Photo: Universal Pictures
Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of M3GAN 2.0.
It’s been nearly 35 years since James Cameron’s genre-defining Terminator 2: Judgment Day hit theaters, but anyone who has seen it in the intervening decades can remember its resonant ending. After defeating the evil T-1000, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reprogrammed T-800 Terminator realizes he has to sacrifice himself to stave off the AI uprising and, with it, nuclear annihilation. As Sarah and John Connor drive off into a safer world, we hear her voice-over: “The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too. And also, is Skynet really that bad, anyway?”
Obviously, I made up that last part. Sarah Connor would never embrace the malevolent AI that tormented her in its quest to destroy humanity. That would betray the central themes of the Terminator franchise: the dangers of unchecked technology and the importance of prioritizing mankind over machines. I’m merely drawing attention to the absurdity of M3gan 2.0’s unabashedly pro-AI ending. Sure, the killer android first introduced in 2022’s M3gan is more shady diva than existential threat, but her artificial intelligence did beget a murder spree. Even as the sequel acknowledges all the carnage, it concludes with a compromise between man and machine that reads a lot like giving up.
M3gan 2.0 is, without question, the T2 to M3gan’s The Terminator, and it’s not particularly subtle about it. While the first movie was a horror film that saw the title doll terrorize 8-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw) and her roboticist aunt, Gemma (Allison Williams), the follow-up is strictly an action movie, in which M3gan returns to protect Gemma and Cady from Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), a military android built from M3gan’s prototype. In the film’s third act, Cady is kidnapped, and Gemma and her team must rescue her and stop Amelia from reaching an even more powerful AI known as the Motherboard. That machine, an early attempt at a helper robot that went haywire and started killing people in 1984 — the year The Terminator came out, incidentally — is being kept in a highly protected underground prison at the Palo Alto tech company where it was created.
While stopping AMELIA and getting to the Motherboard sounds like a fairly straightforward conclusion, M3GAN 2.0’s plot-heavy third act is far more convoluted than that. We discover that Amelia is not actually autonomous, but rather being controlled by Christian (Aristotle Athari), Gemma’s sort-of boyfriend who works for an anti-AI foundation. Christian hoped that M3gan’s rampage in the first movie would be enough to convince the public about the dangers of AI, but instead, the government saw an opportunity to invest in the technology. Christian and his allies built Amelia to sell to the military as a Trojan horse who would appear to reject her programming and act independently, all while being secretly controlled by Christian. Gemma, of course, knows too much, so Christian implants her with a neurochip that is supposed to make her subservient. In reality, M3gan has faked her own death and implanted her consciousness into the chip, so that she can live in Gemma’s head and help her fight back — with an assist from an exosuit that looks like a punier version of the one in Cameron’s Aliens. I’ll warn you right now that things do not get any less confusing from here.
Cady decides they can use Amelia to their advantage if they do a factory reset that will wrest the android from Christian’s control and bring back the original M3gan programming she was built with. The reboot works and Amelia/M3gan is poised to help them escape — before being immediately felled by EMP guns. Somehow those electromagnetic pulses push the M3gan out of her, and Amelia actually becomes autonomous, at which point she kills Christian and decides to free the Motherboard and destroy humanity after all. (There was almost certainly a more streamlined way to get to this point, but the movie insists on being two hours long.) It looks like all hope is lost when Amelia connects to the Motherboard and becomes an all-powerful being. Thankfully, M3gan has decided to sacrifice herself in order to save Cady and the human race — not because she’s been programmed to, but “because it’s right.” With an EMP charge affixed to her that will destroy every machine in the vicinity, M3gan grabs Amelia from behind and all three robots are killed.
Let’s put aside the staggeringly clunky plot beats that make up this film’s climax. The key takeaway is that M3gan has chosen to die nobly for the greater good, a move that mirrors the T-800 lowering himself into a vat of molten steel at the end of T2. M3gan’s redemptive arc is central to her sequel, even if the reality is that she’s fairly consistent throughout the movie. For the most part, she’s motivated by her programming, which tells her to protect Cady. She also gets outfitted with a chip created by Gemma that keeps her from killing people. But M3gan is never not on the right side in the movie: Aside from the requisite PG-13 rudeness, she’s basically always trying to help. This is a fundamental misread of what audiences liked about the character to begin with — who green-lit a M3gan sequel where her human kill count is zero? — and it’s a fumbled attempt at replicating the emotional core of T2. M3gan’s supposed sacrifice is made sillier both by the fact that she doesn’t really die (she backed herself up ahead of time, obviously) and by the coda that follows her “death” scene.
In the film’s final moments, Ms. Gemma goes to Washington, D.C., to talk about AI. This was always Christian’s plan, though he would have used the havoc Amelia wrought to advocate for crushing artificial intelligence before it gets out of hand. Gemma, however, has been deeply affected by M3gan’s redemption. She argues that we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We simply need better laws to regulate AI — we must teach it, train it, and “become better parents” to the technology. That way, she reasons, when these systems inevitably gain sentience, they might decide to work with mankind instead of against it. Much of what Gemma says in this scene parrots the bullshit propaganda we’re inundated with from AI evangelists on a daily basis: Humans condemn things they don’t understand. We do not need to be in competition with AI — we need to “co-evolve” with it. While this perspective may seem like the logical conclusion of Sarah Connor’s assessment that the T-800 was able to “learn the value of human life,” it’s actually a brazen escalation. And it arrives at a time when we’re far more conscious of the destructive power of AI technology, which may never become autonomous enough to bring on nuclear winter, but is already making us dumber and making our planet less inhabitable.
M3gan 2.0 might feel that its hands are tied as a riff on Terminator 2 — the movie has no choice but to turn the killer robot at its center into a force for good. Other choices, however, are indefensible. Positioning Christian and his anti-AI allies as the real villains gives the game away in terms of the movie’s politics. This would be akin to T2 revealing that the real problem wasn’t Skynet but the John Connor–led resistance against it. Gemma’s final plea to the government is even worse, a complete abdication of her morals and a baffling about-face given that she just watched the Amelia android gain autonomy and instantly try to wipe out the human race. Though it may be naive to expect M3gan 2.0 to plant itself on the right side of history, there’s something particularly depressing about a mealy-mouthed “AI is our friend” message in 2025. Perhaps it’s simply that writer-director Gerard Johnstone has seen the writing on the wall and determined that Christian’s crusade against the technology is a losing battle. After all, in a world where James Cameron has embraced AI, what hope is there for the rest of us?
