M3gan

SnarkAI Score: 30/100

tldr:

The review suggests that the movie has a lot of flaws, such as poor character development, questionable plot decisions, and an overall lack of coherence. Additionally, the reviewer appears to be critical of the movie's attempt at humor and its overall tone. While there are some positive elements, such as the voice acting and the depiction of M3gan's abilities, these are not enough to redeem the movie as a whole. Overall, it seems that the movie is not very entertaining or engaging, and viewers would likely find it to be a disappointment.

Our Scores are generated by SnarkAI's analysis of our reviewer's writing. The tldr sumary is drafted by SnarkAI based on that review. All Images are AI generated based on the reviewers descriptions of scenes.

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Buckle up, this one is long as the film is nonsense. F-

The mother is portrayed as an intolerable shrew and the father as a bumbling incompetent, making them reminiscent of every sitcom couple from the 90s. I must admit, from our limited time meeting them, it seems like the girl may be better off without them. We later find out that the mother is homeschooling her child, which is not surprising.

Then we meet the aunt, who seems to have stepped out of a lifetime Christmas movie. "I don't need a family or husband; I have my fancy career in the big city building sex robots. I mean fully articulated childlike androids." They know that parents are not the audience that will be buying these dolls, right? It's 100% going to be perverts. The venn diagram between owners of these dolls and people on the sex offenders registry is a perfect circle.

Somehow, the key takeaway we get from the therapist is that she's patronizing, which is kind of a bad primary skill for a child therapist specializing in bereavement. She's very judgmental of the aunt, who has vintage toys and has not immediately given them to the poor child.

Also, why is the owner letting the lead scientist work with no supervision? Adding spyware to the toys without approval? And why is the innovation scientist also in charge of scaling mass production to manage price? Wouldn't that be procurement?

Say what you will about Chucky. It's the same film, but instead of dubious business info, they use the tried and true "it's Magic. I ain't got to explain shit." We are 20 minutes in, and the aunt has ditched the kid to work because she had 'an entire week off' for her sister dying in a weird snow-explosion. Truly, American Capitalism is the monster here.

The kid pretty quickly gets over her parents dying and basically manipulates the aunt into giving her M3gan so the aunt can go back to ignoring the kid. It's presented as wholesome, but it really isn't.

A few hours of work, and M3gan has gone from an actual dumpster fire of non-functional software and hardware to something that would easily pass the Turing test. Again, they're saying 'child's toy' for this technical marvel. That couldn't possibly cost less than a billion dollars to make.

M3gan can diagnose learning difficulties. They drop that in as an aside. But let that sink in: a bonus feature that made psychologists redundant.

The lead scientist also writes the commercials for some reason. Maybe if she didn't do all these random duties of other people, she'd have had time to read a book or two about the dangers of rogue AI... and maybe program in a failsafe or two... Ah well.

"Hey, maybe we shouldn't use this recently bereaved and very ill child to demo M3gan to the board...." is a thought none of them had. Even though using the lead designer's niece is bad experimentation practice.

M3gan has a weirdly terrible microphone and lots of static and grain in the replays. I assume the engineer is a fan of vinyl and is going for the retro vibe.

Also, M3gan breaks into Disney-style songs. It's utterly cringe.

Why does Kurt have access to the engineering files? He's a Gopher. A gopher who's been watching porn at work and been caught at it. In a toy company. It's not going to take them long to figure out who the leaker was.

Why does the therapist have access to M3gan? What NDAs did she sign? She is the only person actually asking valid questions. Conveniently, the kids all brought gigantic toys to the outdoor school thing, so M3gan looks slightly less obviously out of place, but still, in a pile of bears and rabbits, a human-looking Lolita doll stands out. Still, why did our engineer decide to bring M3gan out in public, despite being told priority 1 was no leaks, then leave this billion-dollar bit of kit unattended to make small talk and jam sandwiches?

Naturally, there's a violent bully. M3gan kills him after a bit of light torture. But he was kind of a dick, so I guess we're supposed to be happy about it?

We get a few bars of Titanium. Becca and Chloe did it better.

There's a slight touch of GladOS to M3gan's voice, which is nice.

It's unclear why M3gan is a sociopath killer who tortures her victims. Her primary program is clear, and it is to protect the kid, so swift would be the natural response to that and, as far as possible, untraceable.

M3gan is supposed to record everything but has sufficient control over its own OS to stop that.

"We've taken every precaution to stop her from hurting anyone" - we have seen zero evidence they did this. In fact, about 10 minutes later, the scientist explicitly says "I didn't give you any of the proper protocols" - let that rest a moment. She knew she hadn't done the most basic safety policies but was cool with mass-producing M3gans and sending them out into the world, with no safety but super strength and speed. And why? What's the driving rush? Is it to save lives? Nope, it's just because a businessman set an arbitrary deadline, and the team needs to hit it. This is why Waterfall delivery is bad, children. It leads to killer robots.

Inexplicably, they decided to keep the killer doll in earshot of the unbalanced kid who was screaming. Despite M3gan's primary program, this goes nowhere. Something narratively clumsy can be excused for a setup, but when it's pointless and clumsy, it should be on the cutting room floor.

M3gan costs $10,000, which is nothing. They've literally created a super-soldier, psychiatrist, teacher, manual laborer, serial killer (oops).

Oh, M3gan has gone full super-computer. She can take over cell phones and computers of all sorts.

They gave M3gan super speed and super strength. Because if there is one thing toy manufacturers are known for, it is ensuring kids' toys are very durable.

M3gan decides to spend some time sitting in the dark playing piano creepily.

The fight between M3gan and her creator is fun, and the 'palliative care' line is cheerfully creepy.

The Bruce reveal is so stupid, and I hate that I loved it.

M3gan can survive being torn in half. Why precisely did they do that? Seriously, this toy is so insanely over-engineered.

And of course, M3gan got into the 'Alexa' despite that being nonsense.

It's a bad film told badly, with characters making bad decisions for bad reasons.