“It took 28 minutes and a lot of tears. But I can now almost use a computer!”

Justin’s rating: Press ALT-F4 to watch the unrated version!

Justin’s review: This is a movie we’ve almost seen a hundred times already. A parent and a child who were previously close realize that they’ve drifted apart as that child’s grown up — and neither has any idea how to fix it. But wait! Road trips fix everything!

And so after a disastrous farewell dinner for college-bound Katy (Abbi Jacobson), her dad Rick (Danny McBride) cancels her plane ticket to college and announces that the whole family will be driving her cross-country. Will they have hilarious mishaps? Will early clumsy attempts at reconnection fail but then eventually succeed when a powerful moment appears? Will they pass Max and Goofy driving on the same road?

Yes, definitely, but not before the robot apocalypse happens.

During their road trip, Rick, mom Linda (Maya Rudolph), little brother Aaron (Mike Rianda), cross-eyed dog Monchi, and Katie find themselves the sole free human family in the world — the world, people, including every militia survivalist who trains for every apocalyptic variable — after a Facebook-like program sends waves of people-capturing robots to imprison everyone and shoot them into space. So yeah, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is also a bit of commentary on our dependence on technology and how it can be used for good and bad.

Listen, I love this movie and our family had a great time watching it, so I want to get my criticism out of the way first. As well intentioned as this movie is, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is pretty clumsy in handling its big ideas. Both the family connection storyline and the “dangers of technology” plot are fumbled pretty badly. You can see what they’re going for, but they get there in the least convincing fashion possible. So to me, the emotional core is lacking and the satire is mostly toothless.

I also was really puzzled why the mom Linda faded so much into the background during the first half of the film, until I realized that, oh, this is Maya Rudolph again, and “underwhelming me” is simply what she does. Heck, we don’t even find out she’s a teacher until the second half, and it’s only when she mama bears out on some evil robots that she becomes interesting.

OK, criticism over. Let the gushing commence.

Sony Animation struck gold with a new vibrant style that first appeared in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, and I was glad to see it make a return here. It looks fresh and very non-Pixarish, allowing for other animation styles (such as 2-D inserts) that make the film look a lot like the modern comic books and graphic novels that my kids read.

It’s also cool that this is a legitimate robot apocalypse movie. While it doesn’t explore a lot of the ramifications of what would happen if you sucked eight billion people out of the world nor explicitly says how their little prison pods will feed them or remove waste, there are some cool moments where you see indications that this is the end of the world as we know it. It really does become about one “weird” family whose unconventional makeup allows them to stymie the robots at every turn. It’s not every day that an animated movie gives us an apocalypse, but here you go.

The Mitchells are very relatable as a family unit, especially when contrasted with their Instagram-posting perfect neighbors. Independently, none of them could be the star of a movie, but together, it’s all about the interactions and relationships. Like some of my other favorite cartoons like Bob’s Burgers and Gravity Falls, this film emphasizes a family that is always there for each other and genuinely enjoys the companionship that comes from being together. I liked how Katy moped about the unexpected car trip for about two minutes before she made a visible decision to look at the bright side of this last pre-college hurrah.

But by far, the reason that I’d push this movie on you is that it is, start to finish, deeply hilarious. I lost count of the number of times that I and my kids let out gut-busting laughs at the latest bizarre smash cut or pitch-perfect line. There’s a lot of well-written humor that’s not starving for inspiration, from the silly dog to two malfunctioning robots the family adopts to illustration overlays that represent how Katy was envisioning the action. Through the humor, these characters become even more personable, and that’s what made this a stellar piece of work.

It does feel like so many people slept on and are continuing to overlook The Mitchells vs. the Machines, and that’s a real shame. There’s a whole lot of shoddy, low-effort animation out there. This is the opposite of that. You’ll see it when you see it.