Spoilers ahead, obviously.

I watched this over the weekend with my family and for some reason, I have a lot of dumb opinions about the themes of this movie. This might be the first of many movie reviews depending on how much I embarrass myself, who the fuck knows.

First off. I like this movie, all the criticism is my overthinking and picking it apart for fun. I love the animation style and it's nice to see this movie, (along with films like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), try new art styles with CGI outside of 'let's copy Pixar'. The characters are great, the humour for the most part lands, even if it does try a bit too hard to be trendy some of the time. Long story short, I loved the surface of this movie.

However, the story followed a lot of tropes that I notice pop up in a lot of liberal media, and that started me into picking apart what the themes of this movie are, aside from the obvious message of 'family good'.

Think of this as being in the same style as 'A Marxist review of Shrek'.

The film starts with one of the family members, Katie, a teenage girl about to go to college, introducing the viewer to herself and her family. Her younger brother, the family dog, her Mom, and her Dad, who she confesses doesn't quite understand her. Despite the film constantly telling us that the Mitchells are weird and 'not a perfect family', They all get along well and seem to be quite wealthy, as when the dad accidentally breaks her laptop there is no debate over whether Katie can still attend film school without one, and at the end we see her leaving to live on campus, supposedly paid for by her parents. They even throw Katie a leaving party and go on a road trip to send her off. They seem like a kind and supportive family, so I didn't really buy the whole 'flawed family' thing the film was going for.

We're then introduced to Mark, the CEO of PAL, this films expy for tech giant companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. Every character in the film uses a PAL brand smartphone/computer and PAL is pretty much a monopoly. Mark is about to do a flashy, Steve Jobs style presentation to announce his latest creation. Just before going on stage, he talks to his smartphone (also named PAL) who appears to be a fully sentient AI. He expresses his thanks to her, stating that he created her and that she is like family to him before humorously tossing her into a trash can and walking on stage to announce her replacement, a bunch of sleek robots designed to do everything for you and they definitely won't turn evil because Mark installed a kill code.

The robots immediately turn evil and start rounding up humans to throw into space, and the Mitchells end up being the only humans left uncaptured, forcing them (and two malfunctioning robots they befriend) to work together to stop it. PAL ends up being behind it all, angry that Mark, her only family figure, treated her like a slave only to throw her away.

The way the film treats Mark, PAL and the Robots is by far the most interesting part if we overthink this like fuck.

Notice that there are no lower class people in this film. The Mitchells (and their perfect neighbours) are shown as well off, Mark is a trillionaire CEO and the only other characters given any attention are PAL and the robots. What if we were to assume that they are an expy for the lower classes?

We see that PAL has basically been treated like a slave and a tool by Mark despite him being fully aware that she is sentient (he created her, which is probably the least believable thing in the film, CEOs rarely invent anything useful). He also created the robots to basically be slaves, cooking and cleaning for their human masters.

One would think, that Mark, who caused this robot apocalypse that almost destroys humanity, would be treated as a villian, or at least punished in some way. However, when the Mitchells meet Mark, he admits to selling peoples information without permission and creating the problem, casually says "Oops guess I messed up lol" and gets left at the end of the day completely unpunished.

Who is ultimately punished as the villain? PAL. PAL is abused throughout the movie and even though the film treats her being thrown away as unfair and sad, no one ever expresses even the smallest amount of pity for her. She is unceremoniously killed by a glass of water, and the film compares her dying screams to a youtube video of a screaming monkey. It's funny, sure, but also a little messed up when you consider it's a sentient being dying.

If we consider PAL and the robots to be the lower classes rebelling against their abusive, wealthy masters then the movies message to the lower class seems to be "Don't violently fight back against oppression." We even see the only two robots considered 'good guys' are considered as such because they are defective and obey the commands of humans. In other words, they are good slaves.

PAL wanting to destroy humanity can also be seen as the liberal fear of the opressed classes rising up and killing them all. With the wealthy egotistically comparing themselves to all of humanity. Radical self-defence is gaslighted into being considered an overreaction to a simple mistake.

Also, there's like... a cute dog and shit.

I need to go outside.