Review of M3GAN: Awesome and Awful AI

January 8, 2023

One snowy winter day, Cady (Violet McGraw) lost both her parents in a terrible vehicular accident. She was sent to live with her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams). Gemma was a robotics expert, very proficient at her job, however, she was not ready to take on the duties of a guardian to a child. To help her take care of Cady, Gemma used a prototype of a mechanical doll with AI that she herself developed, called M3gan (Model 3 Generative Android).

As Cady became very attached to M3gan, she grew even more distant from Gemma, much to her aunt's dismay. However, when Gemma's boss David (Ronnie Chieng) saw how M3gan interacted with Cady, he immediately saw the huge market potential for this AI doll so he wanted Gemma to fast-track its development to get M3gan for wide release. However, Gemma began to observe disturbing behavior from M3gan which would soon turn sinister. 

When you've seen the trailer, you have practically know the whole story already, except for the ending. You can see how M3gan looked like and how she moves like a real girl, even able to dance and do cartwheels. Later on, she would take on extremely protective behavior when it came to Cady. The tech science behind these abilities were a bunch of jargon anyway, so hearing Gemma and her crew "explain" them does not really add much. 

The only actor I knew in the cast was the caustic Asian stand-up comedian Ronny Chieng, mainly because of his comedy shows on Netflix. The centerpiece highlight of the whole film was how they created the illusion of making 13-year old New Zealand dancer and actress Amie Donald into M3gan. Jenna Davis provides M3gan's calm yet chilling voice. Director Gerard Johnstone's camera work and editing choices made this quite entertaining.

Dolls have a subgenre of its own among horror films. The most famous ones are those who have movie series of their own, like Chucky of the "Child's Play" films and Annabelle of the "Conjuring" films. Being imbued with AI, M3gan has her own unique characteristics which distinguish her from these other deadly dolls. For me, the tender scene of M3gan comforting Cady by singing "Titanium" is the one which I will remember this movie by. 7/10.