As technology has advanced over the years, there has always been the looming thought in many people’s minds of the possibilities of sentient technology. That is to say, technology that can have a mind of its own and feel emotions in a human sense. Up to this point, technology has increasingly become more advanced day by day as humans have worked to create technology that can replace everyday tasks and jobs, albeit at the expense of humans who need to work for a living. However, many people, especially those with technophobia, view this in the sense of technology becoming so advanced that it can potentially hurt people.

M3GAN, released Jan. 6, takes this concept and expands upon it in a horror setting. It utilizes the concept of sentient technology, in this case, a sentient robot whose purpose is to befriend a little girl, to display the possibilities of what can happen if a robot becomes too sentient.

The story starts off with the tragic death of the parents of one of the main characters, Cady. While driving in a winter storm, Cady and her parents get into a crash that, unfortunately, ends the lives of her parents. In the aftermath of this, Cady is put into the care of Gemma, her aunt, who is not quite cut out to be a parental figure. With the loom- ing threat of CPS potentially taking Cady away from Gemma, Gemma being heavily engrossed in her work at a toy company, and Cady regularly going to therapy to cope with the death of her parents, all parties involved are largely stressed and devoid of any open emotion.

Noticing that Cady still isn’t feeling better with therapy, Gemma continues to work on her newest project that has been in the works for months at the toy company: a sentient robot named M3GAN who can actively respond to emotion and act as a stand-in guardian when needed. With the motivation of finishing M3GAN with the intent of her helping Cady, Gemma and her team finish the robot in a couple of weeks. Almost immediately, upon being introduced, Cady grows attached to M3GAN and M3GAN becomes extremely protective of Cady, however, that protection is so extreme, that it gets increasingly violent as the movie progresses.

In general, though categorized as a horror movie, M3GAN really isn’t that much of a horror movie compared to other movies such as The Conjuring series. It does feature a lot of gore and graphic imagery, but not necessarily in the scary sense, more so in the “this is what you would expect” sense. Generally speaking, more so than being scary, it’s more of a tragedy movie where you simply feel bad for the little girl a majority of the time. Although, it can be argued it is the smallest bit of comedy as parts of it, thought very cringy, is just ironic because you know what is going to happen at almost every scene.

However, though it has its downfalls, M3GAN still is a decent movie, though just definitely not one of the best out there. Its pacing is, generally speaking, pretty good, so it doesn’t feel like it’s droning on a majority of the time. A lot of what happens is easily predictable, but not to the point, it becomes so overly redundant. And, at its core, it’s a movie that, excluding its downfalls, it is an acceptable movie that utilizes the common trope of sentient robots in a more fun way. It has both its ups and downs, but it’s a fun movie to watch if you’re looking for a “scary” movie that has little gore and little actual scariness.