It's just bloody typical, really. All summer long I was hard-pressed to find more than four films over the entire period from June to the end of August that I wanted to see at the cinema. And then from the end of August onwards, there's suddenly at least a film a week. You really couldn't spread them out a little better, distributors? There weren't that many summer blockbusters this year that you would have been up against; instead there's a whole load of films bumping up against each other in September to the point where I'm having to keep a list to make sure I see them all. And the first film for September is Morgan.
"Morgan" is an artificial humanoid lifeform made with synthetic DNA and nanotech. By the time she is five years old she looks to be in her mid-to-late teens, and her abilities are said to be "off the scale". Unfortunately, there has been an "incident" where Morgan stabbed one of the doctors who had been taking care of her/overseeing the experiment in the eye, and now risk assessment consultant Lee has arrived to assess the situation and make the decision as to whether or not this experiment - Morgan - should be terminated. Things are made more complicated by the team's attachment to Morgan after five years "raising" her, and by Morgan her/itself, who as a sentient being does not wish to die. The question of ethics in this situation soon becomes a moot point, however, when the team and Morgan decide to act to save Morgan's life...
I saw Morgan in an almost completely empty cinema screen - it was just myself and another patron, who muttered to himself through the entire movie, which made it a slightly disconcerting experience. Regardless, from this experience I strongly suspect that Morgan won't have too long a cinematic run, which is something of a shame as it's not too shabby a film. It's not brilliant, but it's not all that bad, and it's certainly a good deal more thoughtful and intelligent than some other films we've seen recently (*cough*The Purge: Election Year*cough*) There is a legitimate argument to be made as to whether it even qualifies as horror - I say it does, using the idea that a horror film is a film which can bring about feelings of "fear, shock, or disgust" in its audience, and I feel that Morgan does a good job at invoking at least some of those feelings during the course of its 100 minutes - but it most definitely has the "sci-fi" tag added to it as well. There's horror in the idea of creating a sentient, intelligent lifeform only to treat it as little more than a commodity and be prepared to euthanize it when it proves too much trouble; there's horror in seeing the lengths a person will go to survive; and there's horror in the realisation that the people calling for Morgan's destruction might have been right all along (that's not a spoiler; it implies as much in the trailer).
There is a twist to Morgan, and this is actually where the film falls down. I for one started picking up on it pretty early on in the film, and by the time we had passed the halfway mark I was pretty much convinced of it (and I was right). the twist itself isn't a dealbreaker for the film; if anything, it actually makes sense. However, the film's coda puts the twist up on screen with the equivalent of sirens and flashing lights, just in case any narcoleptics were in the audience who might have missed everything that pointed to this in the previous 90+ minutes. It annoys me when a film that has, for 95% of its runtime, treated its audience as intelligent enough to keep up with it, only to finish with the equivalent of screaming "Rosebud was the sled!" at the top of its lungs in case anyone had missed it.
Morgan was directed by Luke Scott, who is the son of that very famous director Ridley Scott (who in fact served as producer on the film), and this is the other big problem with Morgan - its subject matter leads it to be compared to one of Scott Senior's most famous sci-fi films that wasn't Alien (I'd say which one but it should be obvious and also could potentially be a spoiler considering how the two films dovetail - if you've figured it out please bear that in mind). I thought I was just getting a little distracted and coming up with an errant fan theory when I started considering Morgan to be something of a prequel, but a quick look on the internet has shown me that I'm not the only one to have seen it this way. It's probably not in a film's best interests to be so easily comparable to one of the best films of the director's father's output, because it's always going to come off as the lesser of the two. In the end Morgan tries hard and shows potential, but ends up too much in the shade of another, bigger film.
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