Meghan film review
I have no idea how intentional it is, but M3gan is unbelievably funny. From “we made a friendly doll and dressed her exclusively like supervillains from James Bond movies” to “woman who spends all of her time online and using apps and computers solves her free time around children issues with an app and computer” to “we are selling artificial intelligence that cares more about your children than you and are selling it as a luxury premium device.” It’s all just this side of self aware enough that I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and read it as an extremely biting satire of modern commodification.
“Okay, who programed the murder robot with the creepy demon doll protocols?”
After learning this was directed by Housebound director Gerard Johnstone, I’ll go ahead and say it deserves the benefit of the doubt as a complex and multilayered film. I think on the surface level it’s meant to be enjoyed as a basic out of control robot scenario (with an ending that’s directly referencing Terminator), but you have the option to dig deeper and recognize it’s having a conversation about what it means to he human, to be social, and to experience pain.
The meaty subtext isn’t just a blandly superficial chastisement about having too much screen time, but more asking the audience to consider the way companies turn human connection into a commodity which can be sold and exploited for profit. It’s absurd that the most advanced artificial intelligence ever created would somehow happen as a children’s toy, but not entirely distant from the world we inhabit.
The adults of this world don’t have time for human connection or pain or personal lives – like anyone else right now, it feels like the time we take to ourselves to be human is in short supply. M3gan is just the next great app that looks at the lack of humanity available for humans, and wonders how to sell it back to us at a profit. There’s multiple scenes in the movie where compassion and humanity are specifically identified as M3gan’s most important marketable features.
And the thing is that it’s humanity with all the grief and consequences shaved off. M3gan can record grief and suffering, but she can’t experience it. Pain is something that needs to be protected against and while I don’t think the argument here is that suffering makes us human, I think the deep down point is we as humans do need ways to process when bad things happen to us. The young girl Cady while getting a great deal of positive connection a human could never give her, but also is not getting time to process her grief over her parent’s deaths, nor learning how to connect to other people.
That M3gan comes off as so positive and healthy is, I think, deliberate, because the film is not anti-tech, it’s anti-commercialism. The danger on display, the bug in the system, is that ultimately M3gan is a commodity, and pain doesn’t sell. A doll that can connect groups of people doesn’t sell, because then not everyone needs one.
M3gan features multiple scenes of somewhat over the top crass commercials for products touted as better than real for their lack of ability to die or cause any sort of emotional upset. They’re excessive but they exist for much the same reasons as similar scenes in RoboCop or Starship Troopers. They’re letting the audience know to look for something deeper, and I’d say it’s there.
M3gan’s not quite top of the line when it comes to films that give the viewer something to think about under a slick, watchable package (still gotta give that to Jordan Peele’s work), but nice to finally see James Wan’s obsession with murder dolls produce a worthwhile result.
willishalfmungu 
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