Photo: Universal pictures
Spoilers to come for the intrigue and the end of M3GAN 2.0.
It has been almost 35 years since the definition of the genre of James Cameron Terminator 2: Judgment Day The rooms struck, but whoever saw him in the intermediate decades can remember his resonant end. After defeating the evil T-1000, the T-800 terminator reprogrammed by Arnold Schwarzenegger realizes that he must sacrifice himself to avoid the uprising of AI and, with him, nuclear annihilation. While Sarah and John Connor sink into a safer world, we hear her voiceover: “The future unknown is heading for us. I am confronted with it, for the first time, with a feeling of hope. Because if a machine, a terminator, can learn the value of human life, perhaps we can also. And also, Skynet is really Skynet really that Bad, anyway?
Obviously, I invented this last part. Sarah Connor would never kiss the malicious AI that tormented her in her quest to destroy humanity. This would betray the central themes of Terminator Franchise: The dangers of uncontrolled technology and the importance of prioritizing humanity on machines. I simply draw attention to the absurdity of M3GAN 2.0is shamelessly pro-Ai. Of course, the Android killer was introduced for the first time in 2022 M3gan is a more shaded diva than an existential threat, but its artificial intelligence did cause a wave of murder. Even if the rest recognizes all the carnage, it ends with a compromise between man and the machine which reads a lot as abandonment.
M3GAN 2.0 is, without a doubt, the T2 has M3gan‘s The terminatorAnd it is not particularly subtle on this subject. While the first film was a horror film which saw the title of doll terrorize Cady, 8 years old (purple MCGRAW) and its robotic aunt, Gemma (Allison Williams), the follow -up is strictly an action film, in which M3gan returns to protect Gemma and Cady against Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), a military Android built from the prototype of M3gan. In the third act of the film, Cady is kidnapped, and Gemma and her team must save her and prevent Amelia from reaching an even more powerful AI known as the motherboard. This machine, a first attempt as a robot of assistance that has broken down and began to kill people in 1984 – the year The terminator Released, incidentally – is kept in an underground prison very protected from the Palo Alto technology company where it was created.
While stopping Amelia and arriving at the motherboard seems to be a fairly simple conclusion, M3GAN 2.0The third act of the plot is much more convoluted than that. We discover that Amelia is not really autonomous, but rather controlled by Christian (Aristotle Athari), the kind of Gemma’s boyfriend who works for an anti-Ai foundation. Christian hoped that M3gan’s unleashing in the first film would be enough to convince the public of the dangers of AI, but instead, the government has seen the opportunity to invest in technology. Christian and his allies built Amelia to sell the soldiers as a Trojan horse which would seem to reject its programming and act independently, while being secretly controlled by Christian. Gemma, of course, knows too much, so Christian implants him with a neurochet who is supposed to make her subordinate. In reality, M3gan simulated his own death and implanted his conscience in the chip, so that she can live in Gemma’s head and help him retaliate – with a decisive pass from an exosuit that looks like a version punished by that of Cameron’s Alien. I’m going to warn you now that things are no less confusing from here.
CAPY decides that they can use Amelia to their advantage if they make a factory reset which will tear the android from the control of Christian and bring back the original M3GAN programming with which it was built. The restart operates and Amelia / M3gan is about to help them escape – before being immediately shot by EMP cannons. In one way or another, these electromagnetic impulses push the m3gan out of her, and Amelia In fact becomes autonomous, how much she kills Christian and decides to release the motherboard and destroy humanity after all. (There was almost certainly a more rationalized way of going to this point, but the film insists to last two hours.) It seems that all hope is lost when Amelia connects to the motherboard and becomes an all-powerful being. Fortunately, M3gan decided to sacrifice itself in order to save Cady and the human race – not because it was scheduled, but “because it is true”. With an EMP load affixed to it which will destroy each machine nearby, M3gan catches Amelia from behind and the three robots are killed.
Let’s put aside the rhythms of the incredibly clumsy intrigue that make up the culmination of this film. The point to remember key is that M3gan has chosen to die nobly for the greatest good, a movement that reflects the T-800 which lowers in a melted steel tank at the end of T2. The M3gan Redeemer Arc is at the heart of its suite, even if the reality is that it is quite consistent throughout the film. For the most part, she is motivated by her programming, which tells her to protect CADY. It is also equipped with a chip created by Gemma which prevents it from killing people. But M3gan is never on the right side of the film: apart from the coarseness PG-13 required, it essentially tries to help. This is a fundamental bad reading of what the public liked of the character to start – who lit a green M3gan Following where his human kill number is zero? – and it is an attempt to reproduce the emotional nucleus of T2. M3gan’s supposed sacrifice is made more silly by the fact that she does not do Really Die (she supported herself in advance, of course) and by the Coda who follows her scene as “death”.
In the last moments of the film, Ms. Gemma goes to Washington, DC, to talk about AI. It was always Christian’s plan, although he would have used the Ravages Amelia forged to plead to crush artificial intelligence before it became uncontrollable. Gemma, however, was deeply affected by M3gan’s redemption. She maintains that we cannot put the genius back in the bottle. We just need better laws to regulate AI – we must teach it, train it and “become better parents” to technology. In this way, she explains, when these systems inevitably acquire sensitivity, they could decide to work with humanity rather than against. A large part of what Gemma says in this scene percupates the propaganda of bullshit which we are flooded with the evangelists of IA daily: humans condemn the things they do not understand. We do not need to be in competition with AI – we must “co -evolve” with him. Although this perspective may resemble the logical conclusion of Sarah Connor’s evaluation that the T-800 was able to “learn the value of human life”, it is in fact a cheeky escalation. And it happens at a time when we are much more aware of the destructive power of AI technology, which may never become autonomous enough to bring nuclear winter, but is already make us more stupid And make our planet less habitable.
M3GAN 2.0 may feel that his hands are linked like a riff on Terminator 2 – The film has no choice but to transform the killer robot into its center in force for good. However, other choices are indefensible. Position Christian and his anti-Ai allies as true bad guys give the game in terms of film policy. It would look like T2 revealing that the real problem was not Skynet but the resistance of John Connor was against. Gemma’s final plea in government is even worse, a complete abdication of its morality and a disconcerting subject since it has just looked at the AMELIA Android autonomy and immediately Try to erase the human race. Although it can be naive to expect M3GAN 2.0 To plant itself on the right side of the story, there is something particularly depressing in a message “AI is our friend” of the mouth of the mouth in 2025. Perhaps the screenwriter-director Gerard Johnstone saw the writing on the wall and determined that Christian’s crusade against technology is a losing battle. After all, in a world where James Cameron has embraced aiWhat hope is there for the rest of us?
