“M3GAN 2.0” Really is That Girl
Three years ago, Blumhouse had an accidental hit on their hands with M3GAN. It was released in January, the month horror movies are usually sent to die, but ended up making $181 million against a $12 million budget. On those numbers alone, a sequel was inevitable. M3GAN 2.0 is an upgrade in all senses of the word.
courtesy of Universal Pictures
After the events of M3GAN, Cady (Violet McGraw) is still struggling with the pain she endured when a murderous robot tried to kill everyone around her. That can be a lot for a kid to process, and her aunt/primary caretaker, Gemma (Allison Williams), is not helping. She has become one of the most vocal advocates for Artificial Intelligence regulation, while continuing to work on technological advances she believes will better humanity rather than hurt it. As with all technology, it’s not so easy to leave the past in the past. The United States military got their hands on the M3GAN blueprints and decided to create AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), a super-soldier who has gone rogue during her first mission. Gemma realizes that M3GAN (voiced by Jenna Davis, physically portrayed by Amie Donald) never truly went away, and it’s time to boot her back up to fight back against AMELIA.
If you didn’t read this site’s review of M3GAN three years ago, the gist was that it was a fun concept, but they were missing the campiness to really make things soar. There’s a dark seriousness to M3GAN that was tonally at odds with the inherent weirdness that is M3GAN the character. M3GAN 2.0 remedies that tonal inequity by morphing into more of a straight comedy with science-fiction threaded throughout. It’s a film that’s not built to scare the viewer. In fact, it’s oddly one of the most hopeful portrayals of Artificial Intelligence on the big screen in a long while. M3GAN 2.0 leans into the goofiness that worked so well in the first film and banks on it. For the most part, it really works. M3GAN’s snarkiness, especially when contained to an amorphous blob of a body until Gemma trusts her, is what makes her shine as the begrudging hero she grows into. For all of our fears about AI growing into a monster that wants to destroy us, M3GAN 2.0 asks what would happen if we treated these robots with respect? Wouldn’t they learn to do the same thing in return?
courtesy of Universal Pictures
The one glaring, impossible-to-overlook problem of M3GAN 2.0 is that it’s too long. There’s no need for this film to clock in at the two-hour mark. We need to return to the world of breezy 90- to 105-minute movies that are gloriously fun. M3GAN 2.0 almost takes us back to that world, but it takes its time getting to where it needs to go. There are movies that earn their longer runtimes, that need the time and space to build to a conclusion, but then there are movies that lose momentum the longer they go on. M3GAN 2.0 is one of those movies, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot to love here.
M3GAN 2.0 is an impressive sequel in the sense that it doesn’t rest on its laurels. It took a swing at being something sillier and more emotional than the original. Like it or not, M3GAN 2.0 is speaking directly to our reality. Parents are figuring out the line between ensuring that their kids are learning essential technology and also learning that there’s a life beyond screens. We’re also afraid of what Artificial Intelligence will do to our lives, relationships, and jobs. M3GAN 2.0 is hopeful about its robotic main character and the humans surrounding her. We’re better when we learn from our past mistakes. Whether that be murdering four people and a dog or being the one who invented said murderous robot. People, and AI, have the ability to change. It’s up to us to decide if that change is for better or worse.
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