Director/Screenplay – Gerard Johnstone, Story – Akela Cooper & Gerard Johnstone, Producers – Jason Blum, James Wan & Allison Williams, Photography – Toby Oliver, Music – Chris Bacon, Visual Effects – Bot VFX, Bunker (Supervisor – Matthew Westbrooke), Cause and FX (Supervisor – Thrain Shadbolt), Fin Design + Effects (Supervisor – Rick Van De Schootbrugge) & Stargate Studios (Animation Supervisor – Daniel Cuervo Arevalo), Special Effects Supervisor – Sven Harens, M3gan & Amelia Animatronics & Special Effects – Adrien Morot & Kathy Tse, Exoskeleton Design – Weta Workshop Ltd, Production Design – Brendan Heffernan & Adam Wheatley. Production Company – Universal/Blumhouse/Atomic Monster/Divide-Conquer.
Cast
Allison Williams (Gemma Forrester), Violet McGraw (Cady), Amie Donald (M3gan), Jenna Davis (Voice of M3gan), Aristotle Athari (Christian Bradley), Brian Jordan Alvarez (Cole), Jen Van Epps (Tess), Ivanna Sakhno (Amelia), Jermaine Clement (Alton Appleton), Timm Sharp (Agent/Colonel Tim Sattler), Mark Mutchinson (Niles Keller)
Plot
The US Army give a demonstration of Amelia, a more advanced android that has been based on M3gan. It proceeds to go amok and kill the target it is meant to retrieve, before revealing it has broken free from its constraints. The FBI approach Gemma and ask her help, warning them that Amelia is now eliminating all who were involved in her creation. Gemma discovers that M3gan’s consciousness has backed itself up in her smart home. M3gan offers to help against Amelia in return for Gemma giving her a body. They discover that Amelia is attempting to break into a secure data centre to free an early A.I. built in the 1980s that went rogue and has now gained godlike powers.
I wasn’t a huge fan of M3gan (2022), a co-production between Blumhouse and James Wan’s Atomic Monster, about a killer doll that gained artificial intelligence and went amok. It seemed construed as a crosshatch between Child’s Play (1988), or perhaps more so the Wan-produced Annabelle (2014), and the Terminator films. It took to the modern debate about the advent of Artificial Intelligence with all the subtlety of villagers waving burning torches in a Frankenstein film. It was however quite a reasonable success, earning $181 million worldwide. Now, director Gerard Johnstone, Blumhouse, Atomic Monster and most of the lead actors have returned with a sequel Megan 2.0. Other sequels were planned but the film’s less-than-expected box-office seems to have put paid to that.
I had no high expectations of Megan 2.0 based on its predecessor but ended up being pleasantly surprised. For one, Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper seemed to have taken the Terminator films as their source of inspiration. M3gan is modelled after The Terminator (1984) and follows its basic storyline where people are pursued by a near-unstoppable killer android. By contrast, Megan 2.0 feels like Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) in that the villain from the previous film is reconceived as a good guy aiding the same characters from the last film as they have to battle a more advanced version of it.
Amie Donald as a more militarised version of M3gan
The Terminator 2 comparisons seem apt in other ways in that Megan 2.0 makes a similar dramatic advancement in the quality of the effects technology over its predecessor. Gerard Johnstone, along with the aid of Canadian makeup effects expert Adrien Morot and Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop, really go for broke here. There are some highly entertaining scenes with people fighting an animate exoskeleton; M3gan diving into action in a wingsuit; a great sequence that takes place at a tech conference with Amelia and M3gan fighting against robots; and a climactic showdown and punch-up between the two android nemeses. It is the next levelling of the fairly straightforward killer android sequences we had in M3gan. And the results are far more satisfying than anything you expect.
There is also a much more complex plot than we had in the first film, including the addition of a villain to the show. (Jermaine Clement ends up stealing much of the show during his scenes as a tech entrepreneur). There is a repeat of the touch button issues from the modern A.I. debate throughout with a few more added to the mix – driverless cars, smarthomes, as well as the winding in of the debate about their needing to be some governmental oversight into the development of A.I. However, you get the impression that Akela Cooper and Gerald Johnstone have done no more than read a few headlines on the topic and thrown these in – the whole debate about governmental oversight has absolutely nothing to say about the issue other than that yes, there should be some.
