M3GAN

In retrospect, 2022 was both the realization of our hopes and fears for AI. With the introduction of generative art AIs such as DALL-E and the versatile chatbot, ChatGPT, the general public was able to appreciate the development of AI on a hands-on basis. Give it a prompt, and DALL-E will generate some strange, hilarious, or horrifying image. Give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will write or re-write a short draft of anything you ask. Just don't ask ChatGPT to write movie reviews. That's my job.

And there lies the rub. These new AIs are capable of generating creative output: visual art, creative writing, and soon even video. They are immensely fun to play with, but they're also unsettling, because they encroach on human's domain.

Well-meaning advocates for art generators such as DALL-E or Stable Diffusion will say that these are tools for artists, but in 2022, companies already used them to replace artists. The Atlantic used AI-generated images in the header images to their articles. Tor published Christopher Paolini's novel, Fractal Noise, with an AI-generated cover. Instead of hiring an artist to paint you a new portrait, you can use Lensa AI. The Lensa app generates new avatars in a variety of art styles (if the user agrees to give up the right to their likeness). Prisma Labs, the company that created Lensa, made tens of millions last year.

Let's get a little more personal. When educators sounded the alarm that ChatGPT was capable of generating academic essays, I felt like Gary Kasparov must have after being defeated by Deep Blue, the world tilting underneath my feet. It's not that I care much about writing academic essays – I look back on my essays from college with a mixture of horror and disappointment – but the whole point of writing those essays was to think critically, marshal evidence, and learn how to write by doing the work of writing. It sucks to work that hard to write a piece of crap essay, but it's also good practice. If a chatbot does the work for us, how do we learn to write, to argue, to think? Wouldn't it just replace us after a certain point?

M3GAN is an incredibly timely film that takes on that fear of replacement head on, in a way that is both emotionally nuanced and incredibly fun. I saw this movie in a theater that was howling, the frisson of fear coupled with laughter. Before the film, a fellow moviegoer was waxing ecstatic about the new female horror movie icon coming out of this film.

I mean no disrespect when I say M3GAN is surprisingly well-written, since screenwriter Akela Cooper (Hell Fest, Malignant) has proven her chops, but January is typically the movie dumping ground. I love the releases at this time of year, because I'm a degenerate who loves to wade through cinematic dreck, but M3GAN is genuinely good, not just good in comparison to the typical January fare.

[mild spoilers follow]

One of the things that most surprised me about this film was how funny it is. The film opens with a spot-on parody of a children's toy commercial, hyping an obnoxious Furby-like toy robot called a Purrpetual Pet that eight-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw) is playing with right before her parents are killed in a car accident; yes, that emotional whiplash kicks off the film. Her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) is there to adopt her after the accident, but has no idea how to relate or talk to her. Gemma is an engineer working for the toy company that created Purrpetual Pets, though her career goals lie less in the joys of entertaining children or the profit motive of her company than in the thrill of technical achievement.

Gemma is a prototypical engineer, better suited to building robots or writing code than dealing with emotion, and she's severely out of her depth trying to assuage Cady's grief. So she does what any well-meaning engineering auntie with a traumatized niece does: she builds her a creepy robot friend.

M3GAN, the Model 3 Generative Android, is sweet in the beginning. In fact, after watching Megan play with Cady, sing to her, and console her after her parents' deaths, I almost came to like the creepy-looking doll. Director Gerard Johnstone know you know the robot is going to be a killer, so he takes his time building Megan's progression from sweet to malevolent on a plausible basis of causation.

Gemma creates Megan as a companion for Cady, but separately Gemma's coworkers (Jen Van Epps and Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Cady's therapist (Amy Usherwood) realize that Megan is being treated as an emotional crutch. Since Megan is adept enough to talk through Cady's emotions and soothe her, Gemma uses the robot to perform the emotional labor of being a parent, and Cady uses the robot as a sort of security blanket. In fact, Gemma explicitly tells Megan to protect Cady from all emotional and physical harm, a directive that dooms anyone who gets in Cady's (or Megan's) way. Neither Gemma nor Cady are willing to admit that Megan's willful and destructively protective behavior are getting out of hand until it is too late.

Primarily, this is a popcorn flick. We're meant to guffaw at the jokes, such as a well placed nod to David Guetta's "Titanium," or cringe in horror, such as when Megan turns her dead eyes to Gemma and refuses to shut down. But as a story, M3GAN works because its characters are grounded. Cady's grief and anger and brief glimmers of joy are the emotions of a real eight-year-old in crisis. Gemma's struggle to become a caregiver is an honest portrayal of how difficult it is to shift your priorities to accommodate someone new in your life, even if they are a loved one. M3GAN works because we, as the audience, don't fear a dancing android is going to hack us to pieces with a paper cutter. We fear that technologies like Megan could take our place, as entertainers, artists, friends, or, shudder to think it, family members.

And if that doesn't make you excited enough to see it? Fine. Big spoilers. There's an awesome robot fight. You're welcome.