People obviously did not take important lessons from the best scifi movie last year, Ex Machina: Never act as God by making a human-like creation. As we have seen from many scifi films that take on the same theme, the artificial creation is never ending well and Morgan is not a movie with a different story.
The same is true for director Luke Scott who should take a lesson from the father's cinematic method, Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien) or from Alex Garland's Ex Machina earlier, so that his debut film has the potential to target the realm of action as well as the philosophy of intelligence artificial is not ending generic.
Morgan is an ambitious project from Scott, but he shows no skills to present world development and solid character. The film is a gig. Despite the many dialogues that try to explain a lot of technical things about artificial intelligence, the film just flickers a little exploration of the behavior and emotions that humans are the main theme. On the other hand, though not reluctant to display a sadistic scene, his peak confrontation in a forest is also not completely play-style action films that make me ask what Scott really wants to do here.
Just like Ex Machina, this film also takes its location in a remote location that is used as a place of research. Lee Weathers (Kate Mara), a consultant of a mysterious company assigned by his boss (Brian Cox) to investigate the incident that occurred in the place. Through the videotape, at the beginning of the movie we watched a teenager wearing a hoodie jacket stabbed the eye of an adult woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
Apparently this teen is not an ordinary teenager. And wrong, he is also not a cyborg. He is Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy), a synthetic man made from DNA engineering that looks exactly like a human, only with a pale skin, bigger pupils and darker lips. Lee's job is to assess whether the research object is worth continuing or to be eliminated.
While Lee considers Morgan no more a commodity (he calls it "it", instead of "her"), the group of scientists there considers Morgan as his own family. Instead of being considered a hazard, they looked at Morgan with a look of admiration and affection. One figure argues that this awkward behavior is due to their isolated condition at research sites over the years (I will not argue).
The only characters who may still be sane are Skip (Boyd Holbrook), the chef whose job it is to provide food for researchers. The slightly sane one is Dr Cheng (Michelle Yeoh), lead researcher. While the less sane start from Dr. Ziegler (Toby Jones), the originator of ideas; Brenda (Vinette Robinson) and Darren (Chris Sullivan), couples who should immediately have children remember how possessive they are at Morgan; until Dr. Menser (Rose Leslie), a psychologist who clearly had a "taste" of Morgan.
They are scientists who are basically very intelligent, but somehow take stupid decisions in every crucial situation, so it's no wonder then that Morgan who is locked up in thick glass-coated cells can run away and cause chaos. This is not a spoiler, because the development of the story from the manuscript written by Seth Owen we can guess easily. Nevertheless, the film is still trying to explain it all with exaggeration through many technical and philosophical theories. Sorry, yes, as a movie connoisseur, we certainly have khatam with the concept and can guess the twist at the end.
With all the predictability and familiarity in his genre, for some reason Morgan maintains his superserius narrative method, so refreshing as Paul Giamatti appears briefly as a much more aggressive assessor than Lee with more over-the-top pengawawaan too.
Taylor-Joy has an uncomfortable presence as it appears in The Witch. The film does not define it clearly, but some moments indicate that despite having a physical teenager, Morgan is just a child (hey, he is still 5 years old) who can not control himself. Although calm but he is ready to explode at any time. And Mara is the opposite; Lee is efficient and calculating. Which of them is more robotic?
Morgan is not a bad movie, let alone Scott has a good eye to present a picture that is pleasing to the eye. This is a film that wastes its potential to develop a theme. There is a much better film in exploring moral and philosophical questions about artificial intelligence with narrative structures similar to Morgan. Have I called Ex Machina?
