Review: M3GAN

When young Cady's parents are killed in a headon collision (which she witnesses) her aunt Gemma takes care of her and learns that she's better at being a visiting aunt from the toy factory than a substitute parent. The irony that she designs companion style toys for children escapes her until Cady shows an interest in an old robot project of Gemma's and says, after a demonstration, that if she had a toy like that she would never want another one. Enter the resurrection of M3GAN, a child size android with an AI learning system. Cady loves M3GAN at first encounter and the pair become a tight unit of mutual development, letting Gemma off the hook. Nothing to see here.

Of course, what you think will go wrong does and the plot is not twisty because of this. As Cady and M3GAN wall themselves off from the rest of the troubling world of life and other kids it becomes increasingly clear that the closed system will generate a disaster of machine ethics on one hand and heart rending dependency on the other. Nevertheless, the film does have a few turns in store that extend this old dependable.

Stories of robots going wrong or humans learning how bad they are through interaction with automatons go back before the movies (E.T.A. Hoffmann, anyone?), the trope is used to expose ethical dilemmas, human intolerance to itself, responsibility and an ocean of other possibilities that approach the notion that things too much like ourselves will eventually frighten us. There are a fair few good Twilight Zone episodes about his, see also Outer Limits, and the world of '60s speculative fiction is a garden of them. Ridley Scott's double take in the Alien and Blade Runner films remain touchstones. Alex Garland's Ex Machina goes into the eerie territory of the Turing test used to determine human and robotic communication.  Spielberg's baton-pass from Kubrick in A.I. retold Pinocchio. All of them, however, must explore the junction of familiarity and function and where the breaking point lies.

We get early clues to the way M3GAN will be going from the opening commercial for the fuzzy talking dolls to her mother imposing screen time restrictions on Cady and Gemma forbidding Cady to play with the still-packaged vintage toys in her home. If this theme of the need for real love and care were not so present we would just have another robot gone wrong tale. The meeting point happens during a corporate demonstration which begins as a flop as Cady doesn't feel like it. The moment is rescued by M3GAN's self-researched solution which feels human but is dependent on her machinery to work. It's that extra pairing that seals the danger ahead which is masked by the sheer success of the moment. So, there's a lot of corporate thinking baggage in the soup along with manipulation both human and machine as well as good old human failure.

Once the Stephen King beat the bully moment has passed we expect and get improvements on it which lead to the inevitable showdowns we also expect. But this is not to call M3GAN a flop of an idea or that it doesn't do more than mechanically play its sub-genre. As a Blumhouse film this could have gone either way and have ended either schmaltzy or cheesy but we get just enough performance and writing to clear both hurdles of cliche while getting a simultaneous feast of it. Yes, there is even a hint at a sequel but it's a good one.

Alison Williams convinces us that she finds the tasks of parenting repugnant and her inspiration for the way out of them problem-solving rather than wise. Violet McGraw has a lot harder a task as Cady whose smothered grief is credibly masked by the delights of her new companion and her way out of that makes her much more of a kid again. 

But it's Amie Donald, the human under the M3GAN CGI and animatronics, who brings her competitive gymnastic training to the stunts, action and the pursuit of the uncanny valley effect that renders M3GAN by turns endearingly strange to quietly terrifying. Her grotesque flailing dance (YouTube it, it's everywhere) was Donald's own idea and her all-fours running a matter of physical practice. The eleven year old's medal-winning skill brings weight and an unpredictability to the android that wouldn't have been possible with either puppetry or CGI. The decision to keep M3GAN free of smiles and persistently doll like against this animalistic and mechanical monsterism and warm it all up with human performance is why the figure works and by extension the whole movie.

That said, the film does feel longer than it should be, treading water at plot points rather than packing them into a more solid momentum. Then again, at a hair under an hour and three quarters, that's not much to complain about. While I find the need for an acronymed robot (Model 3 Generative Android) more nostalgic than helpful (they might have learned from Get Smart's Hymie, also pleasantly retro) it works if they go with a franchise. At the end of a long ancestry of rogue robot stories, M3GAN does its job and even adds a little of its own commentary on top. Can't ask much more.