![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/3aa75fbcf298f26684411abd6f27cef732-m3gan-2-explainer.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Universal Pictures\n <\/p>\n
Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of M3GAN 2.0.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been nearly 35 years since James Cameron\u2019s genre-defining Terminator 2: Judgment Day<\/a> 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\u2019s 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: \u201cThe 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?\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019m merely drawing attention to the absurdity of M3gan 2.0<\/a>\u2019s unabashedly pro-AI ending. Sure, the killer android first introduced in 2022\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n M3gan 2.0 is, without question, the T2 to M3gan\u2019s The Terminator, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s prototype. In the film\u2019s 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 \u2014 the year The Terminator came out, incidentally \u2014\u00a0is being kept in a highly protected underground prison at the Palo Alto tech company where it was created.<\/p>\n While stopping AMELIA and getting to the Motherboard sounds like a fairly straightforward conclusion, M3GAN 2.0\u2019s 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\u2019s sort-of boyfriend who works for an anti-AI foundation. Christian hoped that M3gan\u2019s 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\u2019s head and help her fight back \u2014 with an assist from an exosuit that looks like a punier version of the one in Cameron\u2019s Aliens. I\u2019ll warn you right now that things do not get any less confusing from here.<\/p>\n Cady decides they can use Amelia to their advantage if they do a factory reset that will wrest the android from Christian\u2019s control and bring back the original M3gan programming she was built with. The reboot works and Amelia\/M3gan is poised to help them escape \u2014 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 \u2014 not because she\u2019s been programmed to, but \u201cbecause it\u2019s right.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s put aside the staggeringly clunky plot beats that make up this film\u2019s 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\u2019s redemptive arc is central to her sequel, even if the reality is that she\u2019s fairly consistent throughout the movie. For the most part, she\u2019s 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\u2019s basically always trying to help. This is a fundamental misread of what audiences liked about the character to begin with \u2014 who green-lit a M3gan sequel where her human kill count is zero? \u2014\u00a0and it\u2019s a fumbled attempt at replicating the emotional core of T2. M3gan\u2019s supposed sacrifice is made sillier both by the fact that she doesn\u2019t really die (she backed herself up ahead of time, obviously) and by the coda that follows her \u201cdeath\u201d scene.<\/p>\n In the film\u2019s final moments, Ms. Gemma goes to Washington, D.C., to talk about AI. This was always Christian\u2019s 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\u2019s redemption. She argues that we can\u2019t put the genie back in the bottle. We simply need better laws to regulate AI \u2014 we must teach it, train it, and \u201cbecome better parents\u201d 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\u2019re inundated with from AI evangelists on a daily basis: Humans condemn things they don\u2019t understand. We do not need to be in competition with AI \u2014\u00a0we need to \u201cco-evolve\u201d with it. While this perspective may seem like the logical conclusion of Sarah Connor\u2019s assessment that the T-800 was able to \u201clearn the value of human life,\u201d it\u2019s actually a brazen escalation. And it arrives at a time when we\u2019re 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<\/a> and making our planet less inhabitable<\/a>.<\/p>\n M3gan 2.0 might feel that its hands are tied as a riff on Terminator 2 \u2014 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\u2019s politics. This would be akin to T2 revealing that the real problem wasn\u2019t Skynet but the John Connor\u2013led resistance against it. Gemma\u2019s 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\u2019s something particularly depressing about a mealy-mouthed \u201cAI is our friend\u201d message in 2025. Perhaps it\u2019s simply that writer-director Gerard Johnstone has seen the writing on the wall and determined that Christian\u2019s crusade against the technology is a losing battle. After all, in a world where James Cameron has embraced AI<\/a>, what hope is there for the rest of us?<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Universal Pictures Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of M3GAN 2.0. It\u2019s been nearly 35 years…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,14510,738,19106,54,14349,53,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-20541","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-allison-williams","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-endings","12":"tag-horror","13":"tag-m3gan-2-0","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114758387170092629","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}