A quirky, dysfunctional family's road trip is upended when they find themselves in the middle of the robot apocalypse and suddenly become humanity's unlikeliest last hope.
Am I the only who prefers the title “Connected” as opposed to “Mitchell’s Vs The Machines”? I don’t know but if we’re talking about a movie in which technology has drifted a family apart and those same technologies then come to life to ruin everyone else’s day and that family had to save the world....I’d stick closer to the first title. But that is picking nits as far as I’m concerned because this film.....huh.
It’s good. It’s nothing more than just good but it is.
Everyone in this movie clearly had a devil of a time with the material with their performances. Everyone’s energetic, exuberant, full of life and gleefully optimistic despite the two dimensional archetypes they have as characters (I’ll get to that soon). There’s so many different ways I can applaud a movie for executing excellent cinematography and saying that but the footage speaks for itself. Not to mention the musical score is alright, same with the soundtrack. The animation comes in as my favorite aspect of all this; its use of live-action, hand-drawn, comic book, 3D, cartoon drawings and simple doodles packs the smoothness and vibrancy of Into The Spiderverse and Zombieland and the ludicrous rapid-fire physical and verbal humor of the Lego Movie which result in a handful of laughs with a few added whistles and bells to the already silky smooth presentation, production design is innovative as they use different themes to provide some offbeat offerings and as far as the direction goes, it could’ve been worse.
Speaking of themes.....yeah, I expected the storyline to end up being my favorite part of this whole debacle but not anymore. Not to say what it has is terrible, it isn’t. But man, this story just screams missed potential.
This normally routine storyline about a stereotypical dysfunctional family coping with their almost quirky-cliched personalities and differences to survive a robot apocalypse and the routine overblown message about learning to embrace your weird qualities is nothing special. It’s carried and lifted up by another original unoriginal theme regarding our abuse of technology and how it translates over to us alienating our loved ones. Not only have we gotten lazy with the technology we created, we often take them for granted. And in doing so, the shift between old and new generation erupts and.....well, I can’t really say more about it because what you see is exactly what you get and then some. There’s always going to be a sense of anxiety behind whatever new creations we uphold and we’re lucky the film doesn’t preach it down our throats but I expected more beyond the basic fundamentals of what everybody already knows.
Not to mention as great as the humor was, the sheer abundance of it all not only tainted it’s own consistency but it effectively killed whatever pacing the film built up for itself in an already bloated experience. It’s redundant to the core and makes some of the visual and verbal gags feel really unnecessary.
Fortunately though, I can’t fault the effort because I still laughed a lot and I had fun with it at the end of the day. If fun is all you’re looking for this weekend, pop this in.
