Written by: Akela Cooper
Starring: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chieng, Jenna Davis, Amie Donald
Rating: [3.5/5]
With the rise of artificial intelligence expanding beyond professional use, the obvious next route presents itself in the consumer market. The inevitability of these softwares building integration with devices and as seen in M3GAN, a doll meant to become a best friend. Something eerily creepy, which this film has bundles of fun in exploring and exploiting for some genuinely camp-filled fun.
Under pressure to continue to pump out popular toys for sale, roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) spends a significant amount of time and capital in developing a robotic doll powered by artificial intelligence. While initially launching as a miraculous new toy that will make the manufacturer tons of money, some issues begin to surface.
Science fiction stories have warned about what could happen should we continue to make artificial intelligence a more integral factor in our lives. Going beyond use to create efficiencies but releasing it to the masses where we don’t have a real way to effectively put safeguards for the way it can spread. Well, you can add this feature to the list of movies trying to give this warning to no avail but at least it creates quite an entertaining story with an instantly iconic new horror icon born before our eyes.
There’s something about the physical configuration of this doll that does not quite seem right. A tactic done on purpose creating this continual sense of unease in watching it operate even if it initially presents this very welcoming and loving toy. It has the appearance of a young girl but definitively robotic which always leaves the experience of looking at this doll its own horror experience. Then you have the creative decisions made in how this doll goes haywire and the manner it decides to go about it makes for something frightening but also hilarious.
While this doll obviously serves a good purpose by existing as a toy for kids, the levels in which it gets utilized in this feature reach some disturbing levels toeing a very fine line of what can be deemed appropriate. This appears when the M3GAN doll gets utilized to talk to a young girl about some repressed trauma she’s been afraid to speak about. While initially sweet, it does raise a few eyebrows as to why delving into these conversations with an artificially intelligent doll should be a practice engaged in. This turns these dolls from mere toys that can entertain into it consuming a hefty amount of personal information from their users where you can only imagine those collecting do not have the best of inventions in using what they learn from the doll. The film does not necessarily dive deep into this idea but it certainly provides plenty to think about especially when something like this doll inevitably does hit the shelves and consumers can go out and get one of their own.
This new trend of scripts written by Akela Cooper and produced by James Wan of campy but effective horror has really begun to shine in delivering something unique out there as compared to the current horror landscape. Going back to Malignant two years ago, this new fun type of horror sits between the very self-serious ones and also the “elevated” horror using more of a slow burn and psychological approach to its storytelling. Cooper’s scripts have a sharpness to them while also having so much fun in the process and it shows in the quality product getting released.
Operating as a PG-13 movie, it does disappoint thinking about the brutal kills we could have seen throughout this film, especially with a doll with the potential to be much more vicious. With the PG-13 rating, you do get some boundary-pushing stuff that definitely surprised me but it does make me wonder what we could have received if this film went all-in with an R rating and let this doll wreak complete havoc on the people of this story.
Very much having its fun while delving into a very modern and scarily imminent concept, M3GAN comes in as a fresh new wave of horror begins to take hold. Akela Cooper and James Wan have helped usher this in and have delivered some tremendously entertaining movies, including this one allowing for some pensive thought to take place while also delivering all of the horror thrills one could want from a killer doll story.
Films with Josh 
