Friday, June 27, 2025

The only one at M3GAN 2.0

When I arrived at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville last night at just before 9, the lobby was full and buzzing with people. And I thought "Shit, it's opening night for M3GAN 2.0. I should have gotten here earlier."

But when I got to the counter to get my ticket, the ticket clerk said "Oh, you're the only one in there."

Huh?

Turns out, the lobby was buzzing for other reasons. I noticed there were some people who were dressed up. The Sun has always got some special event going on, which is one of the reasons it's the best cinema in Melbourne.

But my "Huh?" was not the disconnect between the number of people in the lobby and the number of tickets purchased for M3GAN 2.0, it was that no one wanted to see M3GAN 2.0 on its opening night.

This I found baffling. The original M3GAN was a huge performer back in 2023. I don't know if everybody saw it in the theater -- I did not, as I wrote it off as just another lame horror movie when I saw it advertised -- but the appreciation quickly grew such that it became a definitive hit and a thing people talked about in the culture. That meme of M3GAN dancing took on a life of its own. 

And sure enough, that movie was a hoot and super fun.

Why, then, no love for the sequel?

I can't answer that. But I can tell you that the people who stayed away were wise. 

I have not yet written my review, which I'll write over the weekend and post on Monday. If you're reading this a few days from now, the link may already be up. 

But I'll just say that this starts out feeling like it understands everything we want about a M3GAN movie ... and then completely botches the execution in about the final two-thirds of the movie.

I won't go into details at this juncture. But let's just say that where the lunacy of the original was grounded by an essentially realistic setting and underpinned by the emotions of a girl who lost her parents and an aunt who was trying to cope with the new challenges of parenthood, this movie goes quickly into the unreal space of a sort of sci-fit tech thriller, one in which there are underground laboratories, laborious expository dialogue about various processes and covert operations, and more swiped screens than you can shake a stick at. 

I won't give away too much, but let me just say if you thought M3GAN 2.0 would be a movie where a maniacal villain has a self-destruct function for his laboratory that would count down from ten minutes, then you were expecting something entirely different from this movie than I was.

Yes, this is as much of a genre shift as from Alien to Aliens, which went from horror to action. This goes from horror comedy to tech thriller. The comparison to the Alien series definitively ends there.

How the people who didn't go to see it on Thursday night knew this is beyond me, unless the advanced word of mouth about this was so deafeningly bad that they all just stayed away. If it was, I didn't hear it. 

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