Written by Margaret Rasberry January 5th, 2022
Imagine the audiences’ collective surprise when the Universal logo faded, a toy commercial was projected on the screen, advertising an almost unholy amalgamation of a Furby, a troll doll, and a Baby Alive doll that had all those features, including defecation, that your child controlled on an app so that parents would not have to entertain or play with their offspring. The commercial copies all of the essential aesthetics of toys commercials, from the bright colors, children smiling adorably at the camera and the toy, and quick cuts conveying childhood excitement, but the toy itself is jarring to watch that the audience feels unnerved by the childs’ unbridled excitement of that adorable monstrosity. This is the opening scene of the new Blumhouse picture M3GAN, directed by Gerard Johnston, and co-written by Malignant screenwriter Akela Cooper and James Wan, that is a remarkable summation of the film itself.
The film centers on the family of Gemma (Alison Wiliams), a roboticist working at the toy company Funki that makes toys powered by robotic AI technology, who finds herself the sole guardian of her recently orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw). Gemma is not a maternal figure the film quickly establishes as Gemma forbids her niece from playing with her action figure collectables still in the box, and has despondency issues with comforting or providing adequate parental boundaries for her recently orphaned niece. The company she works for, Funki, is established as being ironically run by parentless busy bodies, more concerned with profits and creating addiction in children through the apps the toys have to function on, than in actually engaging with children themselves on their level.
Gemma’s CEO David (Ronny Chieng), is more concerned with profit margins and having toys being less expensive to manufacture than Teslas, finding the replacement of parental human connections with technology part and parcel of working in a toy corporation. One night when Cady has a discussion with Gemma about her work, Gemma becomes inspired by her previous robotics work to finish her original prototype M3GAN (Model 3 Generative Android) to become a playmate for Cady, while also providing her company the greatest technological toy on the market, powered by AI technology with a constantly updating server powered by the cloud.M3GAN becomes Cady’s playmate, singing SIA’s song Titanium in one hilarious jarring scene to calm her down, teaching her to flush the toilet, using a coaster and more, essentially replacing Gemma as Cady’s true guardian. As we have all seen with AI films, things go awry as M3GAN takes her instruction to protect Cady from all physical and emotional harm to a malignant degree.
M3GAN is not a grandiose statement against all AI or a luddite postulation as the film is a cheesy and fairly campy horror romp that follows the same beats as many other Blumhouse films, with jump scares and humor to balance out the bathos, but it does convey a core message that has become exceedingly relevant to our present culture of relying on technology such as addicting apps on iphones and ipods to entertain our children so much that they free the parent from their duties, which the film posits as a degradation of emotional connections adults and children need to function to our technology addicted world. Already a pertinent issue facing our children, but becomes more urgent when a traumatized child gains an addiction to an autonomous being made of wires and metal, instead of a flesh and blood relative.
A poignantly and surprisingly emotional scene the film presents is Cady begging for M3GAN, throwing chairs already, yelling and screaming for M3GAN. This scene is presented like a detox scene, where the addict is unable to function without their addiction, and as Gemma realizes, “M3GAN is not a solution, but a distraction”. M3GAN may not have set out to posit this message of addiction and technological coping to mitigate trauma, but the message is a vital and necessary one nonetheless.
The film’s humor falls flat at times and some may find M3GAN’s voice (Jenna Davis) grating at times, while others may feel restless waiting for M3GAN to enact her warped version of what protecting Cady entails as the plot can be languidly paced at times, but M3GAN rises above its campy veneer to deliver an assured and satisfying film that may endure in pop culture for a long while.
Grade: B-
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