Review: M3GAN (2023)

M3GAN (2023)

Rated PG-13 for violent content and terror, some strong language and a suggestive reference

Score: 4 out of 5

M3GAN should've sucked. It's a PG-13 horror movie released on the first weekend of January, historically a day when studios dump absolute garbage (especially PG-13 horror movies) that they think stands no chance, and while its main characters are mostly adults, its marketing explicitly catered to teenagers by focusing on certain sequences that became internet memes from the moment they appeared in the first trailer. The trailers promised something that was either a camp classic in the making, or insufferably bad. What's more, Akela Cooper's screenwriting has not impressed me in the past, with Hell Fest and Malignant being elevated more by their quality directors and casts than by stories that were either threadbare or ridiculous. Going in, this movie had multiple strikes against it, and while the early reviews had me hopeful, I was not expecting much.

Walking out of the theater, however, I found myself almost certain that this movie will be one of my favorites of 2023, especially one of my favorite horror movies. It's not just a killer robot doll movie, it's also big-idea science fiction that explores a lot of the concepts it raises about as deeply as you can get in a 102-minute B-movie, particularly the question of whether or not AI can actually improve our lives without causing serious tradeoffs and tangible risks to our safety (a rather hot topic right now if you've been following the tech press)... while also being a kick-ass, stylish, scary, mean-spirited, and often quite hilarious horror movie with an immediately iconic villain, great special effects bringing her to life, and a solid cast around her. It's a movie where, even at a screening late Thursday night with a theater that was only half-full because everybody had work or school the next day, I could feel the energy of the crowd around me getting really into it. This is not only the movie that the Child's Play remake felt like it wanted to be, it is one that leans exactly in some of the directions I recommended in my review of that film.

The film takes place a couple of years from now, with our protagonist Gemma being a roboticist working for a toy company that has recently made a highly successful line of interactive plush pets (think Furby, but far more high-tech). Gemma is under a ton of pressure from her boss David to make the toy cheaper so that it can fend off competition from a rival toy company coming out with a similar product that costs half the price, an order that distracts from her work on her passion project, the Model 3 Generative Android, or M3GAN. The next evolution of the concept, M3GAN is a four-foot robot doll with an AI brain capable of learning and bonding with its users, a long-shot idea that David is skeptical of. And then, to make matters worse, Gemma has a niece named Cady dumped straight in her lap after the girl's parents die in a car crash, throwing even more weight on her shoulders. Sensing a way to kill two birds with one stone, Gemma takes a M3GAN prototype home and uses it to help her care for Cady, and at first, it seems to succeed beyond anybody's wildest dreams, such that even David is impressed and orders it put into production after witnessing a demonstration of M3GAN playing with Cady and helping her discuss her feelings about her parents' death.

This is where the movie had me, and it never let go from there. From the moment we're introduced to Gemma, we see somebody who is not remotely prepared to be a parent, somebody whose home is filled with collectible toys that she won't let Cady touch as well as a small robotics lab filled with dangerous objects. Gemma is an archetypal example of a thirtysomething millennial techie who, despite her brilliance, work ethic, and professional success, doesn't know how to "adult" and is still living like a college student in a dorm room. For most of the first act, we only briefly see M3GAN in the lab at Gemma's workplace, the focus of the film instead being on Gemma as she tries and fails to raise Cady, eventually settling on the shortcut that so many bad parents take with their kids: letting screens raise her. Later, when she introduces Cady to M3GAN and the two seem to get along swimmingly, Gemma, her co-workers, and her boss all see it as a victory and a promising new frontier for technology, ignoring the warnings of Cady's psychologist that letting the little girl bond with a machine like this is probably not healthy for her. And indeed, M3GAN's expected descent into villainy is paired with increasingly antisocial behavior from Cady, directed at her classmates and her aunt alike. This movie has a very clear message: technology (especially computer technology that is designed to addict its users) is a bad substitute for proper parents and teachers, relying on it will probably mess up our kids' minds, and we should probably be limiting their screen time growing up, as Cady's own parents did before they died.

Meanwhile, M3GAN slowly but surely turning evil feels logical as it plays out. Fundamentally, she's fallen victim to the "paperclip problem", a hypothetical where an AI system programmed with one central task can turn violent even without any actual malice, especially once it's become clear that the intelligence she's been given to perform that task has also given her the ability to find loopholes in the safeguards designed to stop her from killing people. Make an AI that can learn from human behavior and adjust its programming accordingly? Congratulations, you've built an AI capable of learning what death and murder are, why humans kill each other, and all the self-serving justifications they make for violating their own taboos against such, and incorporate those justifications into its own programming so that she can ignore Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. What's more, as she studies human behavior, she also studies their personalities, which causes her to grow beyond her robotic emotionlessness and turn increasingly sassy and smart-assed. The T-101 she ain't; M3GAN's human intelligence causes her to turn increasingly human in her villainy, starting the film barely flinching as a neighbor's dog tries to maul her and ending it by delivering menacing threats and chilling speeches to her victims. Mark my words, I can see college-level courses on AI research screening this film as part of the curriculum. Cooper may have been setting out to write a crowd-pleasing horror movie, but she incorporated a lot of real-world scientific concepts into the story that reflect debates we're currently having about them, all presented in a fairly easy-to-digest manner that nonetheless doesn't dumb them down.

But she did still remember to keep it entertaining. Like I said, M3GAN evolves into a wiseass as the film progresses, getting creative not only in her kills but also in how she plans on getting away with them. She incorporates the dances she learned from Cady into her combat repertoire, most memorably in the hallway scene highlighted in the trailer but also towards the end when, after taking some damage, she starts glitching out and making increasingly stiff movements that nonetheless feel like they belong in an interpretive dance performance. Casting the young professional dancer Amie Donald under heavy makeup instead of relying on CGI was a golden move here. M3GAN's voice actress Jenna Davis, meanwhile, did the rest of the heavy lifting to bring M3GAN to life, slowly injecting her voice with notes of GLaDOS from the Portal games as the film goes on and M3GAN grows more self-aware. The kills are few and happen mostly off-screen, but even though this film had been cut down from an R rating (and, according to Cooper, there is a seriously bloody alternate cut we'll probably see on home video), it didn't feel particularly sanitized, not when M3GAN puts her victims through hell first before she lands the final death blow. I expect to see a lot of girls and women this Halloween, plus a few men (taking cues from this film's producer Jason Blum last year), dressed up in lolita dresses and giant bowties and swinging their arms and hips, so immediately iconic was this little doll.

It's a damn funny movie, too. When I said M3GAN felt inspired partly by GLaDOS, I didn't just mean the tone of her voice, I also meant her passive-aggressive trolling of her victims. Davis plays her cooler than the foul-mouthed jackass Chucky, but by the end, it's clear that M3GAN's personality has grown enough that she's having something you might call "fun" as she kills people. M3GAN's antics alone aren't the only source of humor here, either. A deep well of satire runs straight through the heart of the film, right from the opening scene where we're shown an ad for the little robot pets that Gemma is working on. I wouldn't call this film an outright horror-comedy like some others have, but it is anything but stone-faced and somber as its characters discuss the risks of AI development; better to show the product of that development dancing on her victims' graves, after all. That's not to say that the film is frivolous, though. When it turns its attention to Cady, it pulls no punches in depicting how she's coping with the loss of her parents and how the presence of M3GAN in her life has become an increasingly problematic coping mechanism. Instead of whiplash between the serious scenes with M3GAN and Cady and the dark humor of the rest of the film, these two elements combined simply made the proceedings feel that much more twisted and grotesque.

If there's one thing I can fault the film for, it's in how it frames Gemma. This is no shade on Allison Williams, who did a fine job playing the character, and I get what the film's main satirical thrust was going for in its depiction of parents who use tablets and TVs to raise their kids for them. Also, Gemma's engineering brilliance ultimately does help save the day at the end. That said, the tone felt like it was negatively judging Gemma for choosing her career over having a family, especially with certain lines of dialogue that M3GAN says to her later in the film, giving off some very weirdly conservative vibes about how the film views working women in general and women in STEM in particular -- specifically, the kind of "crunchy con" who's a bit obsessed with medieval Europe and paleo diets and has books by Guillaume Faye on their bookshelf. (That's a rabbit hole you don't wanna go down. Trust me.) This is a problem I think could've easily been fixed simply by giving Gemma a boyfriend or husband who's shown to be just as incompetent at parenting as she is and just as eager to use M3GAN as a surrogate parent for Cady (and someone else for M3GAN to kill, too!), keeping the focus squarely on bad parenting in general instead of causing it to have some gendered undertones. As it is, while I'm pretty sure it was unintentional, it still left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

The Bottom Line

This wasn't a perfect movie, but it's something of a rare breed: a genuinely smart sci-fi story that's also an awesome, entertaining fun time to watch. If you wanna be scared without getting too grossed out, and then have something to think about on the way home, then M3GAN is your killer new best friend.