It’s a beautiful place, though basically, a flower-filled Garden of Eden and the survivors have returned, harmoniously, to nature. The lyrics are quite appropriate for the movie, with David Byrne singing from the perspective of somebody living in a postapocalyptic setting. ABC, baby!Īs the Mitchells drive west, the Talking Heads song “(Nothing But) Flowers” plays. Rick’s old video camera is not a PAL product instead, it’s a Sony camcorder because The Mitchells vs. We won’t list them all here (pause at the 5:30 mark to see them all), but highlights include Dial B for Burger, a riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder Portrait of an Idiot on Fire, a spoof of Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire Going There, a spoof of Ashby’s Being There Katie and Aaron, her brother-sister remake of Thelma & Louise and They Live(D) in the Jurassic Period, seemingly a combination of John Carpenter’s cult classic They Live and dinosaurs.
Katie’s filmography, as seen in her college-application video, is full of parodies and homages to classic films. The four people she looks up to the most are Greta Gerwig, the director of Lady Bird, Little Women, and the star of the scrapped How I Met Your Dad pilot Céline Sciamma, the French director of Girlhood and Portrait of a Lady on Fire Lynne Ramsay, the director of We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here and Hal Ashby, the director of Harold and Maude. In Katie’s video application to film school, we get a glimpse of her Mt. On her sweatshirt, she’s got a pin of a bomb with the phrase “Hi there!” written on it, a reference to the infamous bomb at the end of Dr. Her backpack has a pin that reads “Lawn Wranglers,” a nod to Wes Anderson’s debut film, Bottle Rocket. In addition to the California College of Film pin and her rainbow pin (foreshadowing!), Katie also sports two pins that reference other movies. You can actually see these socks earlier when the Columbia logo becomes all Katie-fied and the torch lady sticks out a cartoon leg wearing the same Shining sock.
There’s also a poster for the fictional movie Roboslayers 4, which is a bit of foreshadowing of the Mitchells’ future as, well, roboslayers!ĭon’t overlook this Easter egg! (Get it?) Katie’s socks have the same iconic pattern as the carpet of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. There’s one for Isle of the Snake People, a 1971 Mexican movie starring Frankenstein’s Boris Karloff It Came From Beneath the Sea, a 1955 film about a giant octopus that attacks San Francisco and Creature With the Atom Brain, which was released as part of a double feature with It Came From Beneath the Sea.
the Machines opens with a direct homage to Terminator 2 when one of the PAL robots stomps down on a smartphone the way one of the Terminators steps on a human skull in James Cameron’s 1991 classic.Īs a major film buff with a tendency toward genre fare, it’s no surprise that Katie’s bedroom walls are covered with somewhat obscure movie posters. But in addition to the broad-strokes plot, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a movie about a robot uprising, would be inspired by a franchise that included a sequel subtitled Rise of the Machines. While Katie and the rest of the Mitchells - Rick (Danny McBride), Linda (Maya Rudolph), and Aaron ( Mike Rianda, who also directed the movie) - embarked on a cinematic journey to stop a potentially world-ending machine uprising, Vulture was on a quest to track down as many pop-culture references as we could find. So it should be no surprise that the Netflix film itself is absolutely full of Easter eggs and shout-outs to all sorts of genre flicks that inspired The Mitchells vs. Her goal in life is to become a filmmaker, and she has spent her childhood making movies that are chock-full of references and homages to the pop culture she admires. Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson), the protagonist of the year’s best animated movie so far, The Mitchells vs. Danny McBride as Rick Mitchell and Abbi Jacobson as Katie Mitchell.