The concept of horror movies involving haunted dolls is common, considering the classics, like Chucky and Annabelle. However, the movie M3GAN takes a different approach to this, as it’s a robot whose goal is to take care of its owner.

The movie begins when 8-year-old Cady’s parents die in a car accident. Her Aunt Genna, who was never prepared to take care of a child since her life is based on being a roboticist, takes her in. Since she never had enough time to hangout with Cady, she got the idea to create a robot nanny for Cady. 

Megan’s appearance isn’t what you would expect for a homicidal robot, or at least isn’t as creepy as Anabelle. It looks like a normal girl; Megan has blue eyes, blonde hair, a human voice, and even acts like a human. 

Not only is she a smart robot who already knows the basics of being a nanny, like taking care of Cady, reading and singing bedtime stories, being a good listener, as well as sharing stories of her own, Megan also collects information as she experiences new things, therefore learning more and more through every interaction she has. 

So, if there is anything to take away from this movie, it’s that A.I. dolls won’t be a good idea in the future.

Though everything started off well in the beginning with Megan and Cady, it didn’t stay that way for long. About halfway through the movie as the robot has already made headmarks becoming famous, there was an incident where their neighbor’s dog attacked Megan as she was trying to get it away from Cady.

I think it hasn’t really been discussed that that was most likely the point where everything went wrong with Megan and what made her change, since you could see how something in her got damaged. 

The movie had some unexpected scenes, one of them being Megan ripping off a boy’s ear for bullying Cady. It was a pretty intense and gross scene. 

The special effects in this movie were decent. I wouldn’t call it the most realistic, but it wasn’t bad, compared to how lots of horror movies are lately.

What made the movie interesting to me was Megan’s character. She has a loving and fun personality (besides the fact that she murders people). 

I think that was the director’s goal to make the sci-fi movie stand out with not just its plot, but with how interesting Megan is. 

Some previous works of Gerard Johnstone, the director of M3gan, include the horror/comedy movie Housebound. With the two movies being overall very different there is one thing that ties them together and it’s the perfect balance with giving a horror film comedy scenes. Johnstone definitely has a vision for his movies and knows how to add comedic scenes making his movies more memorable. 

An interesting thing is that Megan was played by two different people. Actress Ammie Donald played M3gan’s physical moves, and social media influencer and singer Jenna Davis was Megan’s voice. 

Finally, getting to the most talked about scene in the movie—the dance. I think it was strange in a way that I don’t think anyone in the movie theater expected for Megan to just start dancing at the end of the movie, before she murders someone. But that might have been the point. It felt random and strange, and definitely reminded me of the dance from Wednesday. 

Johnson said it was a “3 am thought” to have Megan dance, but I think with all the talk surrounding the dance on Wednesday, they wanted the same effect. 

The movie ends with Gemma and Cady being comforted by police officers, but is that really what they should logically be doing? I would imagine Gemma would get arrested or at least go under an investigation as she is the person who created a robot responsible for killing a total of five people. 

Though in the end Cady and Gemma do destroy Megan, the post credit scene left us on a cliffhanger as it was a scene of Gemma’s smart home device blinking a light from it, setting us up for a potential sequel. The second movie will most likely be surrounding Megan electronically transferring onto an Alexa. 

Overall, I find M3GAN to be good for its uniqueness and balance compared to other movies that recently came out. The characters, the music, and certain lines make it comedic and also add some horror scenes. It’s interesting to see movies starting to expose the potential dangers of artificial intelligence that could be happening in real life in the future.