There is a certain trend of contemporary consumer cinema, that of popcorn and carbonated bibitone, to let yourself be snagged by the language and internet trends. In the sense that the terms, times and discursive forms that are used on the net, especially on social networks, influence the way in which some of these films are expressed. A practical example? A Minecraft movie. A commercial operation whose task was to bring to the room the transposition of the best -selling video game of all time, precisely Minecraft. The result is clumsy and quite bit dodged from a creative point of view, capable despite this to demolish the box office, reaching almost a billion dollars, a figure beyond the more rosy expectations.

Much of the merit is of the spread of word of word of view between Tiktok, Reels and shorts, when moments extracted from the film created a “meme” phenomenon relaunched everywhere. The point is that by watching a film Minecraft you have the feeling that those moments – especially those who have to do with the character of Jack Black, Steve – are designed, formatted and inserted to fulfill exactly that purpose. Be extrapolated, put on the net and circular. A catchphrase marketing already set out within the film, even at the cost of breaking the narrative ‘logic’ of the work – we think of certain musical moments crammed at random between one scene and another, a type of curtain with which Tiktok himself was born.

A web phenomenon

All this premise is needed to get to talk about “M3gan 2.0”, which is in this playing field and is in the cinema since June 26 with Universal Pictures. The film written and directed by Gerard Johnstone is the sequel to M3gan, a 2023 film always directed by Johnstone and on that occasion written, however by Akela Cooper (who remains as a subject). M3gan was one of the last shots really spot on by the Blumhouse Productions, a production house that over the past few years has established itself as the company that churns out low budget horror and which then realize great results.

From then on, there were not exactly exciting projects, and then the return of one of the most amusing and controversial characters of recent cinema is a breath of oxygen. Because that of M3gan is in all respects the return of a pop icon. Who had decreed it? The Internet. And Tiktok. At the center of the first film by Johnstone, who courted nuances of horror and splatter however in an already marked key of irony, there was in fact this android designed to help children in the formation and which instead ended up breaking the parameters of his programming. So he frees what he seemed to do. Including killing people and … dancing.

And the Ballets of M3gan did not use much to become a viral content, in line with the paradoxical (but truly brilliant) discrepancy between the childish aesthetic, the fashion cover clothing and the cruelty that the robot was stained. And it is precisely on this side between cynicism and grotesque, mixed in a deadly and spot on the funny, the humor, the incorrect, the cartoonish, which recalibrates from the top to the bottom of M3gan 2.0.

More memes than meme

Via the horror tracks: now we are in the field of a muscle action, without pretensions of any seriousness. The big questions are away: basically an old moral question remains as old as the science fiction narrative is, that is, what value to assign to the individuality of artificial beings, but also here without too many pretensions of seriousness. Inside a new android, Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), eager to turn against her creators and dominate the world. Inside a new M3gan, obviously survived the events of the first chapter and now in a new guise of an anti -heroine blocked alongside her creator Gemma (Allison Williams) and her pupil Cady (Violet Mcgraw).

And this rethinking the structure of the film itself, bringing it to the size of a web icon, leads M3gan 2.0 to overtake the meme itself on the right. To position his nonsense instances not as tears compared to general fiber, but to agree them as filaments of a work that is much more toy, aware of having reached a point where it could not have been anything else.

Then it is the film that actively appropriates (willingly or unwillingly) of that internet language before he is to engulf it. Thus slips in an even more loaded and unbridled Luna Park of colors, rompers and curtains that monkey an aesthetic between eighty and ninety (even here, the trend), making M3gan remain, with a triple carpiate jump, incredibly consistent with herself. Now and until the next ballet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nn8j8-gfe8