M3GAN
Year: 2023
Rating: PG-13
Length: 102 minutes / 1.70 hours
I’m not usually one to watch “horror” films, so I was going to pass on M3GAN (2023) until a friend requested to see it together. By genre standards, this PG-13 cross between Child’s Play (1988) and The Terminator (1984) was light on blood and gore that could have bumped it up to an R rating if they showed more of it. Perhaps this was intentional to emphasize the horrors of Artificial Intelligence (AI) overall. Because we all know unchecked machine learning algorithms will always lean toward some kind of murder.
I think if you go into this movie understanding that it’ll be goofy, then you can munch on your popcorn as it hits all the standard tropes. It’s not quite funny enough to be part comedy, but there are some chuckle-worthy scenes sprinkled throughout. From a sci-fi perspective, though, any robotics or AI rules that you’d usually see in these scenarios were mysteriously absent. No offhand reference to Asimov’s Laws, no cheeky nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That we’ve had cautionary tales about robots and AI since the 1950s just shows that this concept of villainous AI/robots isn’t that new.
And maybe that’s my main qualm with this film: AI being used as a buzzword to rehash old concepts. With advances in ChatGPT, deep fakes, and Boston Dynamics robots, we’re seeing the rapid advancement of these traditional sci-fi concepts in real time. M3GAN has merely taken these trendy topics and put them in a formulaic plot. Does it also poke fun at corporate tech practices that prioritize profits over safety? Sure, but it adds nothing to the current commentary of the current capitalist environment in which we live. In the end, I think M3GAN was trying to say something important, but ended up just being a fun popcorn flick.
A buzzword filled light horror movie that’s good for a few chuckles, I give M3GAN 3.0 stars out of 5.
