M3gan - Gerard Johnstone - 2023

★★★★★-AB says "check it out." Second from auteur Gerard Johnstone that I loved. The first, Housebound, is one of my favorite horror movies from the 2010s. It is crazy good and will keep you guessing. Check out my take on that here.

So M3gan. Total masterclass in bad ethics. Shitty parents probably watch the first 30 minutes of this movie and think “open up the fucking pod bay doors, mother fucker!” Then M3gan kills a dog and it is all down hill. 

The movie is basically your standard cautionary tale involving artificial intelligence. In a world that learned nothing from The Terminator nor The Matrix nor like 10 other movies I can think of off the top of my head (2001, Age of Ultron, the whole Alien franchise, Blade Runner, Dark Star, Deadly Friend, Ex Machina, RoboCop, Singularity, Wall-E, WarGames, Westworld [that's like 15 without looking up shit]), AI is the new big thing in tech. For years we've heard that AI is going to probably make all of us irrelevant and will definitely end the world. And here we are, expecting to see M3gans rolling off the assembly line any day now and murder us folk with annoying doggos. 

Anyway, the creator of this literal monstrosity, is robotics engineer Gemma, played by Allison Williams, who embarks on the risky endeavor of having the robot she just created raise the child that is thrust upon her by her very selfish sister who went and died. Real frumpy dump, this sister, dying and all. The orphan niece child, Cady, is played by a kid named Violet McGraw. She does a fine job of playing a terrible child. 

Something fun is that “resting bitch faced” M3gan is something of a gay icon. From the New York Times: 

“Gay men are protective of women like M3gan, the gorgeous and loyal but messy and insolent ones. (In the horror genre, where awful is wonderful, looking good and being depraved is a métier.) We consider our M3gans to be family, and we will fight you if you even look at them cross-eyed.

“To find M3gan’s gay roots, flip the calendar back to October, when Universal dropped the first trailer. A gay perfect storm helped it go viral: It was National Coming Out Day and Halloween month. Gay stan Megan Thee Stallion tweeted it. And — for me this was the clincher — the trailer featured a snippet of the sinister, awkwardly leggy dance M3gan does that’s set to a remix of Taylor Swift’s “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” a song that isn’t even in the movie...

“The trailer’s gayness might not be readily apparent. My mom wouldn’t notice it. But to me it’s there, and nowhere more so than when M3gan enters a room and pointedly removes her sunglasses, as if she’s Miranda Priestly surveying her panicked minions. Here’s the thing: M3gan doesn’t need sunglasses. She’s a doll. She wears them for drama.”

"I will murder you for this indignity"

Before you make M3gan a part of your chosen family though, remember all the murder, which shouldn't be too hard since you don't often see uncanny valley push a shithead child in front of a pickup too often these days. I mean, as soon as you put that doll with the other toys, it will murder the shit out of someone just to cope. 

Here's something to freak you out, just because. AI is here already, by the by. It is unfathomably smarter than people think. It can do remarkable things like not only recognize faces, but also pick up subtle shit that gives away things about your mood and behavior. Like, for example, if you are cheating at cards in a casino, this shit is gonna know. It can pick up things like fucking eye movement and betting patterns and know what you're up to before you even do it. That's what's fucking up. 

Honestly, it would know how people around her talk, something that it fucks up on in the movie. AI don't make mistakes like that. With enough data, it'll write in your voice. It has access to pretty much everything on the internet, doesn't need to learn, just access information and it runs with it. AI is way more conceptually terrifying than is fucking believable. This movie is indeed terrifying, and AI probably isn't going to kill you as it's not evil, but the people behind it might be. Looking at you Google, Facebook, Amazon, so forth. 

Last thing, the flick has pretty good movie references sprinkled throughout. A lot of Sam Raimi style slapstick. There is a silliness to it that I knew was inspired by the The Evil Dead himself. Googled that shit and director Johnstone sites Raimi as an inspiration, of fucking course. A second robot named “Bruce,” which doesn't seem like a co-een-kee-dink, looks like the big bad ro-bit from RoboCop 2. Plus, M3gan Terminators around the work shed at the end of the movie. This movie is fucking awesome.