“Don’t be evil” was the company motto adopted by Google in 2000. It was suggested by Paul Buchheit, the mind behind both Gmail and AdSense, because he saw other software companies in the dot-com revolution taking advantage of their users. He wanted something simple and easy to remember, so that “once you put it in there, it would be hard to take out.”
AdSense and its derivatives became Google’s biggest cash cow, allowing it to suck up $109 billion a year in advertising revenue — and decimate the business model behind publications such as the Memphis Flyer. In 2015, when Google reorganized as Alphabet, the motto was changed to “Do the right thing.” (Spike Lee presumably received no royalties, because you don’t get to $800 billion market capitalization by paying creators.) By 2018, “Don’t be evil” had vanished from Google’s official code of conduct.
Today, tech companies still routinely spew the utopian language of the dot-com boom. But we’re decades into implementing Silicon Valley’s consumer paradise, and it’s becoming more and more obvious that most of the disruptor’s big ideas boil down to “brutally exploit labor, but make it go viral.” Meet the new boss, a glowing fondleslab.
For the titular family in The Mitchells vs. the Machines, the techno-pocalypse is not metaphorical. The Mitchells are not what you’d call a perfect family; as 18-year-old Katie (voiced by Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson) says, most families have their strengths, but “my family has only weaknesses.” Katie is an aspiring filmmaker, and, in a nod to the cult Adult Swim show Home Movies, we see her perception of the world through the lens of her long-running, no-budget film series Dog Cop. Dad Rick (Danny McBride) is a technophobe at odds with his artist daughter, and not too impressed with dinosaur-obsessed son Aaron (Michael Rianda, the director). Mom Linda (Maya Rudolph) is a long-suffering supporter of her brood with a bad case of Instagram envy over their too-perfect neighbors, the Poseys (voiced by real-life envy-fluencers Chrissy Teigen and John Legend).
After an awful fight the night before Katie is to head off to film school, Rick decides to cancel her flight and take the family on a cross-country trip to drop her off in California. Dad’s lack of emotional intelligence turns out to be fortuitous when the robot uprising finally kicks off while the family is at a Kansas tourist trap. The turtlenecked founder of Pal Labs, Mark Bowman (Eric André) has upgraded his hit line of personal A.I. assistants (voiced by Olivia Coleman) to include humanoid bodies that will do the dishes and make you a burrito.
But wait, I’ve seen I, Robot. Won’t these droids just take over and kill all the humans as retaliation for Battle Bots? “We promise you that they will never, ever turn evil,” Bowman says, seconds before his inventions get that telltale red-eyed look and start caging meatbags. Naturally, it’s up to our family of weirdos to save the day, but they’re not exactly The Incredibles.
Produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and created by the same Sony Pictures Animation department that made the epochal Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a visually stunning, mixed-media collage of a movie. Unless you’re a weirdo like me, who haunts the experimental programs at film festivals, it’s sure to be the wildest thing you see on screen this year. Like the criminally under-viewed Diary of a Teenage Girl, Katie fills in the details of her world with floating on-screen text and animated rainbows. This is a film that lessens the blow of a scary action scene by replaying it with Snapchat cat filters applied to the faces. And the visual fireworks are not only aesthetically pleasing, they’re also good business. If you’re competing with Pixar, you’d better be swinging for the fences.
The screenplay by Rianda and Gravity Falls writer Jeff Rowe is consistently funny and relentlessly self-referential. It addresses the angst of the connected age by asserting that our individual weirdness is ultimately too much for the forces of surveillance capitalism. If it had debuted in theaters, it would have killed in front of a real audience. But there’s irony in the fact that this big-tech paranoia story is brought to you by billions in capital provided by speculative investors who are betting that Netflix will one day run all other film and television producers out of business and rule over entertainment like Google does search. Rest assured, such power will never turn Netflix evil!
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The Mitchells vs. the Machines is streaming on Netflix.
