If you want to know how big an upgrade the M3GAN sequel has on the original, look no further than the very first scene. M3GAN was mostly set in a Seattle house, but M3GAN 2.0 starts at the Turkish-Iranian border — with a murderous rampage in a secret military installation and the presence of Saudi intelligence, with U.S. Defense Department officials covertly watching.
Two hours later, it’s not clear if this is really an upgrade.
Most of the same team that gave us the refreshing horror-comedy original two years ago have not only gone super-big, but also changed the franchise’s genre, turning M3GAN 2.0 into an action movie with two AI robots, two villains, FBI units, wingsuits, neural implants, a Mission: Impossible”-style vault heist, exosuits, a 250-mph street chase in a supercar, a power grid disaster, a countdown clock, the UN and the fate of the planet at stake.
Photo: AP
If the evil doll M3gan in the first movie was responsible for the deaths of four humans and one dog, this time the screen is littered with the corpses of shootings, decapitations, severed limbs and laser slayings. There are double-crosses, impalings, blood splatter, cattle prods, tactical military soldiers, self-destruct sequences and insane close-combat martial arts. You can be forgiven for expecting a Tom Cruise appearance.
What you won’t get is much of the vibe of the original, which fused horror, cultural commentary and humor. This time, that’s muted in favor of an overly ambitious, horribly convoluted plot that sometimes feels like the moviemakers just threw money at the sequel and tried to ape other franchises by going massive. The first had a bedroom feel; the new one starts, like we said, on an international border. The original’s US$12 million budget has been tripled.
M3GAN 2.0 owes a lot to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in which the robot killer in the first movie becomes the robot hero of the second. M3gan, it will come as no surprise, wasn’t killed at the end of the original. She’s just been laying low, waiting for her time to seize the day — and dance. Now she is reborn to fight another, better AI robot, played with sinister lethality by Ivanna Sakhno.
M3GAN arrived in 2023 just as AI technology like ChatGPT was beginning to go mainstream. Director and screenwriter Gerard Johnstone turns Allison Williams — who plays M3gan’s creator, Gemma — into a high-profile author and advocate for government oversight of artificial intelligence as the sequel opens. One of the more intriguing questions the movie explores is if parents are gradually outsourcing their responsibilities to technology.
Her niece Cady — the fabulous Violet McGraw — is now a budding computer programmer and rebellious. She has learned aikido and has a strong affinity for Steven Seagal, a running gag. Her protection is still the single focus of M3gan, who has apparently been in cloud networks between movies.
Facing a global existential threat, Gemma is convinced to build a body for M3gan to go toe-to-toe with the military-grade AI killing machine known as Amelia.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” Cady tells her aunt. But whose side is M3gan really on? Wwhat does Amelia really want?
Some of the movie’s best parts are when M3gan and Amelia face off. “You’re not family to them,” the new AI model says to the old. “You’re just the help.” There’s some cool robotic dancing — a highlight of the original — and a return of M3gan’s camel-colored silk sateen dress that became popular at Halloween.
Johnstone has smartly kept the offbeat humor of the original, this time with clever nods to Knight Rider and a surreal use of the Kate Bush song This Woman’s Work. Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords has fun as an arrogant tech billionaire, while Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epps return as Gemma’s tech teammates, this time crawling through ducts or getting choked almost to death.
We wouldn’t be here if someone had taken the advice of Ronny Chieng’s character in the original movie: “I want you to take this cyborg puppet show and put it in a dark closet where it belongs.” Not after grossing US$180 million worldwide. M3GAN 2.0 was inevitable, but it didn’t have to be so inevitably too much.
War in the Taiwan Strait is currently a sexy topic, but it is not the only potential Chinese target. Taking the Russian Far East would alleviate or even solve a lot of China’s problems, including critical dependencies on fuel, key minerals, food, and most crucially, water. In a previous column (“Targeting Russian Asia,” Dec. 28, 2024, page 12) I noted that having following this topic for years, I consistently came to this conclusion: “It would simply be easier to buy what they need from the Russians, who also are nuclear-armed and useful partners in helping destabilize the American-led world order.
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July 7 to July 13 Even though the Japanese colonizers declared Taiwan “pacified” on Nov. 18, 1895, unrest was still brewing in Pingtung County. The Japanese had completed their march of conquest down the west coast of Taiwan, stamping out local resistance. But in their haste to conquer the Republic of Formosa’s last stronghold of Tainan, they largely ignored the highly-militarized Liudui (六堆, six garrisons) Hakka living by the foothills in Kaohsiung and Pingtung. They were organized as their name suggested, and commanders such as Chiu Feng-hsiang (邱鳳祥) and Chung Fa-chun (鍾發春) still wanted to fight. Clashes broke out in today’s
Xu Pengcheng looks over his shoulder and, after confirming the coast is clear, helps his crew of urban adventurers climb through the broken window of an abandoned building. Long popular in the West, urban exploration, or “urbex” for short, sees city-dwelling thrill-seekers explore dilapidated, closed-off buildings and areas — often skirting the law in the process. And it is growing in popularity in China, where a years-long property sector crisis has left many cities dotted with empty buildings. Xu, a 29-year-old tech worker from the eastern city of Qingdao, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for his photos of rundown schools and