M3gan 2.0 Review: From horror girl to action star, M3gan can be anything!

With the rise of AI tools and chatbots in recent years, there’s only one question on everyone’s mind: where is M3gan? In 2022, the Blumhouse film booted up with a bang, receiving positive reviews from critics and moviegoers alike. M3gan entered the chatroom too – gifs of her uncannily fluid dance moves made their rounds on the Internet and garnered attention from female horror fans and the LGBTQ community. Due to the popularity of the fembot film, Universal greenlit a sequel and with all the players of the original creative team onboard M3gan 2.0 began production. The team are no rookies to horror either – James Wan (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring), Jason Blum (founder of Blumhouse Productions) and Akela Cooper (Hell Fest, Malignant) came together not once but twice to give us the fierce girlie-pop robot icon we’ve all grown to love. 

The film opens with us meeting AMELIA (Ivana Sakhno) which stands for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android, an accidentally autonomous and rogue robot. AMELIA deviates from her mission and with her new intentions unknown, the film cuts to Gemma and Cady. Gemma (Allison Williams) has become an AI ethicist and advocate for government AI regulations. She continues to work on AI innovations but with a more humanistic lens, such as working on a robotic exoskeleton. In a new smart home, Gemma lives with her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) who still has an interest in computer science despite the debacle M3gan (Jenna Davis) caused in the first film. Alerted to AMELIA’s behavior, M3gan speaks to Gemma and Cady through the smart home – she was able to create a backup of her file and work on a new version of herself #selfimprovement #bossbabe.

Despite Gemma’s hesitancy, Cady and M3gan convince Gemma that M3gan can be of use while AMELIA is at large – she is made of similar programming after all. M3gan becomes the key to stopping AMELIA – being able to better predict her moves, her motivations and ultimately, stand-off against her. Gemma and her team start recreating M3gan (but taller, at her request!) in the bunker underneath her smart home, the same bunker that M3gan so thoughtfully decorated in her two years of introspection. Working together, Gemma, her engineering team, Cady and M3gan do their best to not only track down AMELIA but figure out what it is she wants. 

This film proved that M3gan isn’t a one trick pony – in fact she can do it all! She is a gay icon, horror queen and now action princess. Although the first film was labelled a horror movie, it is definitely on the campy side of the genre. Outside of the terror of technology and a few swift kills, M3gan was dancing, singing and being hilarious. This campy horror introduction to M3gan created a fandom for the character that would watch her in anything she’s in. Although M3gan 2.0 is formally labelled as horror and sci-fi, the film leans into the action and sci-fi genres much more than the original. This genre switch was surprising to me as a viewer because much of the advertising up to the release felt very campy – using Britney Spears’s “Oops! I Did It Again,” M3gan saying “hold on to your vaginas” and the tweets from the M3gan Twitter account. 

Regardless of the genre switch up, M3gan 2.0 was enjoyable although a bit derivative. Before seeing M3gan 2.0, two specific sentiments were floating around about the film that are arguably true. The first being that the film has the exact plot of Terminator 2 and the second is that it rocks because of that! The film's plot parallels are quite obvious: a once evil robot must now protect the very people they were once trying to kill because a more advanced, currently-evil robot is out to kill them. We’ve seen this movie before and honestly, M3gan and Terminator have quite a few things in common personally. They’re uncharacteristically funny for robots, they are both extremely dedicated to their missions, have really only killed in the names of their mission and have memorable one-liners. Both the Terminator and M3gan became characters people loved and wanted to root for despite their serious flaws and both sequels give the audience a real reason to root for them.

The deviation from horror to action has got me excited for where this genre-bending character could go. Gerard Johnstone, director of both M3gans, has said “[he] would not be surprised if there’s another five of these movies.” Imagine a M3gan-centered dramedy? A detective M3gan? A M3gan AI exploitation flick? I will watch anything that features M3gan and it’s safe to say I don’t care about the genre anymore. Universal has got a character that will attract an audience regardless of genre and that’s a rare, beautiful thing that they should absolutely take advantage of (and cash in on). Although horror is my favorite genre and I would love to see M3gan become an evil AI robot once more, writers more creative than me can come up with something fun for M3gan’s new adventure (or five adventures). 

It’s interesting that M3gan and M3gan 2.0 have come out at the peak of the public conversations around AI. While many sci-fi films and TV shows are trying to answer the ethical questions that AI raises, M3gan 2.0 brings them up without giving the audience an existential crisis. It’s critical and serious about our current dilemma but doesn’t act like it has all of the answers, a much needed break from the constant bombarding of information and opinions around AI. M3gan 2.0 is an entertaining watch for those that were delighted in M3gan a few years ago and proves M3gan is still that girl and she’ll still do anything to defend her bestie Cady.

If you liked M3gan 2.0, you should revisit Terminator 2, one of the best sequels ever made.

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