Opening Caveat – Making movies is hard. People put lots of time, love, energy and thought into them and despite that, they are very hard to make.
M3GAN (dir. New Zealand’s own Gerard Johnstone) is produced by James Wan who is involved with the Saw franchise and by Blumhouse productions which have been responsible for many great horror films recently. Also, it was made by a lot of Kiwis and filmed partly in Auckland so I was excited to root for it.
It follows the story of Gemma (Allison Williams), a brilliant roboticist, she is sick of working on a child’s toy and she has dreams of making a more complex and rewarding robot that can be so much more for the kids.
In the middle of covertly working on the project she calls M3GAN, Model 3 Generative Android, her boss David (Ronny Chieng) finds out and tries to shut down the project. Meanwhile, her sister and husband have a car accident and she is left with custody of her niece Cady (Violet McGraw).
She uses Cady as a guinea pig for how M3GAN can work and operate. M3GAN creates a bond with her user and then her directive from then on is to make her user safe. The risk pays off and David is shocked by what M3GAN can do. The project is fast-tracked to the CEO and the Board.
This is where things start to go sideways. Cady, usurpingly, is not dealing with the loss of her parents. Gemma is a workaholic that is abdicating the responsibility of parenting Cady to M3GAN. M3GAN then starts making choices to protect Cady from everyone and everything that might cause her harm.
The film has got lots of praise for its meme-ness. GIFable sections with the juxtaposition of a small childlike android doll in high fashion. The dance section, which makes no sense in the film since there is no music in the film world so she is just dancing to nothing to the characters in the movie. The audience can hear the soundtrack so she is dancing to the beat for us.
The film succeeded in generating marketing buzz. As Andy Warhol said, the art of the 20th century was marketing so they nailed that. From a film point of view, I was left wanting. Thematically they touched on childhood trauma, and technology being used as a replacement for parenting, maybe I am reading into this but the damaging effects of technology on young girls as self-harming has gone up an alarming amount since social media,
The film didn’t really investigate any of these themes. It felt very surface-level. No great learnings took place over the course of the film for the characters to overcome the foe. There was a shallow sense of catharsis. At the cinema, the audience seemed to enjoy it but there weren’t many people gasping from fright. Again, films are hard. Lots of voices pulling things in different directions. The film had to have reshoots to get a PG rating, maybe a directors cut will change the film and make it more horrific and scary.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe