Next Gen (2018) | Netflix Film Review

Meet Mai (voiced by Charlyne Yi), she’s your typical angry teenager from a broken home. You see, years ago for unexplained reasons, her father left her and her mother to fend for themselves, and he never sees them again. Her mother, Molly (Constance Wu on the vocals), fills the void of her husband’s departure by surrounding herself with robots. And I mean robot everything: personal assistant, brush, toothbrush, a bowl of noodles, the world is a robot. All of this is a perfect recipe for a teenager who’s angry, hates robots, and simply wants to know that someone has her back. It’s also our launching pad for Netflix’s latest original, Next Gen.

Today is the release of the brand-new Q-bot Gen 6. The release is complete with a big show to go over the features and Justin Pin (Jason Sudeikis) dancing around a stage in perfect “megalomaniacal, egotistical, narcissistic, CEO of a company” style. Everyone is thrilled with the new version of the Q-bot and surprise surprise, everyone who came to the reveal gets one for free (insert maniacal laugh). While at the event, Mai meets 7723 (John Krasinski), a robot secretly developed by Dr. Tanner Rice (David Cross) as a counterpoint to Justin Pin’s Schemes. Mai and 7723 become friends and the two of them go on a journey of fun and bonding, you know, like they always seem to do in stories like this. This approach isn’t anything new as a whole, but it does have some nice odds and ends that make it stand out.

Next Gen is an animated feature, making “acting” a difficult thing to measure. Did the voices of Charlyne Yi, Constance Wu, Jason Sudeikis, John Krasinski, and David Cross work? Yes, especially Cross along with Dr. Rice. He was also the voice of nearly every other robot we met and was charmingly effective. So, instead let’s talk about the characters, and right upfront Mai is insufferable and nearly unlikeable through most of the movie. If it wasn’t for her dog Momo (Michael Pena) and her interactions with the robots that seem to trigger her with ease, the movie wouldn’t have been very fun. Justin Pin is hard to not like, but aren’t all good villains? 7723 is kind of like Big Hero 6’s Baymax, only cooler, not nearly as mentally challenged and speaks in full sentences.

The world created in Next Gen is rather fantastic. The production team created something that both feels different and alien, and allows the viewer to forget that this is a characterized world of imagination. It is easy to get lost in, which is saying a lot for me as I spent the first 15 minutes nit-picking the elements. “That hair looks too stringy and light”, “that skin tone seems overdone”, but after a while, I simply stopped caring about what I thought was wrong. It all started to look and feel like a world I was living in.

The concept team behind Next Gen deserves a medal. They seemed to have found a perfect balance of design that emulates generational development in technology. Everything feels like it is of the same family – which is good – and old feels old, new feels new, which is appropriate. The designs of robots feel functional and intelligent, nothing feels “look at me, look at me! I’m made of fluffy air for no good reason”.

Next Gen is the latest of Netflix’s venture into new and original content. It brings a world of robot-everything into our living room and it’s part of our monthly subscription, so can it be worth rating it on our movie ticket price scale? The answer is yes, you don’t lose any of that cinematic magic that we would come to expect from a film in the theater. The story is solid, the primary character is understandable but problematic, and the imagery will stand up to anything coming out of the animation houses of PIXAR and DreamWorks.

All told, Next Gen is a “W” in the win column for Netflix.