Film Review: M3GAN (2023)
Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN is much better than it has any right to be. If one were to judge the film on the trailer alone, it appears to be a mash-up and knock-off of both the Child’s Play and Terminator franchises (not to mention all the low-budget derivatives that came in their respective wakes), yet in reality it has a lot more going for it than either. Is it as silly as Child’s Play? Perhaps. Is it as overbearingly pessimistic as The Terminator? Maybe. But either way, it’s hard to argue that, at the very least, it’s much more thoughtfully made than the first and more plausible than the latter, if that sort of thing matters to you in your killer robot doll movies.
It’s possible that M3GAN wouldn’t exist as it does without the influence of either of these long-standing properties, but it’s far from a copy. Child’s Play is a supernatural film about a murderer’s soul possessing a children’s toy and not much else. Thematically, there simply isn’t much there. The Terminator movies, on the other hand, are rife with ideas about automation and AI running amok but are bogged down by an overabundance of time travel paradoxes and doomsday predictions.
M3GAN strays from James Cameron’s gloomy prophecy in favor of something much more current and tangible: how AI affects child development and the ever-increasing dependence on the technology’s many uses. AI is in the news every day, and Johnstone smartly taps into our collective uncertainty about its possible uses by giving it an angelic child’s face and the soothing voice of an understanding best friend. The results are creepy as hell, falling purposefully right in the center of the most unnerving of uncanny valleys.
Watching M3GAN (played by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) move about is like seeing a demonically possessed marionette skitter across the room while definitely affirming that it can’t open the pod bay doors. It’s a genuinely unsettling and unwholesome sensation, not unlike when Reagan (Linda Blair) does her hideous spider walk down the stairs in The Exorcist, albeit with a fair bit more grace and much less blood spewing from the mouth.
Needless to say, and perhaps predictably, M3GAN gets progressively more violent (with progressively creative deaths to match) as the doll in question continually adapts to its environment and restructures and reevaluates the parameters of its programming, which is to care for and protect her eight-year-old owner Cady (Violet McGraw). As Cady’s relationship with M3GAN evolves into one of complete codependency, her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), a roboticist at a large toy company who created the doll on company time, is helpless to stop the ensuing rampage. That this over-the-top and often hilarious carnage falls along a well-worn path of horror film story beats hardly matters when there’s this much fun to be had.
