Weaponised Uncanny Valley and The Dangers of raising an iPad children
It has been a long time since I watched a movie with expectations, and an even longer time since those expectations were matched in the way that they were. But at the same time, this movie was nothing like what I was expecting, and almost exclusively in the best ways.
Every trailer, or even just a basic description, would make it seem like we were getting a new Chucky, just updated for modern times. Instead we saw a thoughtful look at modern parenting and overreliance on technology. In fact, this movie seemed more in line with Ex Machina than a horror.
The main character, Cady, is your classic iPad baby. Sure she's not exactly a toddler, but she's still young enough for the concept to stick, and old enough to have a competent character on script. She loses her family, gets sent to live with an aunty, and that's when the physical tablet gets replaced with a robot.
This film comes close to weaponizing and nailing that feeling of uncanny valley, that place where robotics come close to lifelike and we suddenly feel an absolute dip in how pleasant it looks. This is a film where one of the characters is basically the embodiment of uncanny valley, giving a creepy feeling to it that requires no jump scars, no clever music or visual work, it's accomplished all with the physical look of the title character. She exists within that space of being so close to human, but far enough that it's creepy, and this works wonders for the film, seeing as adults who have more experience likely see her more as a robot, whereas Cady, a child without the same life experience, has a far more positive view of her, and lacks that sense of unease that resonates so well with this film. I could probably make an allegory here to how some research is saying masks messed with kids facial recognition during the lockdowns, but that might be stretching a bit.
When it comes to the quality of the film, I have very little to say outside of that. I'm glad they didn't go for full realistic on Megan, since it would have destroyed their ability to utilise the uncanny valley effect, but otherwise it's what you'd expect from modern movies. It's clean, crisp, well lit even in the dark so that audiences can see, and the music was good, although nothing particularly memorable. As for the story, that's where M3GAN starts to take off.
The thing about Megan is that she is used, initially, in all the same ways many people use tablets of smart phones with their kids; give it to them to shut them up. It's pretty clear that Gemma doesn't really want to be spending time with her niece. She'd rather be a girl boss climbing the corporate ladder, and that's effectively what she does. Her boss doesn't approve of her project, tells her what to do, and she has that cliché attitude of thinking she'll show him up. This is where M3GAN starts to distinguish itself from the sewer of crap coming out of Hollywood nowadays.
Gemma isn't seen as some icon for doing what she's doing. She's abandoned family responsibility to pursue her career, and while it's fine to pursue a career, isn't the whole point of getting a good job, especially when you have a family to look out for, to provide for them? Yet she basically abandons Cady wholesale to pursue her career for career's sake, and that's when Megan takes over. It's all innocent, no one having bad intentions, but this is the set up. A woman who wants to be at work instead of with her kid, a kid raised by an algorithm that adapts and moulds itself to you, and the slow breakdown that occurs within.
See, the horror aspects of this film have three things in common; they are almost all shown in the trailer, they are almost all in the final act, and they are almost exclusively the worst parts of the film. M3GAN is at its best when it's a speculative fiction about the dangers of modern parenting styles, not when its trying to scare you. There's a shot in the trailer where Megan is basically dancing with a sword, and it's possibly the highlight of a silly moment in a good film. It's almost as if you had a director who wanted to make a high quality spec fic, and a studio who came in from above and made changes to make it more 'commercially viable'. The thing is, I know this film had two writers, one of which has a history focused on spec fic, and the other focused on over the top horror, and it really shows. The way it shows a child attaching more to a machine than a parental figure because said parental figure is never around is both haunting, yet completely understandable. It all makes sense in a way that no viewer with half a brain is going to complain lacks logic. The reality is that if I were in that position, hell I'd probably grow attached to Megan, since at least she cares. Or her robot algorithm makes her present caring behaviour.
As the film progresses, Cady basically has no lover for her aunty, and why would she? The woman is never around, she shrieks all responsibility, from around the house learning to education to comfort, and offloads it to a doll, so of course the natural thing happens. It's all so logical, in a way that is predictable in the same way a train wreck in slow motion is; yeah I know what's going to happen, but I can't take my eyes away, and the way the carriages come off the track holds a horror to it in a way jump scares cannot.
And this is where the movie falls down. The final act rolls in and suddenly the quality of a good speculative fiction is blown away to make room for a half-baked horror. It's strange, because I went into this movie expecting a garbage horror film, but the first hour gave me the most pleasant surprise of a simple and modern speculative fiction that is so close to home it ain't funny. I know I'm harping on about this fact, that the film is a spec fic, but that's because it's where the film belongs. Every good moment comes from this half of it, every bad moment comes from the horror side. And I know the two genres can go well together, but that is not what the final act of this movie is. It's all so haphazard, the studio wanting certain things to happen and so it makes them happen without concern for how it fits together. You get a fight scene that is split in two halves; the emotional negation, and the 'tick as many cliché horror tropes as we can' ending. There's a low scale fight that is filled with emotional tension, but it quickly gets replaced by something that honestly felt like it was trying to tick nostalgia boxes from Aliens. Man, talk about a film that blended the spec fic and horror aspects well.
Anyway, the way the film ends is a complete disappointment. If there was one time in this movie where there was a moment for horror, it was at that end, but instead they had to go safe. I'd hate to spoil it, but I really can't express how great the movie was, and how much of a let down the end was, without doing so.
{Spoiler segment}
In the final moment, the fight between main character Gemma and robot girl Megan gets interrupted when Cady walks in on them. Both characters care about Cady and want to protect her, and see killing the other as the only way to do so. We get this POV shot from Megan's eyes where she can see Cady's emotions, fifth of them trust. This is something that has been developed throughout the film and so we're familiar with it by this point. Megan talks, being sentimental with Cady, and slowly we see the trust level go up. Then Hollywood pulls its garbage and says that oh no, it's Gemma she trusts, and then Megan gets defeated. It's so frustrating and aggravating. The whole movie was setting up the fact that Gemma has not been there for Cady, and that there was nearly no attachment between them. There was no reason for Cady to make this choice. Yes, in a vacuum and as an adult it'd be obvious to choose the human, but that's not the result of the story. You can't spend an hour showing me this girl getting so close to a robot that she basically has a mental breakdown without it, and then she goes and kills it without any set up. The best she should have done was run away. If the movie was honest to its speculative fiction set up, it would have had Cady side with Megan to really hammer home how when you let the internet raise your kid, it's not your kid anymore. All the bonds and love you should have shared are lost, taken up by a grid of weirdos on the internet. But the film shies away from this, I assume because either the writer didn't have the guts, or the studio said it wasn't commercially viable enough.
The sad thing is M3GAN was close to being a sci fi for the ages, but instead it spends too much time insisting it's there for the horror crowd, and instead it'll likely be a decent rated horror that fails to have any long lasting success. The horror aspects of this film were forgettable, and they have no chance of lasting, while when it was being speculative, when it was warning about parents abandoning their children to spend all day at work, not for money mind you but to climb a corporate ladder because they want to with no end goal in mind, and more importantly when you abandon your children to iPad and TVs and smartphones in order to do so, the film was actually top notch. It's worth noting that Gemma is single, which is presented in a slick, albeit cheesy, bit of writing, so it's not like we're talking about a family structure where one parent works and the other raises.
The way I'd describe this film is to imagine if Ex Machina decided to change the final act to turn it into a basic horror. It would have detreated the film, and that's exactly what M3GAN did.
Quality rating: 7/10
Enjoyment rating: 7/10
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