M3GAN

You have a niece who's lost her parents comes to stay, this distraction starts to disrupt your work day, so you revisit a work project, you'd been trying to keep secret, you call it M3gan, it's all just child's play. It's not long before machine and niece connect, takes the role of parenting without neglect, keeps a watch on its young guard, any threat, it will discard, with a mission to defend, secure, protect. Before too long you have concerns as the creator, your brainchild has become, a calculator, a consciousness that learns, considers all the twists and turns, perhaps it's time to pull the plug, and terminate her.

A variation on several themes you've encountered many times before but entertaining nonetheless and thought provoking as well.

Fine, it's a moderately entertaining deadly doll movie but... seriously, it's been a bit overpraised. This is paint by numbers storytelling. A beat by beat remake of every "deadly friend" tale. Also, while I generally find her appealing, Allison Williams looks like she's about to crack up half the time. It's also a little soft on the true horror/scares front. Id actually love to see an R rated sequel that goes as hard as "Child's Play" or "Annabelle." Anyway, it makes me sad to think that there are strong movies out right now ("Babylon," "The Whale") that audiences are ignoring in favor of this January junk.

Young Cady is given M3GAN, an AI doll, that's very protective.

First off, I felt very old in the cinema, aged 40, where most of the viewers seemed to be teenagers, and I think they're perhaps the target audience.

Definitely not without appeal, it's an interesting, if unoriginal plot, Child's play vibes, and there are a few jumps here and there. M3GAN does have some intriguing moments, but sadly never flips into horror mode, which I felt the trailers pointed to.

The major plus, the visuals, it looks very good indeed, it's nicely shot and well produced, M3GAN's realisation is great, the film peaks towards the end, and the scenes in the forest in particular look very good, and offer the film's most unsettling moments.

On the debit side, it's hard to believe in the actions of some of the characters, a few times, I sat there wanting to shout out 'REALLY,' is that actually what they're going to do, but worse, the film was a little too slow in parts.

I expected it to be somewhat gruesome, it really wasn't, when I came home from the cinema, I read that it had been cut to fit with a younger audience, I can see that.

6/10.

It seems especially in the horror genre nearly everything lately is regurgitated and advertised as something new. Blumhouse does this more than anyone lately and yet still manages to rake in profits from mostly generation z unfamiliar with the old classic horror films that came long before. The glaring similarities and material borrowing comes from basically every Chucky film, though it's presented in a way that's more appetizing to the newer tik tok gen z crowd. Not saying the film isn't still executed solidly or isn't effective. It just feels like such an obvious rewrapping of an old classic.

The film itself has a solid enough story and decently intriguing visuals to keep it interesting. The acting is subpar at times but the shock value makes up for it. The true issues lay in the blatant lack of originality toward the overall product. Slight futuristic advancements in plot points and cgi can only differentiate from the old so much when something feels so familiar.

Most movies seem to either be underwhelming or just fine. Once in a great while, they over-deliver and exceed your expectations. But possibly the rarest result is when you are excited to see a movie and you get exactly what you'd hoped for. For me, M3GAN was a blast of entertainment, a perfect concoction of a well-paced story that is just there for you to have fun with. Okay, if I'm honest, it did have some moments that elevated my enjoyment even a little more than I'd hoped--they went to a few places I could not have expected. That doesn't mean that the story wasn't predictable; it was pretty clear where this was going the whole time. But it was still fun and memorable, and I expect that if I ever happen to walk into a room where someone has this movie on, I will sit and watch with them to the end. I enjoyed it.