After her sister and her sister’s husband die in an eminently avoidable car accident, toy company robotics engineering wiz Gemma (Allison Williams) finds herself suddenly in the role of guardian for her little niece Cady (Violet McGraw).
Not feeling (or acting) terribly well cut out for her surprise mother job, Gemma decides to let technology solve the problem. She retools the shelved project of a life-like robot doll she calls M3GAN, and somehow develops a rapidly self-teaching AI for the thing. At first, thing’s work out crackers: M3GAN is so human, she quickly takes on the roles of mother, best friend and only peer for Cady, while Gemma’s bosses recognize a monumental breakthrough when they see it and market the shit out of the project from the go. Nobody does waste even a second to think about security and safety concerns or the impact on children’s mental development, of course.
Until Gemma realizes two things, we the audience have been clued into rather a lot earlier. First, M3GAN will do absolutely anything to protect Cady’s well-being as she interprets it, which is a problem in something nobody has clued in on Asimov’s Rules of Robotics, and she’s utterly deranged by human standards. Secondly, perhaps having a crazy robot as her only attachment figure is not terribly good for a little girl’s psychological health.
If you see it predominantly from the direction of sense and logic, Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN is a terrible film. Everything that happens in here could have been avoided if anyone involved in the plot had just stopped for a second and thought about the consequences of what they’re doing at all. Now, particularly after these last couple of years, you might argue that this sounds a lot like real-world human behaviour, but even compared to our daily work of self-destruction, the laissez faire attitude of Gemma, her bosses, her colleagues and so on is absurd; by all rights, this film’s world shouldn’t exist anymore because every nuclear reactor would have blown up already, taking everyone in it with it.
Also not great is the film’s treatment of the by now traditional horror movie themes of grief and family trouble, mostly because its approach to them is so rote and primitive and too obviously meant to emotionally manipulate its audience into believing there’s any actual heft to this tale of AI development, robotics and replacement parenting going very badly wrong. Some of the beats at the start where Gemma wavers about what she actually wants from life and how Cady might fit into this, with Gemma clearly understanding she can’t let the poor kid down, but having trouble not letting herself down, actually feel somewhat genuine, but everything that comes afterwards is really just a mix of pap to get us to the killer robot, and the sort of nonsense contemporary screenwriters love to put into their scripts to demonstrate their “relevance” and “emotional depth”. Really, the only thing that saves this part of the film is how seriously Williams and McGraw treat the shit they are peddling, and Johnstone’s genially sardonic sense of humour that manages to play many a scene with cloying sentimentality and sardonic humour at the same time. But then, in the end, all of this is only meant to get us to the monster anyway.
And what makes M3GAN actually a really, really fun movie to watch despite it being so stupid and rote in many regards, is how much intelligence has been put into its life as a surface level horror movie.
The design of our killer robot, the way CGI and the work of Amie Donald (body) and Jenna Davis (voice), turn it into a believable and believably corporeal presence, the clever way it steps into the Uncanny Valley – all of this is brilliant and extremely effective, turning M3GAN into a very memorable monster (perhaps to be ruined in the surely coming sequel, because we all know by now how Blumhouse loves to operate in this regard). Where much of the rest of the writing here can feel a bit robotic, M3GAN the killer robot doll’s quips and dialogue sparkle with just the right mix of the groan-worthy, the sinister and the actually intelligent. Not surprising from the guy who directed Housebound, Johnstone has a lot of fun with this aspect of the film.
He’s also great at general suspense and specifically the murder set pieces. These aren’t just efficient little suspense machines – and pretty funny to boot – but also show how creative a film with a PG-13 certificate can actually get when it puts its imagination to use. So while there’s little here for the gore hounds, there’s nothing harmless about the murders and the violence.
So, if one can survive the most idiot of idiot plots, and doesn’t kick the film into the sun for its bad jabs at emotional heft, there’s an immense amount of fun to be had with M3GAN as a pure crowd pleasing horror movie. Seen this way, I’d call it close to perfect, ironically enough.