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At the end of November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that quickly announced we were living in a new age. A week later, Universal Pictures gave the world M3gan, a comedy horror with a wickedly timely premise: an AI housed in a humanoid Valley Girl doll, made as a best friend for a lonely child. What could possibly go wrong?
For the wider world after ChatGPT, that question is still under review. In M3gan, the answer was: a lot. Not for the producers, though, who spent $12mn on a movie that made back $181mn.
And so we now have M3gan 2.0, among the more inevitable sequels in film history. Less predictable is that it is actually very good fun. Writer-director Gerard Johnstone has surely noted that real-world AI now gives people enough to fear. The dial is duly cranked from horror to full-blown comedy.
To begin, there is a bait-and-switch of a whole other genre. The opening plays like an espionage action movie, with a new walking, talking, lethally self-defining AI. This one is called Amelia. (Johnstone’s eerie timing now somehow extends to setting this initial mayhem on the Iranian border.)
Back in the US, the principals from the first film reassemble. Orphan Cady (Violet McGraw) navigates high school while roboticist aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), who first crafted her an AI pal, is now all-in on ethical tech. Johnstone keeps us waiting; hopefully it isn’t a spoiler to say the anti-heroine of the title makes a belated entrance, flawless tween deadpan intact. “Yes, it’s me,” she breezes. “What a shock, etc.” (She/it is played once more by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis.)
The rest is knowingly witty and cannily knockabout. A stickler might ask if a two-hour running time was really needed, but Johnstone’s design is clever. One moment you are invited to consider paper-clip theory and issues of AI regulation (the movie could make a ticklish double bill with Jesse Armstrong’s tech bro farce Mountainhead). The next, you’re in the kind of timeless sci-fi satire where figures in white coats wield giant syringes. You might smugly note the allusions to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or simply enjoy the barrage of smart, silly gags. I confess, at least once, I LOL’d. Even critics are only human.
★★★★☆
In cinemas from June 27