M3GAN Is the Movie for the Moment

I'm back to reviewing movies, baby!

For as long as I can remember, movie theaters have been my Happy Place. They’ve been my escape. They’ve been my home away from home, where I could forget the cold grey misery of everyday life and lose myself in a world of fantasy and imagination. Also, boobs. Hey, I was a horny kid. I make no apologies for that. 

Movies saved my life when I was a suicidally depressed misfit boy utterly terrified of the world and its bewildering inhabitants but in love with Hollywood make-believe. 

Then I grew up, after a fashion, and movies became my job as well as my overriding passion when I started reviewing movies for The A.V. Club back in 1997 while I was still in college. For close to two decades I made my living as a professional film critic for The A.V. Club and then The Dissolve. Movie theaters became my workplace. 

Then I lost my job as a professional film critic and salaried full-time pop culture writer at The Dissolve back in 2015 and my relationship with movie theaters changed. 

I still loved to go the movies but the loss of that job and that beautiful, beautiful dream hit me hard. I couldn’t help but associate movie theaters with the dream job I was laid off from and film criticism, my former profession. 

Now you could argue that since I never stopped writing professionally about movies as a full-time job I consequently never stopped being a film critic. There’s certainly an element of truth to that but over the course of my twenty-five years in the business I have come to have a fairly specific conception of what being a film critic entails. 

For starters, it involves seeing and writing about most of the big new movies in a timely fashion. I haven’t done that in at least seven years. It also entails making top ten lists and belonging to critic groups and being part of a tight-knit community of professional obsessives and cinephiles. 

That has not been my life for a very long time. I miss it sometimes, particularly the part that involves movie studios sending me random promotional crap, going to Sundance every year and getting to see the big new movies before anyone else. 

That part was pretty great! I have bittersweet feelings about my former profession but that part was pretty freaking sweet. 

When Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place launched in 2017 new movie reviews were part of the grand design in the form of the column Scalding Hot Takes but when my podcast Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast changed to Travolta/Cage I phased out new movie reviews for reasons I don’t entirely remember. 

Then came COVID. Movie theaters became a blessed memory, a ghost, a sacred ritual just out of our reach during the awful height of the pandemic. 

I’ve missed the communal joy of the movie theater. So I decided to make a purposeful return to reviewing new movies a big part of Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. 

Last night after my boys were asleep I attended a 10:00 screening of M3GAN, the hot new evil doll movie that has the internet going nuts. M3GAN is a movie for the moment, a meme-friendly exploration of our complicated relationship with technology that makes our lives easier and more pleasurable but also might murder us in colorful ways.  

We are currently engrossed in an intense, only mildly annoying culture-wide conversation about what are known as Nepo Babies and whether or not being the progeny of the rich and famous is a sure-fire ticket to success or merely makes someone’s life infinitely easier in every conceivable way. 

M3GAN smartly and semi-sadistically casts preeminent Nepo Baby Alison Williams, the daughter of fib-prone superstar journalist Brian Williams, as roboticist Gemma. It’s a juicy role that very successfully asks audiences to dislike her. 

Williams’ real-life privilege can’t help but inform her boldly unsympathetic portrayal of a cold, unpleasant, demanding workaholic who has created an artificially intelligent doll that behaves in a tantalizingly, horrifyingly human fashion despite Gemma’s poignant lack of understanding about what it means to be human. 

M3GAN opens with a car accident that kills the parents of sad-eyed little girl Cady (Violet McGraw). Cady is sent to live with her aunt Gemma despite her complete lack of maternal warmth. 

Some people are never meant to have children or be parents. Gemma is one but circumstances have forced her to take on a parental role she is uniquely unqualified for. 

In semi-secrecy, Gemma creates M3GAN, a life-sized doll blessed and cursed with artificial intelligence that makes it at once something more and less than human. 

M3GAN’s breakout success is attributable in no small part to the brilliant design of the title character. She inhabits the nightmare no man’s land known as the Uncanny Valley. She’s not quite human in a way that’s terrifying but also oddly touching. 

M3GAN takes the otherworldly beauty of the Olsen Twins to a horrifying new dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. 

If Chucky is The Twilight Zone or Tales From the Crypt then M3GAN is unashamedly Black Mirror, an icy, stylish exercise in abstract social commentary and our complicated relationship with computers as well as a fiendishly effective exercise in meat and potatoes horror. 

The purpose of M3GAN is twofold. She’s designed to be the sensitive, understanding and involved caretaker Gemma doesn’t know how to be while also helping the traumatized little girl cope with the death of her parents. 

But she has another function as well. Once paired with a human being, M3GAN becomes a protector who will stop at nothing to keep her person from harm, up to and including mass murder. 

From the very beginning it’s clear that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with M3GAN. Someone clearly flipped the switch on her to “Evil” and everyone around her has to suffer as a result. 

M3GAN has cold, dead eyes that judge unsparingly. Her genetically engineered sweetness and sensitivity come off as maudlin, sentimental and calculating. As a curious upgrade M3GAN has the pipes and the sticky-sweet tunes of a second-rate American Idol contender, and launches into  song when the occasion presents itself. 

Because she’s paired with one person and one person only M3GAN’s focus is narrow and unrelenting. She exists to serve and protect Cady, and like others sworn to serve and protect that often veers into viciously abusing those they see as a threat. 

Cady quickly becomes addicted to M3GAN in a way that makes Gemma feel threatened and insecure. She created M3GAN to do the job of parenting a traumatized and depressed child for her then is mortified when M3GAN ends up doing the job too well. 

Ah, but M3GAN isn’t just a disturbingly proficient substitute parent, songstress and therapy doll; she’s also a consumer product. Gemma’s employers Funki, whose signature product is a Furby-like abomination with robotically engineered sass, want to mass produce M3GAN. 

Funki want to make the freakishly, scarily advanced robot friend available for anyone with ten thousand dollars to spare and terrible judgment. Gemma suspects that there is something murderously wrong with her new creation but also wants to hold onto her job in a real kill or be killed industry. 

M3GAN is an almost perversely straightforward proposition. It’s oddly devoid of twists and turns. It’s obvious from the very beginning that M3GAN will go haywire and begin killing people. That’s exactly what happens yet it proves deeply satisfying all the same. 

The doll with the increasingly homicidal line of patter first sets about enacting bloody vengeance on genuine threats to her master, including a neighbor’s vicious dog and the kind of bully who grows up to be a prolific serial killer. 

As M3GAN evolves and de-evolves at an alarming rate she becomes impossible to control and wracks up an impressive body count. 

Gemma tries to stop M3GAN but she’s acquired super-human powers that make her a formidable adversary. There’s a wonderful, instantly viral moment deep in the film’s third act when the killer doll stalks the cocky head of Funki, pausing briefly for a dance that’s hypnotic in its freaky awkwardness. A lesser movie would beat a crowd-pleasing sequence like that into the ground but M3GAN lets it pass quickly.

Child actress Amie Donald plays M3GAN as essentially a four foot tall female Terminator, a glowering, malevolent, unstoppable force that will not rest until it has achieved its objective. 

M3GAN suggests Chucky in its evil doll-based scares but also in its surprising sensitivity and emotional depth. Chucky and M3GAN are very much concerned with how children and adolescents process trauma and how it affects every aspect of their lives. 

Stylish, scary and darkly funny, M3GAN is everything I wanted it to be. 

I’m excited to be going to the theaters on a weekly basis again. Join me! This is going to be fun. 

That’s the Nathan Rabin promise! 

Next up: Da Plane! Da Plane!