‘M3gan’ — Originality Through Copying

It’s often been said that there are only six different types of stories and every story that’s created is only a variation of these originals. After thousands of years of storytelling, this has become truer than people realize. All audiences have to do is look at films that have come out in the past few decades to see how often movies copy one another. But there comes a point when movies implement so many different elements that it essentially becomes something brand new entirely. This is exactly what happens with the new horror film M3gan.

Essentially, the movie is about a killer AI inside a doll. It was created by a brilliant roboticist working for a toy company looking for the next best thing. Of course, M3gan becomes so attached to the roboticist’s niece that she is willing to do anything to protect the girl. Since this is a horror film, that obviously means murder.

Right off the bat, obvious comparisons can be drawn to films like Child’s Play, which also has a killer doll. There’s a big difference between Child’s Play and M3gan, though. In Child’s Play, the killer doll had the soul of a serial killer. In M3gan, the doll was an artificial intelligence created by someone determined to make a program as life-like as possible. This has touches of the film Ex Machina. But in that movie, the AI was created as a passion project rather than a product to be put to market. In which case, it aligns more closely with the action comedy Small Soldiers. So, although M3gan has many different elements for many different films, it has scrambled them into a blender so much that it has created something completely new. And in this age of derivative storytelling, that’s probably the best way to do it.