By Daryl Johnson
Staff Writer
After losing her parents in an accident, Cady (Violet McGraw) is having a hard time adjusting to staying with an aunt that she didn’t get to see much. Her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) is dedicated to her career engineering robots and isn’t prepared to take care of her niece. To compensate, Aunt Gemma reveals the Model 3 Generative Android or Megan (Amie Donald) for short, who takes on the role of a friend to Cady. But as time passes, M3gan becomes overprotective towards Cady and does the imaginable.
Both actresses Violet McGraw and Allison Williams share the spotlight in this movie and draw viewers in to invest their attention to a believable situation (unexpected parenthood) that keeps this movie relatable. Amie Donald is a New Zealander and a professional dancer that attended the Portugal World Dance Cup in 2019 where she was the first from her country to bring home bronze and silver medals. She draws upon that background in a dance scene that adds a fun, lighthearted perspective of M3gan and distracts you from the violent and evil side of her.
The concept of this movie is similar to the Child’s Play movie franchise, which is famous for a killer doll that terrorized people for fun. M3gan’s music includes suspenseful and ominous theme, which compliments the choreography of the lifelike movements of a scary doll. Even though this movie has a few jump scares and the music cues are there, these tactics do not effectively portray all of the elements of a scary movie as there is humor mixed in as well.
In an interview with James Wan (writer and producer of “Saw”, “Dead Silence”, “Insidious”, and “The Conjuring”) and Jason Blum (CEO of Blumhouse Productions) the idea of the movie just came about from a conversation about what kind of movies would be good to see. Wan and his team were talking about a “killer doll movie meets terminator” which became the start of M3gan.
With an average rating of 7.2 out of 10 on rottentomatoes.com, M3gan may not be a new horror classic. However, will definitely cause you to question whether or not it would be a good idea to purchase your niece or nephew a doll that walks talks and speaks.