has already left home in her head. She delivers her lines fast and defended, the voice of someone bracing for disappointment. Danny McBride plays Rick as a dad whose love arrives entirely as practical advice nobody asked for. McBride finds the panic underneath the bluster of a man watching his kid pull away. Maya Rudolph gives Linda Mitchell a brittle suburban politeness that detonates into ferocity. Olivia Colman voices the betrayed phone assistant PAL with clipped, wounded condescension that makes the villain funnier than the heroes.
Mike Rianda directs from a script he wrote with Jeff Rowe, and the animation refuses to behave. The CG models carry hand-drawn doodles, lens flares, and scribbled emphasis marks layered directly over the frame, so Katie’s inner monologue erupts onto the screen as visible graffiti. The editing cuts to phone-camera footage and meme formats without warning, which turns the visual language itself into a generational argument. The action set pieces stage their biggest threat with a Furby grown to kaiju scale. The design treats the Mitchells’ beat-up station wagon and their cross-eyed dog Monchi as load-bearing emotional objects rather than props.
This is a film about a father who films his daughter’s life instead of watching it and a daughter who edits her family out of her future. The machines want everyone optimized and uploaded and frictionless. The Mitchells survive precisely because they are slow, glitchy, and incapable of working correctly. Rianda builds a blockbuster-scale spectacle and uses it to argue that the broken thing is the thing worth keeping. The argument lands because the family feels specific enough to be real.