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AFTER doing something unspeakable to a school bully’s ear, chasing him through a forest like a wolf and then driving him under the wheels of a passing car, M3gan, the world’s first “Model 3 Generative Android”, returns to comfort Cady, its inventor’s niece. “We’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” it whispers.
So has the audience: before you ask a learning machine to do something for you, it helps if you know what that thing actually is.
M3gan is tasked by its inventor, Gemma (Allison Williams, who starred in production company Blumhouse’s earlier smash hit, Get Out), with caring for her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). Cady has been orphaned after her parents accidentally drove under a snow truck during an argument about policing her screen time.
M3gan is told to protect Cady from physical and emotional harm. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, it turns out.
Gemma works for a toy company called Funki, whose CEO David (Ronny Chieng) is looking for a way – any way – to take a swipe at Hasbro. In a rush to succeed, Gemma ends up creating a care robot that – to paraphrase The Terminator – absolutely will not stop caring. M3gan takes the ordinary knocks that life dishes out to Cady very personally.
The robot, depicted via a low-budget mixture of masks and CGI, performed by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis, is an uncanny glory. But the signature quality of Blumhouse’s films isn’t so much its skill with low budgets as a willingness to invest time and money into scripts. In developing M3gan, writers Akela Cooper and James Wan – the latter of whom directed the horror film Saw – found there was greater currency in mischief than in mayhem.
Caring for a child involves more than just distracting them. Alas M3gan, an evolution of Funki’s “Purrfect Petz” (fuzzballs that quote Wikipedia while evacuating plastic pellets) can’t possibly understand this. The point of parenting is to manage your own failure, leaving a child capable of handling the world on their own. M3gan, on the contrary, has no intention of letting Cady grow up. As far as it is concerned, experience is the enemy.
In this war, M3gan transforms, naturally enough, into a killing machine. Yet the android’s charge is a far more frightening creation: Cady is a bundle of hurt, afforded no real guidance, adrift in a world where she believes everything will eventually go wrong or die. A screaming 9-year-old slapping her well-intentioned but workaholic aunt across the face makes for infinitely more disturbing viewing than any scene involving M3gan.
“Robotic companionship may seem a sweet deal,” wrote social scientist Sherry Turkle in 2011’s Alone Together, “but it consigns us to a closed world – the loveable as safe and made to measure.”
Cady, born into this world of care robots, eventually learns that the only way to get through life is to grow up. But the real lesson is for parents. Children aren’t meant to be easy. They are meant to be worthwhile. If we absent ourselves from their lives, we are the ones who will be left poorer.
At a conference on human-machine interaction in 2014, I saw a video starring an “educational robot” called Nao. It took a while before someone in the audience –not me, to my shame – spotted the obvious flaw: why does it show a mother sweating away in the kitchen while a robot is enjoying quality time with her child?
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