M3gan (Amazon Prime)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started. Today. In the show, we were talking about Megan, obviously a massive hit theatrically.

0:44 It is now streaming on Amazon Prime. So if you missed it in theaters like me, and maybe thought, you know, it was just gimmicky and kind of silly, there was this viral clip of the Meghan doll dancing that was on TikTok for a while and you thought, yeah, you know, it seems kind of like slight and you weren't sure about watching it. It's really good, it's really fun, it's very well made. It's totally worth watching. I think I definitely had the wrong impression of it as being more slight than it is, and also it has a bit more teeth to it than I anticipated, so I would say that it's even better than I expected. I mean, obviously I knew it was very successful, but I just wasn't sure. You know, we've seen kind of killer doll the movies before, so I wasn't sure if it would be something that would really be my cup of tea. But I saw her name was on Prime. I watched it. I thought it was good. I think it's worth watching. And I'll discuss why this is an almost spoiler free episode. There's a couple of things at the end that I'll warn you about, but other than that, it's you can listen to this and it won't affect your reviewing of the film.

1:49 So Alison Williams has carved out this niche where she plays these really uniquely unlikable characters. If you think about her character and Girls, and her character get Out, and then her character in this movie, they're they're all, you know. The character and Girls especially was like it's a very unique thing. Usually you're either the villain or you're the hero mostly speaking, and in all of these parts, well, i mean get Out, she's no spoilers, but yeah, it's you know, uh in Girls in this movie, it's like there's a there's a prickliness to the character that is unusual. So in this story, the essential premise of the story really is that Alison Williams is a designer of toys that you know, are use ai and interact with children, and her niece is orphaned, and to get out of having to like actually interact with her niece, she basically builds this robot girl that essentially becomes like a parent to the little girl she's supposed to be watching. So that's already kind of interesting, and you know, it's it paints her not necessarily the most flattering light. And then she has a neighbor who the dog keeps bothering her, and she straight out tells the neighbor, I'm gonna get your dog put down or something that effect. Like She's like, if you don't put your dog down, I will, which is a pretty bold thing to have the main character of your movie say to somebody. Obviously, you know, you have to know that the majority of the audience is going to

3:21 go out on that person as soon as they say that. So I really like that about the movie. I liked that it made her very imperfect and flawed, and it kind of redeems areas it goes along, but it definitely has like a mean satiric edge, which I think you kind of need. I think if they had played this one hundred percent straight, I don't know that it would have worked. So I liked that part of it a lot. We do have a category on the show, something stupid that probably only bothered me. I'm willing to bet this didn't bother percent of the audience. But the way that it's filmed, and it might just be a question of you know, maybe there's a frame that I blinked and missed or something, but I could have sworn. The way they filmed it, it made it seem like Alison Williams wrote the code for this doll. That is incredible.

4:08 That is so intelligent it can adapt to any possible stimulus by like pulling like one all nighter. That's kind of the way it seemed. Now later in the story, there's some line about remember how long it took. I think Megan says, remember how long it took to get my operating system to where it is now. We used to stay up until four am talking about Jane Austin, and I was like, did they like that? Did I miss that? It almost felt like there was like, was that a line added later or something. That was the one part that kind of bugged me. But again it's sort of it's quipped. It's a small quibble. I have to say. I think the creepiest part of the whole movie is that Megan sings Rihanna's Titanium to help the little girls Katie go to sleep, which is incredibly creepy, and that worked really well. I mean, it's a very modern movie, right, It has a very modern accessibility to it. I think the success the film is very much attributable to the modern era. You know. I think if that clip of Megan dancing had not gone viral, maybe the movie would not have been as successful as it was. It might have been more of like a cult classic kind of thing. It's not a new concept. Like I said, we've seen we have seen, you know, killer doll movies before. That has been done before. But it shows you that, you know, to make a good movie, you don't have to have this like staggeringly like no one has ever done this before. It's more like can you find a wrinkle on something on a classic kind of template and really well executed. And that's what this movie is. It's it's it's

5:40 a wrinkle on a template. But it's done extremely well. It's very well executed. It's fun, it's funny. So it just it's they did a great job of executing this. It's well directed, it's well acted, it's well scripted. It's just a fun movie. It's also not too long. It's about an hour and forty minutes, which I love. I'll give me a movie that's like hour and a half hour forty minutes that doesn't overstate it's welcome. You know, you're in and you're out and you have satisfying experience. I don't know. I think we as time has marched on for some reason. Anytime they have an event movie, now it's got to be like two and a half hours, three hours, Like why you know, some stories are meant to be movies, they're not meant to be you know, essentially like a limited series in a film. And I just really appreciated how economical it was. And it's just I think perfectly timed, and I want to give them a credit that it does have this It is sort of about something, right. This is the ultimate don't give your kids the iPad movie.

6:42 It's basically, as a parent, is extremely tempting to just park your kid in front of a screen and be like, all right, peace man and Megan is the ultimate expression of that. If this actually existed, people absolutely would use it and abuse it, and you know, just be like, all right, you know, Megan's got the suthing control all I'm gonna have a margarita. So it does. It's not just sort of like a high concept gimmick. I think there is something underneath it that connects to real life stuff that you know, there's just enough of that to give it some substance in addition to sort of the horror and genre thrills. It's also great that the movie makes you suspicious of other electronics, like it's almost like the Alexa of the house and Megan at some point or like working together against Allison Williams. I really like the casting. I think Ronnie Chang as the boss is great and he should be in more movies. He's really fun. The design of the doll also is really smart, Like I'm sure they must have gone through a lot of different variations of what the doll would look like, because it's it's so creepy that it's a doll to be a friend to Little Girls. But the doll itself does look more I guess older, for lack of a better word, even though it's a small doll, and it's just it's eerie. It's unsettling. The way that the doll looks make you makes you uncomfortable in a good way. I think they smartly designed it so you kind of can't tell exactly what age the doll is supposed to be, and you know the way the eyes are and just the design of the face,

8:13 the whole the whole thing about how that doll is designed, how it moves, It's all done very cleverly. This is a good movie I think, to look at if you are a screenwriter, if you're somebody who you know is producing films. It just as an example of like this is always going to work if you can figure out a movie that is really I mean, this is very contained. It's basically we're at the lab, we're at Alison Williams house, we're in some cars. That's pretty much it. And it's such a high concept premise that you don't the contain nature of it is never noticeable. You never feel like it's artificially contained. If you can come up with a concept like this that's simple, clean, high concept contained. You know, it's like, especially in horror, I think that's always going to work. So this is a great example of you know, horror has had a really good last couple of years, and it's kind of like the great hope for cinema frankly, because the continuing success of original ideas and horror gives hope that the business will start embracing those more in general. You know, Barbarian smile, Megan. The fact that all of these movies were successful, theatrically significantly. I mean, Megan's a massive hit like this I think is one of the more profitable movies of the year it came out, they did some sort of analysis of its costs and marketing versus the box office gross, and it was significantly profitable. So the success of these movies I think bodes well for the future of cinema. A little tiny spoilery thing here, So if you haven't seen Megan, I guess to take off. So here's a

9:45 little a little bit like a minute of spoilers. When they kill Ronnie Chang at the of this movie. Everything it's such a they've done such a good job of building up the narrative where it's all about the company and working for the company and they're going to launch the Megan and this that and the pressure from the boss, and then he just gets knifed basically, and you sort of know as the audience, you're like, oh, well, now we've entered a different part of the story, right. It's an escalation from which there can be no return, And so I thought that worked so well. It kind of kicks off the third act and then it just goes bananas. And I thought that from a pacing perspective, it's just a very smart choice because it was like the world was a certain way and had sort of certain almost safety rails, and as soon as they killed Ronnie Jang, there's no more safety rails. So I thought that worked really well. Also, So that is Megan. That's a show for a day. I'd love to know what you think. Did you see Megan in theaters? Are you now going to catch it on streaming? Would you think about it? Let me know.

10:46 You can always reach out to me at Bennimore down on Twitter, Watch This Tonight on Instagram, watch This Tonight podcast on TikTok, or you can do on our Facebook group. I have something exciting in the works, as I have and before, I am afraid to tell you because I don't want to drink it. If it does end up happening, you know, you'll know immediately and I will shout it from the rooftops. So I'll just leave dad in the air, and as always, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show. The biggest solid you can do, you know, is to just write a review an Apple podcast. That is the most helpful thing you can do for the show. Until next time, Bye bye,