When a parent gives their child a new toy, it’s really a gift to both of them, the hours of fun that occupy the youngster also afford their caretaker some free time. If a work-from-home mom or dad needs an afternoon to knock out some spreadsheets, or just some damn peace and quiet during the last legs of a road trip, it’s tempting enough to plonk a kid in front of Bluey and call it a day. At a certain saturation point, however, this becomes an easy way out of parenting that can have ruinous results down the developmental road. The digitization of playtime – with kiddie settings now on tablets, where autoplaying streams draw from infinite on-demand content libraries – has brought a renewed urgency to the question of what deleterious effects next-gen tech may have on the mushy, impressionable brains of our precious angels. At the vanguard of this insidious threat looms M3gan.
Standing 4ft tall and armed with the most cutting-edge artificial intelligence that modern programming has to offer, the “Model 3 Generative Android” represents the final frontier in killer-dolly narratives. She sings. She dances. She wants to be your bestie and she’ll use the blade of an industrial paper-cutter to massacre anyone standing in her way. In her self-titled, star-making movie vehicle released to US theaters this past weekend and in UK ones this week, M3gan drags an august lineage of homicidal playthings into the future with a perfectly pitched flair for campy fun.
