Seen That? Watch This is a weekly column from critic Luke Buckmaster, taking a new release and matching it to comparable works. This week, it’s the shrewd horror spectacle M3GAN and equally gnarly 2019 Child’s Play remake.
What can you learn about a society, through its depictions of anthropomorphised killer robots tuned to the gnarly capabilities of lawn mowers and paper guillotines? The movies have been coughing up trouble-making human-like cyborgs for eons, from the Maschinenmensch in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (conjured way back in 1927) to Schwarzenegger’s time-traveling baddie in The Terminator.
These days, in a rapidly evolving digital world of cybernetics, roving smart devices and scarily powerful AI, it stands to reason that nefarious androids are changing too—becoming more spectacularly destructive as they move increasingly into domestic and consumerist spaces.
Exhibit A: the diabolical titular character in the shrewdly entertaining horror film M3GAN, who becomes besties with a vulnerable young girl before all hell breaks loose. And exhibit B: the diabolical Buddi from the 2019 Child’s Play remake, who becomes besties with a vulnerable young boy before all hell breaks loose.
Both films use horror as cultural critique, etching cautionary messages about looking for humanity where there is none (this message is an oldie but a goodie). And—more salient in the era of ChatGPT, DALL-E and other emerging technologies with mind-bending possibilities—about developers excitedly embracing technology they themselves barely understand.
Child's Play (2019)
M3GAN is the superior work: funnier, wittier, more attuned to the potential absurdities of outsourcing friendship to a machine. It’s also more emotionally engaging, with an inventor type character—Allison Williams’ Gemma—who brings nuance to the mad scientist stereotype by being at once likable, relatable and hideously irresponsible (you barrack for her personally, but, under pressure from her boss—Ronny Chieng’s David—to deliver an unready prototype, want to see her fail professionally).
However the similarities between the two films are so striking that M3GAN can almost be considered a loose, unofficial remake—and probably would have been if they hadn’t been released so close together. For those who’d like to double down on diabolical doll movies, this pair would make an entertaining—if a mite repetitive—double feature.
Both begin with a glossy, cheesy ad (the filmmakers’ tongues firmly in cheek) spruiking a line of kids toys. In M3GAN it’s a brand of furry products called Perpetual Pets; in Child’s Play, a variety of dolls named Buddi—which (like the soon to be introduced M3GAN) feature self-learning technology that adapts to its owner’s behaviour and personality. Both films front-load intensely traumatic sequences: in M3GAN, it’s a head-on vehicle collision that kills the parents of young Cady (Violet McGraw); in Child’s Play, the death of a factory worker on the Buddi assembly line—who disables one doll’s safety features before committing suicide. Before long, in both films, we’re shown robo-vision, taken inside the dolls’ heads to observe things from their perspectives.
Both films have family-related slow spots, establishing a bond between parent/guardian and young’un. There’s Andy (Gabriel Bateman) and his single mother Karen (Aubrey Plaza) in Child’s Play, and Cady and her aunt Gemma in M3GAN. Both robots quickly decide a local animal is the enemy: Andy’s cat cops it in Child’s Play; the neighbours’ pooch gets annihilated in M3GAN.
The interconnected nature of smart devices allows each doll to command various machines with telekinetic-like powers. Both choose opportune moments to replay sound grabs from recorded conversations, weaponizing them to turn people against each other. Both androids don’t allow people to easily turn them off (and they wouldn’t be good movies if they did). And both films build to sensational Grand Guignol endings, gnarly spectacle erupting in a public space.
By now you can see why I think of M3GAN as an unofficial remake of Child’s Play (and why I’m sick to death of using the word “both”). One interesting point of deviation is the appearance of the doll, which significantly impacts how we perceive the villain. Buddi is a manufactured cartoon: a familiar kids’ plaything ran through a funhouse mirror. M3GAN on the other hand looks fascinatingly creepy: a refuge of the uncanny valley—close enough to real to have us scrutinizing it for emotions; far enough away to suggest we were wrong for having looked in the first place.
After a while I wasn’t sure whether the robot really looked sinister, or whether Gerard Johnstone’s ghoulish direction was projecting something onto it that wasn’t there aesthetically. M3GAN has the better doll—but both films express diabolically entertaining satire.
