Movie Review - M3GAN (2023)
In Hollywood, January is a cemetery for bad ideas. The biggest releases of the year come out during Christmas time and they cannibalize most of the moviegoing audience in the following weeks, so any studio with common sense isn't going to release anything they believe in during that period of time. Blumhouse’s M3GAN was a stupid idea on paper, but sometimes stupid ideas come out at the right time and strikes a chord with collective consciousness.
It shouldn't work, but it kind of does?
M3GAN is the story of a nine years old girl named Cady (Violet McGraw) who loses her parents in a car accident. She is taken in by her non-motherly, career driven aunt Gemma (the bad girlfriend from Get Out Allison Williams) who is an engineer at a toy company and happens to be working on a new prototype of AI which aims to be a hybrid between a best friend and a super educational toy. It’s called M3GAN (Model 3 Generative Android) and it doesn’t work like it should.
The End of Technological Triumphalism
No disrespect to Jason Blum and screenwriter Akela Cooper, but M3GAN is a competent movie at best. It's crammed with horror stereotypes like the shitty neighbour, the abusive boss, the lonely, directionless kid, etc. It offers little to no surprise, but it hits all the right beats. By that, I mean that it is a movie you've seen a hundred times before if you're a horror enthusiast, which happens to feature a murderous AI doll instead of a voodoo possessed doll or, I don't know, a murderous leprechaun?
I believe there are two reasons why M3GAN is so popular when it was sent out to die in the January graveyard. The most important factor is that it echoes our doubts and fears about technology. Since Donald Trump's election and the subsequent scandals, we've exited an era of technological triumphalism where any innovation was met with little criticism and realized how much control it exerts over our lives. Technological innovation is met with doubt and scrutiny now.
A doll that learns our behaviours in order to exploit us is a very simple, straightforward reflection of that.
The doll itself is kind of neatly written because it's really just operating from its programming command (keeping Cady safe at all cost), except that it keeps learning as it is used, so it doesn't have a good understanding of basic social interaction. It interprets the psychological comfort caused by Gemma's demands as a threat to Cady, which is a swell idea that causes a shitload of ruckus. The movies even gives a believable explanation as to how M3GAN learned to be homicidal.
It's very much a boogeyman movie and not a sophisticated take on our relationship to technology, though. The extent of M3GAN's take is "technology bad, nostalgia good". Cady and Gemma eventually connect through the latter's connection to her inner child, which also eventually save the two girls from the murderdoll. Akela Cooper's screenplay is serviceable without being spectacular. It gets the job done. Only person who doesn't is Allison Williams who is not a good career-driven aunt.
She comes off way too nice and soft for that.
Nostalgia and an elephant named Chucky
The other reason why M3GAN garnered so much buzz is nostalgia. This movie feeds on our obsession with the past, which makes sense since it's also about our fear of the future. On top of literally borrowing the villain from Child's Play, it borrows the logic behind its effectiveness. If Chucky represented the corruption of innocence by occult and Satanic forces, M3GAN represents the corruption of innocence by unchecked professional ambition.
To each era its own proper boogeyman, but the underlying idea is basically the same. Still I enjoy this form of borrowing more than I would enjoy another fucking reboot.
Gemma's obsession with her own past is also painfully obvious. Not only she works at a toy company, but she's collecting old toy, hoards old projects from her college days, etc. She’s supposed to be cold and self-centered millennial, but her innocence is alive and well. Gemma and Cady eventually protect themselves from a future they don't fully understand by using a past that is already decommissioned. I'm not a nostalgic person, but I've heard worse from a movie.
*
So, is M3GAN good? I'm going to say something terrible here and tell you that you should definitely pay to see Avatar : The Way of Water on a big screen and leave this one to a streaming session. They are movies of a even narrative quality, but one doesn't work as well on a small screen. M3GAN is worth seeing though. It's also a movie written by a woman of colour that features only women in key parts, which is another reason why you should give it at least two hours of your time.
But not much more than that. It's not THAT exciting.
