MORGAN
★★☆
This shiny piece of science-fiction, like any good prototype, soon goes haywire. Morgan is a B-movie with pretension to high-minded inquiry, addressing artificial life and the sanctity of human existence, but when the story actually engages with the themes the only outcome is a reductive body count and artful blood splatter on concrete.
It's not exactly intellectually nourishing.
In a remote American lab surrounded by nature's bounty – bees, plants, native animals – scientists have created the unnatural Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy), an artificial human being who is five-years-old but looks and certainly acts like a teenager. Piqued at being denied access to the nearby woods, she stabs one of her lab coat-wearing handlers (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) in the eye with a pen.
This necessitates a risk assessment of "the L9 prototype" by buttoned-down corporate executive Lee Weathers (Kate Mara). Immune to both the secluded locale's cabin fever and the staff's obvious love for their creation – they describe Morgan as "she", whereas Lee uses "it" – the interloper must decide whether to terminate Morgan, a decision that becomes self-evident after a visiting shrink (Paul Giamatti) administers the worst psychological evaluation ever.
Morgan is directed by Luke Scott, the youngest son of Ridley Scott, the British filmmaker who is a producer here and, more importantly, the director of 1982's Blade Runner, the masterpiece that this urgent successor borrows more than a few strands of DNA from. In this case, the Scott 2.0 isn't an upgrade.
There is some sleek, if a touch obvious, uses of reflective surfaces to superimpose one face inside another, but Seth Owen's screenplay mostly ignores the possibilities suggested by this scientific hothouse, merely focusing on how the Morgan's designers – played by the likes of Michelle Yeoh, Toby Jones and Rose Leslie – have become her protective parents.
Anya Taylor-Joy, so good earlier this year in The Witch, captures the slightly off-key tone of someone almost human, but unlike Alex Garland's Ex Machina – a recent and superior story of synthetic creation – Morgan has no faith in your ability to analyse and potentially understand these characters. Once the star attraction fails her (survival) test, she's merely a teenage terminator in a hoodie.
The best thing this minor movie has going for it is the smart use of gender, with a preponderance of female characters meaning curious dynamics in how they relate to each other. Morgan calls Yeoh's Dr Cheng "mother", whereas Mara's Lee Weathers is instinctively a rival. When the facility's cook (Boyd Holbrook) tries to play alpha male, Lee isn't having it. "This is what I do," she tells him, taking care of business.