In the spirit of classic science fiction such as Jurassic Park and Westworld, the suspenseful melodrama M3GAN is a cautionary tale about moving too quickly to embrace scientific progress without being able to control its inevitable permutations.  Michael Crichton would have loved this movie because it borrows the same basic concept he used, and it does so very well.  And if anybody tells you that Artificial Intelligence poses no risks to humanity, just point them in the direction of this story.

Gerald Johnstone’s film uses AI to bring a humanoid doll to life.  Robotics engineer Gemma (Allison Williams) is convinced that her big, expensive project can succeed, but it only does so when M3GAN (Amie Donald) pairs with Gemma’s niece Cady (Violet McGraw), whose parents have recently perished.  The two bond, so much so that Gemma’s boss (Ronny Chieng) pushes the project forward, hoping to go public and cash in before anyone else can steal or copy the mechanism.  But M3GAN is a quick learner, and the more she learns of humanity the larger a threat to it she becomes.

While the tale is somewhat familiar, either through Crichton’s stories and the like or the various “Chucky” or “Puppet Master” series where dolls magically (or demonically) come to life, this story packs a real wallop when the delightfully stiff robot demonstrates more human compassion and understanding than the people that surround her.  And while the second half devolves a bit into more familiar horror tropes and situations, everything still revolves around character, and thus never loses its believability or effectiveness.  It is frightening on a personal level yet also harrowing in a much larger sense, reflected subtly in the film’s final shot.

Special credit must be given to Amie Donald, the 10-year-old dancer/actress who is M3GAN most of the time onscreen.  What a performance!  This story is marketed as horror, and understandably so, but it more essentially qualifies as the cautionary tale type of science fiction to which I have already alluded, a convention that goes back almost a century in American cinema.  It is also a movie that might rate even higher ratings in future viewings.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  2 January 2025.