M3GAN Review: Lazy and Lackluster AI Horror!

Blumhouse has taken over the horror game in recent years due to its wide selection of horror titles like Get Out, Sinister, Insidious, and Unfriended: Dark Web to name a couple. Like every studio, Blumhouse does have its number of flops. However, after seeing the trailer for M3GAN it was either going to be a film just as the trailer was portraying it or one with a number of surprises within. After experiencing this film, in a packed theater too, I am disappointed to say that it offers up exactly what I expected, an AI horror film about the fear of technology becoming too powerful to control, a theme that I personally feel is uninteresting and rarely executed with surprises.

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The major issue with M3GAN was its script. It follows Gemma (Allison Williams) who becomes the legal guardian of her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) after her parent’s death. With the intention to help her cope with it, Gemma builds the most advanced AI companion for Cady named Megan. The film was very formulaic, conventional, and minimally surprising, all elements that horror isn’t benefiting from today. Now, this is not always a bad thing per say but in M3gan’s case it seemed like Johnstone wanted to do something fresh for modern audiences but it just came off as extremely lazy as it decides to focus on weaker elements of the film while putting stronger elements on the backburner, such as parenting in the face of technology.

M3GAN comes off as being made solely for the purpose of becoming an internet symbol. It was hard to see any real passion behind this project when you have Megan doing a TikTok style dance for five seconds out of nowhere before picking up a weapon. Things like this are so off putting as a viewer knowing very well why this was added, to become a popular GIF or meme online afterwards. For a robot that is seemingly so intelligent and lifelike, her programming gives her zero humanistic characteristics regarding feelings or emotions, other than anger. The evil AI trope is getting very boring, and it has just been picking up in recent years. As a result I expected this movie to do something meaningful with it, which it was not able to do.

M3GAN does touch on trauma and parenting in the age of technology, but it never goes further with this point, being one of the only intriguing elements of the script. Instead it seems it was decided at the beginning this film was going to be an Orphan ripoff and replace Ester with M3gan, all the way down to her old fashioned fashion sense. We get some scenes that display Gemma’s inability to be a motherly figure to her niece Cady because she never chose to be one. As a result, the film begins to show how technology is able to take the place of parental care to give parents “a break.” I appreciated this sentiment in the film but again it was widely overshadowed by M3gan and her antics to expand on this point.

M3GAN seems to be getting praise from critics and audiences. Unfortunately, it did nothing for me and I am hoping Blumhouse can amp up its game this year, especially after how great The Black Phone was last year. This is a film I would skip if the trailer didn’t do it for you because there is nothing new here that you can not view in the two minute preview.

‘M3GAN’ Rating – 2/5

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