How M3GAN 2.0 blurred the lines between human and AI

After a deadly encounter with the reality of unbridled AI in an invulnerable robot body in M3GAN, M3GAN 2.0 sees the android’s original creator Gemma (Allison Williams, The Mindy Project) now advocating for AI regulation along with her cybersecurity expert partner (Aristotle Athari, Hacks). Instead, they’re working on an experimental robotic exoskeleton that’ll enhance human strength and mobility. But M3GAN’s schematics were leaked, and a new mechanical menace, AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), has escaped military control. She has a score to settle with billionaire Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement, Harold and the Purple Crayon), and the only way to stop her might be a family reunion with Gemma’s niece Cady (Violet McGraw, The Life of Chuck, coming to Showmax on 5 February).

Stream M3GAN 2.0, and the original film M3GAN on Showmax now.

So much has changed in the world of AI since M3GAN (performed by Amie Donald, voiced by Jenna Davis) first performed her viral robot dance while swinging around the blade of an office guillotine. We’ve gone from laughing at messed-up hands with six fingers to having to triple check every viral social media post to figure out whether it was AI-generated. And as financial backers of the AI revolution let slip the extent to which they see the rest of humanity as expendable, M3GAN 2.0 has become more than a simple techno-terror movie. 

Read on as actress Ivanna Sakhno, writer-director Gerard Johnstone, and the film’s production team pull back the android’s skin to reveal how they blurred the lines between human and robot, and what that exposed about being human, in a world that’s becoming increasingly dehumanising.

Deep in the uncanny valley

To create AMELIA, the visual effects team at Morot FX Studio had to create an animatronic version of actress Ivanna Sakhno, which she found disturbingly realistic. "It felt like I had left my own body, and I was looking at myself from a distance. You can probably understand how unsettling that would be," she admits. 

How unsettling? Crew members often mistook the AMELIA animatronic for Ivanna, and Ivanna for AMELIA, while she was in the room. "People would come up to the animatronic and start talking, and then they realise it's not Ivanna," reveals actress and producer Allison Williams, "Or people would go up to Ivanna thinking she’s the animatronic and start moving her, or stepping over her without realising she's a human being.”

Then keep in mind that part of the plot has AMELIA acting as a sex-bot under a man’s control, and imagine what it would be like to see crew members handling the object that looks like you. It’s part of a conversation that’s now happening in real life, as women discover that xAI’s chatbot Grok is being used in apps like Clothoff to take the images they’ve posted online and digitally undress them and sexualise them without their consent – at a current rate of one new image generated per minute. 

AMELIA, who has M3GAN’s enhanced intelligence, is understandably a little upset. "I don't see AMELIA as a psychopathic robot," says Ivanna. "I see her as somebody who is trying to understand her own identity, her own wiring, and trying to understand why she was put into this world in a way that is quite cruel and traumatising. She is a highly advanced AI that was created for military purposes, but throughout this storyline we see her beginning to question her own autonomy. She is, to me, a living being grappling with existential questions."

Bringing M3GAN back

The production was filled with conversations about identity and uniqueness, even when talking about their robots. "When we started designing M3GAN 2.0, we didn't want to lose what people loved about her," says director Gerard Johnstone. "We played around with different hairstyles and looks, but anything that strayed too far just did not feel like M3GAN anymore. What we did want to push was her sophistication – her expressions, her precision, and even her lip sync. Mark Setrakian, (Pacific Rim, Men in Black) as animatronic lead, built his own software to recalibrate all of M3GAN's functions. We managed to push her even further into the uncanny valley," says Gerard. 

But they went a little too far…

"On the first movie, we tried to have her hands moving, and they didn't really work," explains Adrien Morot, founder of Morot FX Studios, "Or they worked, but not to the degree I was hoping. They were a bit stiff and limited, but M3GAN should be an evolved robot, almost human. It should be just on the edge of reality. On this film, we have built a completely animatronic set of hands. They looked too real on camera, they moved so much like a human, that we had to make the conscious decision to take a step back and make the movement intentionally more robotic so that you don't think it's just somebody wearing a mask. It's the first time I have ever been in that position of making something less fluid and less organic,” he reveals. 

Humans doing The Robot

When it came to M3GAN’s dancing and AMELIA’s movement, behind the scenes, none of that could happen without humans creating something real first. 

"We knew people would be expecting M3GAN to dance again, but I didn't want to repeat the same moment from the first film," says Gerard. "So we created this scenario where M3GAN is undercover at an AI convention – a robot pretending to be a human, pretending to be a robot. She gets caught in the spotlight and has no choice but to dance to avoid suspicion. We imagined it as a kind of robotic breakdancing, something stylised and precise.”

To develop that movement, they turned to M3GAN's original movement coach Luke Hawker, who worked hand-in-hand with choreographer Kylie Norris. And for M3GAN 2.0's iconic dance, they tapped BARBIN, a Chinese (human) robot performer, whose moves they then recorded via motion capture to use in the film. "Her physical control was so exact that it already felt animated," marvels Gerard. 

Then, crossing back over to the other side of the AI-human divide, Gerard and his team turned to real-life robots to inspire AMELIA’s eeriest moment. "Boston Dynamics released a video of Atlas, their humanoid robot, doing this wild acrobatic flip where its legs go over its head – something that looked completely unnatural, almost impossible,” reveals Gerard. “We thought we could replicate it with visual effects. Then our team found Regina Hegemann, a contortionist who could actually do the move in real life … that became the perfect way to introduce her (AMELIA) on screen.”

Having thoughts? Step into the uncanny valley yourself. Stream M3GAN 2.0, and the original film M3GAN on Showmax now.