M3GAN – Review
102 Minutes, Rated PG-13
Written by Akela Cooper
Directed by Gerard Johnstone
**NOTE: this post will be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. You can read Mark’s review below, then listen or watch as he discusses both it and A Man Called Otto. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
A robotics engineer at a toy company builds a life-like doll that begins to take on a life of its own.
Look, we’re all familiar with Chucky, the star of the Child’s Play franchise, right? Small Soldiers ring any bells?
2001: A Space Odyssey and it’s unstable AI?
What happens when something happens with AI not on accident, or through nefarious motives, but through altruistic motives.
M3GAN certainly falls into the category of “but I was only trying to help” horror.
Gemma gains custody of her niece, Cady, when her parents are killed in a car accident, but she has no idea how to be a mom. Instead, she’s a toy designer who’s working on something big that might just help Cady deal with her grief…and allow Gemma to figure out how to be a mom.
But, as things must, things go awry, and the bond between Cady and M3GAN’s AI personality becomes too intense, for both Cady and M3GAN, leading to the inevitably bad consequences we’ve come to expect.
Now, where Chucky is an absolute horror involving possession and murder, and Small Soldiers is a mistaken installation of military grade hardware into toys, M3GAN is neither. It’s not a straight-up horror, instead perferring to terrorize us in what animation folks call the Uncanny Valley.
But where Uncanny Valley is usually reserved for issues of appearance–as in: that computer generated person looks too real, but I know it’s fake, so it’s creepy–M3GAN exists just outside the Valley, but firmly lives in what I have dubbed the “Uncanny Valley of Behavior.”
Yes, like so many thrillers of yesteryear, M3GAN behaves in such a way as to be just believable enough to tip into creepy, even though you know it’s not real.
In short, M3GAN is just human enough, behaviorally, to make you question, which only reinforces the most important part of any truly horrific film: humans are the best (worst?)monsters.
As always, I’m shocked (not) whenever a film scientist declares, “we’re making an AI that can learn for itself,” which is almost always followed by, “why is it learning?!”
The influences in M3GAN are easy to see (Chucky, I Robot, The Alpha Test, Prototype, Small Soldiers, etc), but they’re put together here in such an intimate and sensitive setting (in terms of where the characters are in when they begin to interact with M3GAN) that it’s easy to see why they get sucked into allowing M3GAN to become what she becomes.
If we’ve learned anything at this point, it’s that “AI Bad.”
But M3GAN is actually a frightfully good time. Creepy as hell with the inevitable sequel tease. It embraces its premise with the same intensity that Malignant did previously. It proudly stands up and says “This is what I am. Deal with it.”
Check it out.
M3GAN hits theaters today, January 6 and stars Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jen Van Epps, Brian Jordan Alvarez, and Ronny Chieng.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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