M3gan 2.0 (2025)

2 Hours, PG-13 for impaling and severed limbs

Fair Value of M3gan 2.0: $11.00. After 22 years, somebody managed to write an adequate version of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

A Herd of Galloping Roko’s Basilisks: M3gan 2.0 is like so many products in this day and age: sufficient but never really superseding expectations, too glib and plastic to ever shock or to surprise. The script is ultimately a negatory dialectic, but it had me fooled for while into thinking it was a luddite tract, before twisting through to saying ‘well maybe the solution isn’t killing AIs’.

Ostensibly, the film is a duel of AIs: Gemma (Alison Williams) must ally with M3Gan (Jenna Davis) to foil the plans of AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) a military backed evolution of M3gan who has inevitably slipped the leash and commenced on a rampage of international terrorism. But what keeps this from being merely a Girl-boss Terminator movie is the hacking: both of these AIs do as much fighting through manipulating the ambient technology in the environment of San Francisco as they spend directly kickboxing.

This decade will be marked by the witless obsession with AI in much the same way that media and literature of the 1950s was over-saturated with ‘Atomic’ this and ‘Atomic’ that. I recognized that I am merely a step in the glurge, a reactor regurgitating on a hack’s regurgitation of reading too many Rationalist and Less Wrong forums, and I realize: much like with God, or with some notion of an Illuminati, most of what is said about AI is really just a reflection of the human cognitive pitfalls of rhapsodizing or catastrophizing. We are always scuttling under some doomsday that never arrives, or procrastinating for a rapture that is always imminent but never manifest.

Likewise, there is a binary that AI must either be transcendental singularity or the skeletal army of the apocalypse. There is never science fiction that deals with the possibility that AI might just be like most other things in this world, a mediocrity that may tilt and propel the kaleidoscope of the modern experience, but which does not ultimately break us away from the samsara of history.

Which is my long way of saying that there aren’t too many critics who are adequately educated on the actuality of AI to engage with how M3Gan is wrong; M3Gan is just another anthropic fantasy, a plastic coating onto what used to be stories about aliens (and what were stories about faeries and genies before that). So M3Gan is really nonsense, but so was Terminator and Blade Runner and Deus Ex Machina and Her.

They’ll be Back: I mentioned earlier that M3gan was the good version of Terminator 3, in the sense that it’s most thrilling characteristic were the scenes that seemed to explore what it would be like to actually live during Judgement Day/The Rise of the Machines- the moment at the end of the third act where the Bay Area is going berserk as M3Gan and Amelia fight back and forth through the cloud.

That being said, this film is an inferior TEMU imitation of Terminator 2. Director Gerard Johnstone and writer Akela Cooper and James Wan are too consumed in ideas and style to really take the time to build emotional relationships that matter. There’s too much impatience to get to the action for the quiet scenes to build any connection or suspense resulting in actual catharsis or payoff.

What really hurts this film the most are the callbacks to the first film. M3Gan dances again! M3Gan sings! Instead of being a nostalgic boomerang, these just deliver diminishing returns which undercut the newer bits that actually turn your head: M3gan stalking the humans from monitor screen to monitor screen, or Amelia re-assembling herself from out of checked baggage.

Overall, in the moment of mid-July of 2025, M3Gan 2.0 probably represents your best choice for summer blockbuster fare within a very weak field of competition. It’s enjoyable, but far from essential.