M3GAN 2.0

dir: Gerald Johnstone

2025

M3GAN 2.0 is a terrible title. I mean, M3GAN was a terrible title too, since where does it leave them to go in a third instalment? Nowhere! You can’t “do” M3GAN again even if it would make visual sense, or M3GAN 3.0 even if it makes this distorted type of number plate mental “sense” where people use 4s instead of As or 3s instead of Es.

Every time I have to look at it I sarcastically mumble to myself “huh, Mah-three-gan too” like I’m one of the idiots from Beavis and Butthead. Which possibly accounts for some of my troubles on public transport recently.

It’s painful. Like watching someone have to come up with a password that has one uppercase letter and a number and a non-alphanumeric symbol in order to proceed, and The System keeps rejecting it.

It makes me shudder just seeing it. Anyway, after the surprise super success of the first film, which was about a foster mother farming out her parental responsibilities to a complicated “mobile” device, and having the whole world punished for it, they made this one. I don’t think the title of the 3rd one is going to be much of an issue, since this sequel tanked so hard.

The first one made hundreds of millions. This one despite following the Terminator 2: Judgement Day template, made tens of millions of dollars. Flicks that make tens of millions don’t get sequels these days.

It’s kind of unfair that this failed box-office wise, because I thoroughly enjoyed this one. I’m not saying it’s a great flick. I’m not even saying it’s a good flick. I’m just saying that, despite expectations, despite the lazy descriptor of making this seem like a different very successful flick from an age ago, this flick stands on its own two feet, and the issues / hassles around having a ‘life-like’ surly robot as a character that can either help people or murder them as circumstances dictate is still a lot of fun.

I’m not going to call ‘her’ M3GAN. It hurts my soul. The robot that was overly protective in the first flick and occasionally murdered people in the first one until ‘she’ was stopped was always going to come back. Of course there was a backup of her program somewhere. She keeps taunting Gemma (Allison Williams), who’s become something of an anti-technologist thought leader / influencer, even though she has no body. Gemma, given the experiences of the first film, is very much against AIs being in everything and everywhere. I mean, she did invent them, so…

To make up for the loss of dearly departed bug eyed salamander Silicon Valley techbro Ronny Chieng from the first one, they somehow make the great Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Concords fame an even more odious techbro / antagonist (but then you feel “bad” for him, because he’s in a wheelchair). But he’s not the “real” villain, oh no.

The interesting thing about this flick is that, like the first one, who the actual main character really is, is in no way clear to the audience until it’s way too late. If Gemma was the main character first time around, and Cady (Violet McGraw) was the niece / adoptive daughter she horribly neglected because she wasn’t ready to and didn’t want to be a parent, then evil robot M3GAN was the villain. But the robot was just doing what it was programmed to do: protect Cady. Maybe its actions were the fault of her creator, or the rapacious and greedy tech bro who had a complete disregard for what the creation he funded would do to people.

That’s not entirely how the flick worked out, but the lines are even blurrier this time around. The lazy review line that, like Arnie does in T2, M3GAN goes from enemy to protector ignores the fact that she was doing her best to protect Cady in the first one anyway. Kind of like a selective Terminator. Plus the protection she overs, the affection she might have for Cady is not really convincing. M3GAN looks out for Number One, being M3GAN.

However, even when you’re the hot young Murderbot who was destroyed by her creator, there’s always something or someone coming along to replace you: AMELIA! And she looks vaguely human, as in she’s played by a human with a mostly human face (Ivanna Sakhno), but she’s clearly a step up from M3GAN, because she can pass for human, and has raised the Murderbot stakes much higher, by murdering someone the US Military Industrial Complex didn’t want her to murder.

So… okay, lazy Screenwriting 101: who do you get to murder New Improved Murderbot before she murders someone we allegedly care about? Well, of course you have to bring back the original, the OG Murderbot to get it done.

In stark contrast to the original flick, which sort of argued that neglecting your kids and palming off your parental responsibilities to technology and distraction devices is bad and you should feel bad because people will die, painfully, this one starts arguing tech = bad but then follows the enlightened path of selfish techbros = evil, some tech = good, upgrade tech = bad, all the way back to “you fools, she was always trying to kill us from the start”.

No-one wants to see a kid die in anything, but safely I could say everyone else could have died in this and I wouldn’t have minded, though, unlike the first flick, this is not a horror flick at all about a demonic doll brought to life by black magic / the internets at all. This is a comedic action flick, with medium comedy (only M3GAN gets funny lines 99% of the time) and medium action, but I guess I must have been in a medium mood that night when I watched it.

I liked the fact that M3GAN is a sassy robotic sociopath looking out for herself to the detriment of the rest of humanity. The Tiktok dances and the weird clothing meant to appeal to perverts doesn’t do anything for me, but when she’s making fun of Gemma’s hypocrisy / split ends etc, I was having a ball. Her command, when she’s finally getting a new body built for her, to “Make Me Taller!” is something all short-arsed pretty little hate machines can really, really relate to.

There’s really zero problem in jumping genres from my perspective; Keeping it as straight horror couldn’t have worked beyond just replicating the original, and the original wasn’t that original to justify it. Admitting that M3GAN is the only character we probably care about was more honest, more freeing. Have her and Cady go to Vegas or Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break, or Silicon Valley for Revenge in the next one, where she unapologetically kills a whole bunch of people who think they can destroy humanity themselves with no comeuppance, only to learn the error of their ways (for brief seconds before their heads are torn off), and I assure you the great unwashed masses will return in droves.

Or don’t, whatever. Bring on fifteen sequels, I'll watch ‘em all! I can’t guarantee I’ll be sober, though.

7 times okay is enough some days out of 10

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“Alright meatsacks, let's get to work.” – it’s what I say to my staff every morning - M3GAN 2.0