The Mitchells vs the Machines review – frantic and fun Netflix animation
Over the last year, it seemed for a while that any vague vision of big-screen normality would be so far into the future that we’d best get used to watching new movies on our smartphones instead, a fear for us that was closer to a nightmare for studios. Shuttered cinemas led them to frantically sell their films to streamers, who were all too ready with outstretched arms and wide-open chequebooks to help bolster their booming business. But after a tussling ape and lizard showed that audiences were in fact ready to return to the multiplex, there was undoubtedly a sense of seller’s remorse within the industry in the days after, a stinging regret over rushed deals and lost opportunities that would continue to haunt in the coming months.
Watching the splashy animated adventure The Mitchells vs the Machines on Netflix just weeks after Godzilla vs Kong jumpstarted the global box office, one can imagine that some wound-licking might soon be taking place over at Sony, where it was originally envisioned as a big-budget tentpole before being offloaded during the pandemic. While Sony reportedly made around $100m from the deal, for worldwide rights excluding China, the film itself is such a cannily crafted crowdpleaser that its eventual box office haul would have surely been that much more. It also carries with it a considerable budget, a big bet that belongs on the big screen, instead of launching online after a token one week theatrical window.
Its scale is made that much grander when compared with Netflix’s other animated offerings, an output that’s gradually improving but remains a few sketches behind the big boys, the most obvious comparison here being their other madcap family caper The Willoughbys from last year, a solid effort which pales up against the vibrancy of the Mitchells. It’s part of the energetic oeuvre of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, acting here as producers, whose hands have been involved in everything from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to The Lego Movie to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, steadily building up a stable that’s easily become a more inventive alternative to Pixar’s boringly sequel-heavy slate.
The frantic, anything-goes nature of their films, both in tone and visuals, belies a tight focus on storytelling and dialogue with sight gags and set pieces used to supplement rather than distract. Kids are forcefully taken along for the ride but the sharp, often sitcomesque humour ensures that parents are equally enthralled and here, once again with writer-director Mike Rianda and co-writer Jeff Rowe deserving the credit, the balance is pitched just right. There’s a lack of smugness to the script, despite a set-up that would in the wrong hands encourage it, as an aspiring young film-maker is forced to fend off a robot apocalypse while on a crosscountry trip with her family. The Terminator onslaught is brought on by an Apple-esque tech company, here called
Pal, and its hoodie-wearing leader who wants to do away with smartphone assistance and replace it with actual servant-like robots, an idea that leads to instant disaster.
There’s an obvious irony to a Sony-produced Netflix movie bemoaning the danger of an over-reliance on technology but Rianda makes an earnest stab at trying to offer up a balanced view of the pros and cons of iPhone culture. Rather than the easier and clumsier film he could have made scolding kids for swiping and tapping and missing out on real life, he shows that young digital creators are achieving incredible things and that, when used right, this form of connectedness can be a powerful force. While some of the inyour-face attempts to combine YouTube videos with animation are jarring at best and annoying at worst, the cautionary stabs about unregulated big tech that come alongside are no bad thing, nestled within the framework of a brightly coloured kids movie.
It’s also genuinely funny, a credit not only to the hit-a-minute script but also to a finely picked cast of comic actors, of unusually high calibre – from Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson to Danny McBride to Maya Rudolph to Eric Andre to SNL-ers like Fred Armisen and Beck Bennett (stealing the majority of their scenes as defective robots) to Oscarwinner Olivia Colman as the malicious Siri gone bad at the centre of it all. If it all gets a bit too overstuffed at times and if some of the father-daughter emotional sap doesn’t evoke quite the reaction intended (Pixar still lead the way on that front), there’s more than enough here to outweigh the notso-great. It’s a far more effective state of the nation summary of how technology has taken over our lives than most live-action attempts and there are some nicely progressive touches, deft but visible (a casual reference to the lead girl’s queerness near the end is quietly remarkable). Sony might be kicking themselves in the immediate future but the millions who will get to see the film on Netflix and the enthusiasm that will surely follow is a sign that its animation arm is doing something special. In the ongoing studios v streamers war, we can call this one a tie.
The Mitchells vs the Machines is out in US cinemas on 23 April and on Netflix on 30 April
of racism, as the psycho-terror of fear and paranoia evinced through hallucinations and various cliches of paranormal activity. As such, the series both historicises and mythologises Compton (now better known as an African American ethnic enclave and the birthplace of West Coast hip-hop) as a once whitemajority neighbourhood whose demography transformed after the “white flight” exodus of middle-class residents.
If, despite the radically different setting and historical material, this series sounds suspiciously like a sloppy pastiche of Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed 2019 film Us, that’s because it is. Or at least it’s meant to be: both centre on the home invasions of a Black family, and the title steal is, frankly, cheeky. But what distinguishes Themfrom Usis that the established canon of Peele’s work stretches beyond the expected capacities of Black characters in horror films, allowing his actors, in both Us and his 2017 film Get Out, to revel in the fun and absurdity of the genre.
Where Peele’s work does grapple with racism, in Get Out, it is done so intelligently: attempting to reveal incisive but less visible truths about middle-class liberal racism, that racists can be “Good people. Nice people. Your parents, probably”, as Lanre Bakare wrote on its release. Them, however, forfeits the opportunity to make any sophisticated or penetrating appraisal of racism in the US beyond affirming its existence. Instead it is an exercise in gratuitous racial violence, both in the infliction of racial terror against the Emory family, and on the Black audience who are left without respite from visceral and degrading scenes.
“Piccaninny” dolls are strung up outside the Emory home, while the Nword is burned on the lawn, and each member of the family faces difficulties in assimilating into their new institutions; eldest daughter Ruby is tormented by her white classmates with monkey noises. This repeated assault on Black audiences, however, reaches a climax with the gratuitous violence in episode five where, in devastating scenes, it is explained that the Emory family had moved from North Carolina after the mother, Livia known as Lucky, was raped by multiple men as she witnessed her baby boy, Chester, being wrapped in cloth and swung violently around until he was dead.
Beyond those scenes being excessively traumatic, what sticks with me is the callous treatment of Lucky in the aftermath. Rather than this episode exploring grief, Chester’s death is merely a plot device to narrate Lucky’s descent into madness and her daughter’s increasing sense of alienation from her.
It is a particularly cruel and misogynoiristic denial of emotional breadth, and as the son of a Black mother who lost a child and knows that this grief persists even 18 years later, it cannot be understated how traumatising these scenes are to witness.
That Them depends on lacerating and torturing the psyche of its audience is not lost on Amazon; indeed the series debuted with a concurrent headline in the Los Angeles Times: “The racist violence in Amazon’s new series left execs ‘shaken’. Does it go too far?” Before the series was screened, the trailer for Themlast month led to an eruption of anger and upset in Black social media spaces from those frustrated at the incessant efforts to reify a new genre of “black trauma porn”. Also clear is that this is not merely a problem of “diversity” in Hollywood, often presented as the panacea for problematic film and television; both the show’s creator Little Marvin, and executive producer, Lena Waithe, are Black. Notwithstanding the overwhelming number of white directors and producers on the show, what we are seeing is that even Black creators can inflict racist harm on Black audiences. The dividing line isn’t “lived experience” of racism; it’s who profits and who suffers, and we are often not honest enough about which Black faces sit on which side.
More critically, what has emerged from these reactions is a question of whether the film and television category of “racial horror” should exist in the first place. It’s a question that has deep complications for what we consider to be the constructions of the horror genre itself. Wes Craven, the creator of A Nightmare on Elm Streetsaid in 2007 that horror movies are “the disturbed dreams of a society”, and that the horror genre depends on our fears being “manipulated and massaged”. This speaks to the purpose of horror as tapping into the most primal, Freudian fears: the unknown, the dark, grief, death. But how can the spectre of racism and racial violence be reduced to the arena of “fear” when it persists as a force for violence and social death against the Black audiences who are watching?
In his essay on Them, the author Brandon Taylor writes that the imagination cannot make space for racism as unrealised fear through the horror genre when these acts of violence are realised daily: “I don’t understand how you make a horror if you are never safe. How do you make something to terrify a people who have lived for generations in a state of constant besiegement? The worst thing short of death that could happen to Black people in America has already happened.” These words are particularly heavy in the month that 20-year old Daunte Wright was killed by a white female police officer during a traffic stop just 11 miles from where George Floyd was murdered last year in Minnesota. Taylor further argues that creative licence is stifled in this genre, as the “horror” can only ever be so many degrees from reality. As such, “paranormalising” racism falls flat.
But the specific problems with Themdo not necessarily undercut the potential for horror to reflect the fears and realities endemic to racism well. As Wes Craven continued: “You don’t enter the theatre and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theatre and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go to a theatre dealt with and put into a narrative.” Racial violence is a reality but this does not negate the existence of fear, which is its own kind of violence. Fear is not necessarily irrational, in the way that it is irrational to believe that there are ghosts in your house or a monster under your bed. And if horror is a medium which has always reflected fears, both societal and the more primal fears of death and darkness, is it fair to preclude narratives on racism from being integrated into the horror category? Certainly the art world has examples of well-executed portrayals of racism as horror – for example, Norman Lewis’s 1960 painting America the Beautiful, which was displayed at the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power in 2017. The piece evokes a powerful hauntology by portraying the KKK and burning crosses as abstract, ghost-like figures, in a way attesting to the omnipresence of racism.
The issue is that Themdoes not fit into the canon of well-made Black horrors that Peele has established. Peele has been clear that Usis not a horror film about race and racism. It is a horror film that places a black family at its centre. Yet the very presence of Black characters means the film is often misread as making a commentary about race that is nowhere to be found in the script. Of course, there are cases where you could successfully ignore authorial intent: while George Romero’s 1968 horror Night of the Living Dead was not intended to be a commentary on police racism, the Black protagonist, Ben, being the last survivor of a cannibalistic zombie attack on a rural farmhouse in Pennsylvania, only to be shot by a white sheriff who mistakes him for a zombie remains one of the most penetrating reflections of the function of racism in the history of film. Romero insisted that his casting of the African American actor Duane Jones as Ben was a “race blind” casting, yet this was inconsequential to the social message the film has come to represent. But that is not the case with Us, which has been interpreted as “racial” horror not based on any analysis beyond the skin colour of the actors.
And this is where Themdemonstrates an absolute misreading of Peele’s work by its creators. Speaking to Variety, Little Marvin says: “As a kid, loving all of those classic movies, folks who looked like me never populated the center of those frames. Here’s this classic Hitchcock frame that back in the day would have only held Janet Leigh or Eva Marie Saint or Grace Kelly, and instead here’s Deborah Ayorinde in the center of the frame, looking gorgeous, dazzling and Black.” But the point of writing Black characters into different genres is not simply to have Black actors “looking gorgeous” while they are brutalised on screen, nor is it to instantly disrupt every genre category to make commentaries on race and racism.
Little Marvin’s words evidence the restrictiveness of both his own creative instincts and those of white Hollywood. As the writer Angelica Bastien responded in Vulture:“There’s something insidious about Little Marvin’s perspective in this quote: it supposes that putting a Black person in a visually white concept is inherently radical, instead of showing the limits of his imagination.” Even where Peele’s films do make a societal commentary on racism, as in Get Out, Little Marvin’s attempted pastiche is still premised on a misunderstanding of what makes the film a “horror” film. As the writer Brit Bennett has tweets, “The Jordan Peele knockoffs are so bad because they are made by people who thought the horror of Get Out was the Armitages [the main antagonist white family] when in fact, it is the sunken place” – the “sunken place” being the hypnotic arena where Black people find themselves mentally and physically entrapped by the clutches of white society.
We would probably be more generous to the “racial horror” genre if every “racial” horror was made to the standard of Get Out. But the reality is that within the horror genre, well-made, criticially acclaimed films often result in a slew of low-quality imitations. John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is considered a classic of the slasher genre and inspired numerous derivatives, such as Friday the 13th and My Bloody Valentine. To compete, these films often ramped up the shock factor by making the death scenes grizzlier and more brutal.
While this cheap strategy has little consequence in the slasher series beyond a few subpar films, the reality of mass commercialisation of the “racial horror” genre, particularly in the hands of white Hollywood execs, is that its easy overlap with “black trauma porn” means that Black audiences will be subject to an arms race of the most shocking and horrific images of antiBlack atrocity. Them belongs to this genre of trauma porn, not the canon of Jordan Peele or Wes Craven. While we can likely rely on Peele to maintain integrity and quality in his work – his upcoming slasher film Candyman features a Black cast and is sure to be a sophisticated commentary on race and racism, given the themes of the 1992 original to which it is a direct sequel – not all horror films featuring Black people can or will be made by Peele. And even with critical backlash, as long as Hollywood can line its pockets by commodifying Black pain, it will continue to churn out the cheap knockoffs.
Hellman then completed arguably his best-known film as a director: TwoLane Blacktop, which was released in 1971. It featured musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as drag racers in a cross-country road movie in which they pick up a hitchhiker (played by Laurie Bird) and encounter a rival driver (played by Warren Oates). Part of the Hollywood new wave that spawned Easy Rider and Vanishing Point, TwoLane Blacktop was funded by Hollywood studio Universal but greeted with bafflement by the studio on its completion, and given little support.
After being replaced on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid by Sam Peckinpah, Hellman returned to the Corman stable with Cockfighter, which starred Oates and was adapted by Charles Willeford from his own novel. Corman famously described it as the only film he ever made that lost money, even after it was re-edited and given a new title: Born to Kill. It is still illegal to show the film in the UK due to scenes of animal cruelty.
Thereafter Hellman found it increasingly difficult to get films off the ground, though he was brought in to finish two films, the Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest and the cold war thriller Avalanche Express, after the directors of both films (Tom Gries and Mark Robson respectively) died during production. Hellman did manage to make one film in this period: the 1978 spaghetti western China 9, Liberty 37, which featured Oates alongside Jenny Agutter. He also acted as editor on a number of films, including Corman’s influential 1966 biker film The Wild Angels, the Monkees’ Head (which Nicholson co-wrote) in 1968 and Sam Peckinpah’s Killer Elite (1975), as well as acting as second unit director on Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980) and RoboCop (1987)
Hellman returned to directing with Iguana, released in 1988, which was adapted from a novel by Alberto Vázquez Figueroa, and subsequently agreed to direct a third instalment of the Silent Night Deadly Night slasher series the following year. The latter film turned out to be a fortuitous connection as Hellman and its executive producer, Richard N Gladstein, discovered the Tarantino’s script of Reservoir Dogs, then an unknown writer. Hellman initially wanted to direct the film, but after Tarantino made it clear he wanted to direct it himself, Hellman mentored the project and acted as executive producer, helping to raise money for it.
Despite the success of Reservoir Dogs, Hellman found himself little in demand, and his only subsequent feature was Road to Nowhere, released in 2010 and scripted by Steven Gaydos (currently executive vice-president of content of Variety magazine). The same year Hellman was presented with a Special Lion for Overall Work at the Venice film festival.