Megan: Just Another Grizzly American Girl Doll

Plot via IMDB:

When Gemma suddenly becomes the caretaker of her orphaned 8-year-old niece, Cady, Gemma’s unsure and unprepared to be a parent. Under intense pressure at work, Gemma decides to pair her M3GAN prototype with Cady in an attempt to resolve both problems-a decision that will have unimaginable consequences

When you’re a robot engineer with zero maternal instinct and you must raise your dead sister’s daughter, what do you do? You make and let a robot raise her. M3GAN being a horror film, you make a automaton that will eventually break all Three Laws of Robotics.

Of course, you need a kid who can act. Pretty easy enough to find. Almost any kid in Hollywood can easily do that. Violet McGraw is just the latest generation model.

Next you need an adult who can both play comedy and drama— or at least be neutral enough that she looks like she’s straddling the line. Allison Williams, did it comfortably before in Get Out, so she will do— and she works cheap.

Lastly, you need a good effects company and a pint sized actor who can do robot, both Chucky and Terminator versions. Amie Donald can do it well. Put her in an American Girl body with effects part animatronic, puppetry, and VFX and M3GAN practically writes itself.

The surface theme is about how robot engineer learns how to love humans, particularly comes to adore and defend her newly adopted child. She needs to become Sarah Connor if you want sequels.

M3GAN does away with any hint of misdirected goodness in this doll. Since she is coded dispassionately without parental controls she is completely amoral, EVIL as they term it in the movies. The only law she obeys is that her killer mayhem must never rise above a PG-13 rating.

Director Gerard Johnstone goes for equal blends of camp, simple suspense that’s easy to follow, and violence that’s offscreen or not overly grizzly.

There are a few attempts at social commentary. How modern mothers and fathers use tech to outsource parenting is the main one. The movie stays in its lane. It never tries to outsmart or take itself seriously.