Review: M3GAN

M3GAN
Cert: 15 / 102 mins / Dir. Gerard Johnston / Trailer

Gerard Johnston's cyber-chiller is the story of a software engineer, Gemma (Allison Williams), who masterminds a next-level interactive toy; a life-sized android of a little girl named M3GAN (Model 3 Generative ANdroid) complete with an artificial intelligence which exponentially grows and adapts to its owner/subject. When Gemma's niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is orphaned in an horrendous traffic collision, she is awarded interim custody of the child whilst trying to juggle a modern, independent life and her demanding career. When M3GAN appears to be the perfect companion for the grieving Cady, Gemma sees this as indicative of the projects success, while her boss David (Ronny Chieng) sees this as indicative of a product which needs to be hurried through production to maximise profits. But no one seems quite prepared for how M3GAN attaches herself to Cady, and the lengths to which the surrogate babysitter will go to protect the pair of them from outside harm...

Now, narrative cinema requires a suspension of disbelief from its audience; the ability to forget they're sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers watching a series of rapidly projected images created by hundreds of people thousands of miles away for millions of dollars, and a willingness to buy into the in-universe reality and emotion of the story they're being told. Science fiction and horror need this above all else, because of the logical unbelievability of their content.

Director Johnston, along with screenwriter Akela Cooper and story-lead James Wan, require what can only be described as several gargantuan leaps of faith from the media-savvy viewer in 2023. They are asked (indeed, expected) to believe that a) a doll of this technological and mechanical complexity can be fully developed and then produced to retail at $10k, b) that there will be enough takers in the domestic, suburban market to make this a viable business model, rather than using the same tech to create workers for hazardous environments (ie the replicants in Blade Runner), and c) that aunt Gemma is in any remote or meaningful way equipped to be the legal and moral guardian of a traumatised child, despite her not being sure and every single other character in the film (including the robot) confirming this doubt repeatedly. The last of these challenges is where reality just hangs up its gloves for the rest of the movie...

HAMMER

So this write-up feels like it's peaked already, but there's no way to skirt around the elephant in the room. M3GAN isn't awful, but it's a long, long way from being great. Oddly slow to start (given that it's a movie which is perfectly encapsulated by its 2½ minute trailer), this is a social satire implemented with a hammer rather than a scalpel, practically winking at the camera every time one of the vacuous adult characters makes a pointed comment about technology being loud, confusing or unstable, like it's been script-edited by a committee of Daily Mail readers.

It's not that the film is stupid - it's really not - but in order for this to be smart it needs nuance, and that's something to which the budget would not stretch. In producing this film it apparently took twelve million dollars to create a screen-realistic synthetic human that looks deliberately false for story reasons, but authentic enough to be perfect as the film's uncanny antagonist. And yet Hollywood™ still can't find anyone who can convincingly Photoshop together a mantlepiece photo of three actors who are supposed to be on family vacation together...

Weirdly, while the central performance of the eponymous android is every bit as believable as the story requires, the whole thing is repeatedly hamstrung by the surrounding humans making the simplest mistakes, dumbest assumptions and most tonally myopic oversights that the genre has ever witnessed. It's not that you're rooting for the robot exactly, but M3GAN certainly seems like the most level-headed character.

ESCHER

To be fair, there are positives in all this. The film holds a very respectable number of female characters, not just the story-leads but in supporting positions too. It never overplays this or makes it a thing (so forgive me for making it a thing), but this really works in M3GAN's favour as not feeling too much like a standard studio-horror. There are also a handful of scenes where Johnston and the cast finally embrace the silliness of the situation and effectively turn it into an eighties slasher movie. These are very welcome, but they're too few and far between to be a defining feature.

The cast give it their all as far as they're able; of my varying problems with the film, acting isn't among them (although it's worth noting that young Violet McGraw is great at playing 'emotionally scarred' to the point of absolute unlikability; as previously noted, zero nuance). Allison Williams carries the lead well, completely aware that her character's flaws are integral to the plot mechanics. First and foremost though, the combination of Amie Donald's physical performance, Jenna Davis' vocalisations, and the model-making, animatronic and digital artistry which completes M3GAN herself is, if anything, beautifully understated. Because the audience is told the character is artificial, the need to find flaws in the presentation immediately evaporates, focusing attention on the story. That the story isn't particularly great*¹ is by the by, but yeah...

M3GAN isn't trashy enough to be fun, and it's not clever enough to be provocative. Passable Friday-night fare, what this wants is to mix philosophical morality with self-aware satire and cutting edge visuals, like a 21st century take on Shelley's Frankenstein by way of Ex Machina. Instead, this is Lawnmower Man for the TikTok generation*², desperately hoping the 'what if' will be loud enough to drown out the 'yeah but how?...

It'll make money though, so at least Blumhouse's largest box is ticked, right?

*¹ Spoilers, highlight-to-read: At the climax of Act III it turns out that the robot isn't remotely waterproof, which feels like the shittest thus-far-ignored plot progression since H.G. Wells painted himself into a corner and made all the Martians catch a cold so that his story could end without everybody just dying. That isn't the clincher, though: in an actually-telegraphed move, it's shown that anyone could have just stabbed M3GAN in the face at literally any point to stop things getting out of hand. [/end]
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*² Yeah it's easy for me to be that snarky, but it's also easy for the film to try and be better. ^{[ BACK ]}

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