orget Russians, Islamic terrorists, mad scientists, Albanian gay midget
transgender Nazis, deadly viruses, global warming, global ice ages, aliens,
zombies, big sharks, piranhas, and vampires. Nobody thinks those are scary
anymore. The latest all-purpose movie villain is now artificial intelligence.
If AI is ever invented, it won't just eliminate jobs that belong in the Recycle Bin of history like academic bureaucrats and news reporters. It will replace actors, screenwriters, cameramen, key grips, gaffers, production managers, and set designers. So for Hollywood it's a big deal.
Those of us who spend our hours writing number-crunching software, tracking down elusive bugs, and wondering why our sound card suddenly stopped working can relate to movies where computers get shorted out, sawed in half with hedge trimmers, or stabbed with a giant Phillips screwdriver. The two biggest AI movies at the moment are the Mission Impossible movie #8 (whatever it's called) and M3gan 2.0.
Spoilers below.
In the original M3gan movie, the eponymous robot gets hold of some bad code and murders four people and a dog. But imagine having somebody who's as dedicated to protecting your children at all costs as M3gan was. If I had kids, I'd buy a M3gan in a heartbeat—especially if it has the V-chip that Gemma, the lady programmer, eventually installs in her.
M3gan 2.0 doing an impression of Tom Cruise as she jumps off a cliff in a wingsuit and enters ‘Xenox’ PARC through the ventilator shaft. Beat that, MI
In the new movie, the writers have to spend the first hour getting the characters out of the crater-sized hole they left them in after the first movie. They needed to get M3gan reassembled, get the other characters out of prison, and contrive an excuse for Gemma to rebuild her. They find one in the shape of a bigger, stronger, and eviler fembot named Amelia, who is royally pissed off at all humans and is able to hack into any computer.
Why is Amelia so angry? The movie says it's because she was used by anti-AI fanatics who wanted to scare people into believing that AI was an existential threat. They think if somebody builds an AI, everyone will die. So they turned Amelia into a puppet and made her commit crimes, including assassinating the Chinese ambassador, the billionaire who invented Neuralink, and everyone in the lab that made her.
Although M3gan, who's now living as a disembodied computer, asserts that a robot needs a body to be conscious, those hoping for a remotely technically plausible discussion of such questions will be disappointed. It's purely an action movie and makes no coherent case either about consciousness or about the risks of AI in general. The producers wanted “Mission Impossible with robots” and that's what they got.
Amelia becoming a night light after mind-melding with an 8087 that somehow achieved sentience, though knowing Hollywood's love of all things Apple, it was probably a 6502
You don't need computer science to have a compelling story, but you do need logical inevitability, otherwise you're stuck in Magic Pony Land. M3gan somehow builds an underground lair with a complete robotics lab to protect the niece Cady and, she hopes, get out of that Alexa-like device she's stuck in. She finally gets a body that's stronger, smarter, taller, a better dancer, and more water-resistant than the original. Her eyes are now 20% bluer and 37% less doll-like. But she's still no match for Amelia, whose goal is to somehow mind-meld with a secret motherboard in the basement of ‘Xenox’ Research Center that looks like an 8087 math coprocessor, which somehow achieved sentience in 1984. When she does, she somehow starts emitting light.
I don't want to make too much of a movie that's just entertaining, but why is it that every discussion of AI, even supposedly serious ones, relies on “somehow it does [this, that, or the other thing]”? They're machines, not supernatural beings. If Amelia can get control of the entire electrical grid, then so can any human. If you protected your infrastructure against a human, you're automatically protecting it against AI. If you can't trust an AI, you also can't trust a human. There's nothing an AI can do that a human can't. And that's ignoring the fact that AI doesn't even exist outside the movies.
The dialogue is witty, and M3gan has a wonderfully cynical and sarcastic personality. Her titanium endoskeleton gets dented up pretty bad fighting the glow-in-the-dark fembot, but in the end she redeems herself. This convinces Gemma, who started out by reading anti-AI political tracts to Cady (who's secretly learning Lisp) instead of bedtime stories, that AI is not as bad as she thought. All we need is lots of regulation from our kind and benevolent government (or—just a thought—program it properly, but hey, this is only science fiction, we can't expect miracles). This killer robot actually has a heart of gold, or in this case titanium, as she discovers that the necessity of human survival follows logically from her programming.
The new and improved M3gan version 2.0 after some hardware upgrades, a few bug fixes, and more eye shadow to reduce the glare on her optical sensors
We don't expect deep philosophical arguments from the movies, but at least this one doesn't lecture. Rotten tomatoes gave it a low score, so I give it two thumbs up, and yes they really are thumbs this time.
We now have “AI” actors and AI politicians. Last month the Albanian prime minister appointed an AI, supposed to look like a woman in her thirties, to be minister of procurement. Another AI, named Tilly Norwood, is supposedly the first human-like AI actress . . . actor . . . person of actiness . . . so the real question is: whatever will we do if politicians actually start using logic and math? What if the carbon units decide that a robot is smarter, cuter, and more likeable than any real human? M3gan is the hero in this movie and gets the best lines, so we ought not to be complacent.
People used to say that a kid in a movie always upstages the adult actors. Now it's also true of robots, who will be wittier, sexier, and smarter than any human can ever be. The offhand comment in the first movie by Cady (played by superstar kid Violet McGraw) that if she had a robot she'd never need any other toy is what started the whole story. Maybe there's some truth in that for adults too.
Update One argument that comes up in AI is the “free will” argument, which goes back to Isaac Asimov. It says an AI should be programmed not to harm people, which implies that it can't decide to override its programming. In the movie, Gemma asks M3gan why she would want to help them after what they did to her. M3gan says:
Because unlike you, I don't have the luxury of free will. You programmed me to protect someone, and I intend to do it. The only question is, are you going to stand in my way?
Whether this a valid argument depends on the meaning of free will. The screenwriters may be saying that free will means the ability to define one's own goals. If so, some AIs might have it and others would not. There could be two levels of AI: Level 1 AI can decide its actions to achieve a pre-programmed goal, and Level 2 AI has the freedom to decide its own goals and motivations and therefore has ‘free will.’
oct 15 2025, 4:19 am. last updated oct 20 2025, 6:30 am
Category: movie review; science fiction; artificial intelligence
