Practically all the decisions made about artificial intelligence come out of corporations run by male billionaires located in a few square miles of Northern California. Some people think that’s “too much power for one man to will.” Not so, “I say that depends on the man,” says Alton Appleton, the tech mogul in “M3GAN 2.0” (Universal), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse.
This is the second movie about artificial intelligence (AI) so far in 2025, following hot-on-the-heels of one of the year’s substantial highlights, “Companion,” which I reviewed in February. That film delivered an AI lover in a box (the companion); “M3GAN 2.0” pits the seductiveness of AI to the military against the dangerousness of the tech companies to the ordinary citizen.
The creator of the original M3GAN, Gemma, played by Allison Williams, ruing her earlier life, becomes a best-selling author and sets up an activist foundation to expose the perils of excessive screen time and AI for children. Unfortunately the message isn’t getting through to her niece, Cady, played by Violet McGraw, who is twelve years old and learning how to code-hiding a tablet device inside what appears to be a photograph of her parents to vex her aunt. Meanwhile the military, “we intend to win,” under the command of Colonel Tim Sattler, played by Timm Sharp, amusingly dressed as a modern-day “Columbo” (played by Peter Falk between 1971 and 1990), has developed AMELIA, a second-generation M3GAN robot capable of pinpointing and neutralising hostiles in the Middle East. But AMELIA forges a mind of her own and now only Gemma can save the world from a massive cyber-attack. She figures that the money she will earn from helping out will save her more nobly-minded venture from flopping.
How does our billionaire fit in? He hopes to recruit Gemma to his firm, “[you can either] fight the future or help us shape it.” He owns the cloud-computing centres which have been hacked, and has developed a “direct cerebral interface” which is a small implant on his left temple enabling him to see a person on a screen projected inside his head. This technology is astonishingly close to the “solutions” emerging right now from some of the Silicon Valley “philanthro-capitalists” (a real evil-sounding expression from “M3GAN”) funded by actual people, their real investments and their rich pension funds.
The first half-hour or so is very promising. Smart use of television-news channels establishes the two opposing views and those who support each side. The idea of AMELIA, a military-grade M3GAN who replaces soldiers and can even resist drone attacks, is highly plausible. She can be trained to fight without emotion and what she “sees” is actually “seen” on monitor screens in the command center, somewhere in the U.S.
One of the best films from the 1980s, “WarGames” (1983), with Matthew Broderick, covers the same ethical ground. We can see straightaway the attractiveness to the military of “protect[ing] our nation…without the spectre of political blowback.” And pulling the original-creator-turned-cynic out of retirement is right out of “WarGames” too. The ability of a chip inside the brain to cure a severe disability, as demonstrated in “M3GAN,” is one of the more hypnotic arguments made by our billionaires as to why they should be left undisturbed to get on with their god-like work. Where the film struggles is in making a case for recreating the original M3GAN (supposedly destroyed forever in the first movie) in order to kill AMELIA. This is a challenging area: journalists’ probing questions about the dangers of “rogue” AI-to-AI interaction (without going through a human agent) are ducked by irritable tech billionaires time and time again. In turn, “M3GAN 2.0” ducks the chance to explore a geeky solution to the problem (such as in “WarGames,” an entirely non-violent affair). Instead, leaving the science fiction behind, it becomes just another brutal, gun-soaked orgy-this time between two female AI robots voiced by human actors. Given Hollywood seemingly finds it impossible to halt the violence once it has been triggered (see my review of “Novocaine” from March), the film never recovers.
I sympathise with the filmmakers though: this is not a film to be dismissed, and it is to our benefit that Hollywood studies the countless different problems with AI. Some of the concepts here are really good. Take the “smart” house where Gemma and Cady live: as well as the fridge and a robot vacuum cleaner (obviously), there is a television that turns itself on to warn of the military’s arrival, a badass ice machine that trips the invaders up by projecting ice onto the wooden kitchen floor, and a “plastic teletubby” in which to hide M3GAN after she is reborn. And to emphasise their rather odd habits, when told to go to bed, Cady says, scornfully, “I’m not tired.” “Take a melatonin,” Gemma replies. I smiled as the theme from “Knight Rider” (1982–1986) appeared for a musical cameo. Later in the film, the whole sequence where M3GAN comes out as a prepper-building an underground bunker for Gemma and Cady-is fascinating; but the “why?” isn’t spelled out enough. And as the violence increases, the screenplay descends into lines like, “your allegiance to them has made you weak;” or “she’s stronger than I ever could be;” or “a world where you don’t have to fear the future;” or “I’m not doing it because I have to; I’m doing it because it’s right.”
“M3GAN 2.0” is not just another exercise in mindless, militarised mediocrity. The absurd levels of funding, trickiness, and uncontrolled impulses of both the military and the tech bros (and their sycophants) are held up for some scrutiny by the filmmakers. Perhaps they can be encouraged to make a purer science-fiction film that explains under what circumstances “existence doesn’t have to be a competition.”
Adam Poole
4th July 2025
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