It was only a matter of time before the “scary doll” genre and the “artificial intelligence gone psychotic” genre joined forces, like chocolate and peanut butter with a side of silicon filings and frayed SATA cables.
Enter M3GAN (aka Megan) the 2023 next wave of interactive robo-toy with an American Girl-power spirit. M3GAN stands for Model 3 Generative Android, which uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to expand its capability as a young girl’s doll and play companion. The movie’s timing is spot-on given the recent rise of programs like Chat GPT and A.I. image generators.
With a blank expression, M3GAN can do TikTok-ey dance moves, offer pop-psychological insights about parents pressuing kids to eat vegetables, and sing a Sia lullaby (David Guetta’s “Titanium,” a song a robot can appreciate) to a grieving kid. I found M3GAN‘s growing intelligence reminiscent the 2013 Spike Jonze-directed movie Her, where Scarlett Johansson voiced the A.I., and for bonus points M3GAN‘s face and sculpted bee-stung lips resemble the aggressively consternated expression Johansson must have had while contemplating a lawsuit against Disney.
M3GAN boasts well-developed detail in its early scenes at a tech-driven toy company called Funki. Modern, expensive Pacific Northwest office interiors are filled with cutthroat millennial types in tightly tailored clothing, such as Ronnie Chieng’s tech CEO who pressures engineers to keep toys one step ahead of copycat knockoffs.
That’s where we meet engineer Gemma, who, like a modern-day Frankenstein, is secretly developing the M3GAN prototype in a basement lab. Gemma is played by Allison Williams, the former Girls actress staking a horror-movie career after her appearance in the hit Get Out. With a gorgeously tomboyish appeal reminiscent of Jennifer Carpenter, Willliams strikes a tenuous tone as an ambitious girl nerd whose Tinder-dating single life is disrupted when she becomes the legal guardian of her orphaned and traumatized 9-year-old niece Cady (Violet McGraw).
With montage reminiscent of the original Iron Man movie, we see the trial-and-error build of the robot doll’s processors, sensors, and outer skin, as Williams and her engineering team build the unsanctioned product. I liked seeing how a M3GAN is built, and this sidesteps “How?” questions later in the film. There’s also a foreshadowing scene ala Ripley’s power loader in an early scene of Aliens.
M3GAN is jam-packed with such callbacks to other robot- or AI-themed movies, which makes it simultaneously smart and derivative. There’s such an A-level production (especially the details of the M3GAN doll) that it’s disappointing when the story falls into the B-movie horror grooves.
Pressured to develop M3GAN into the company’s leading product, Gemma zaps two birds with one electric prod by using M3GAN to take care of her niece. While Cady sobs over losing her parents, the dark-souled M3GAN automaton breaks into a sweet, auto-tuned serenade like the Terminator-in-drag comforting a princess.
At times M3GAN flashes with brilliance recalling Paul Verhoeven’s original Robocop, as in the opening advertisement for PurrPetual Petz, little Cabbage-Patch Gremlin Troll GigaPet things that have low-level A.I. and poop pellets if you don’t feed them on schedule.
Director Gerard Johnston and screenwriter Akela Cooper front-load M3GAN with satirical whimsy, but characters are painfully underdeveloped and inconsistent. With barely a pause, Gemma’s character transforms from a heedless Frankenstein-style mad scientist to the only adult who wants to shut down M3GAN. Similarly, a child-psychologist social worker (Amy Usherwood) veers from a rude caricature to a sympathetic realist, then abruptly disappears.
This being a horror movie, M3GAN, of course, has to kill people. For a movie that sets such a realistic tone elsewhere, its chosen victims are cardboard cutouts, and their deaths neither work as vicarous, poetic justice nor as menacing scares. The setups seem arbitrary and slapdash. A bully kid is dispatched in the woods of a therapeutic retreat where kids shouldn’t be unsupervised. M3GAN violently resolves a conflict with Gemma’s neighbor over a broken fence, but the scenario seems like it wasn’t thought through: Why didn’t Gemma fix her fence when she’s obviously hired people to do other housework and gardening? Why didn’t the neighbor fix the fence when she apparently has a full workshop in her garage? (Yes, it’s only a dumb scene in a movie, but these details could have been figured out by a screenwriter.)
Potential existed for a Black Mirror style commentary, particularly about childhood addiction to “screen time” (when Cady is denied access to the homicidal M3GAN, she throws a druggie-level tantrum). Instead, M3GAN does a little of everything, and its returns diminish. Instead of commenting on our scary A.I.-generated future, it seems like one of its calculated products. And, much like A.I.-generated material, or reloaded PurrPetual Petz poops, it looks like we’ll be getting more of it, as there’s a M3GAN sequel in the works.
