Morgan Fails to Deliver on its Own Concepts

David Leaman-Miller
Sep 8, 2016
3 min read

Morgan, written by Seth Owen and directed by Ridley Scott’s son Luke Scott has a lot of interesting ideas. The film opens with a top down security cam shot of Morgan, a genetically enhanced humanoid, sitting at a table with one of the researchers who invented her (or it). Morgan, hauntingly played by Ana Taylor-Joy, is upset because she was not allowed to go outside that day. She (or it) looks at her (or its) hands and proceeds to quickly and brutally attack the researcher, repeatedly stabbing her in the eye. Something has clearly gone wrong with the prototype. Enter Lee Weathers, a by the books corporate risk consultant played by Kate Mara. After receiving instructions from a mysterious disembodied voice spouting exposition, Weathers arrives at the remote mountain estate where all of this is going down. Her job is to collect information and make a recommendation back to corporate on what should be done with Morgan.

Ana Taylor-Joy as Morgan

The film Morgan plays with some intriguing ideas. Ana Taylor-Joy's deeply personal yet somehow grotesquely unnatural performance as the title character keeps the audience guessing how human she (or it, as Lee Weathers insists on calling her) really is. Repeated flashbacks to Morgan as a child happily exploring the natural world and the lakefront setting of the film’s finale raise interesting questions about the role of nature in human development and nurture. The ethical dilemmas faced by the team as they try to decide whether or not to eliminate Morgan is interesting to see unfold. There are even hints of interesting ideas about corporate power and secrecy. The film also has interesting framing that maps character's reflections on top of each other sparking interesting thoughts about identity and creates clever foreshadowing. Unfortunately, Morgan adequately explores none of these ideas and the resulting film is grossly unsatisfying.

See doesn't this look like there are some interesting pieces at play?

Oh wait, it's just a horror movie.

Most films these days have the problem of a decent premise getting scaled up too big and losing control of itself. Morgan has the opposite problem. Morgan takes an interesting, albeit rehashed, idea about genetic alteration, but then scales the story back too much, suffocating itself and leaving no room to explore its own ideas. What could have been an interesting wrestling of big ideas devolves into a survival of the fittest bloodbath. I went in to the theater expecting a less good Ex Machina, but what I got was closer to a less good Kill Bill. Ex Machina, last year’s master piece directed by Alex Garland, features a very similar plot and set design (see below), but it took its own ideas seriously. Tension continuously rises throughout the film because we don’t know what to believe, who to trust, what is going to happen, or even what we want to happen. All we do know is that the dam has to burst and someone is going to get hurt, and the surprise ending of the film is powerful not because it "got us” but because it advanced the ideas that were present throughout the film.

Morgan mistakes tension and stakes with violence. About half way through the film loses the tension it had started creating and instead becomes a predictable, boring, and bloody run of the mill horror movie. The clever camera work from earlier is replaced with incomprehensible shaky-cam while poorly fitting and blatant music cues come to the foreground of the sound mix. I am no longer wondering what is going to happen or what it all means, I am just waiting for it to be over. The film culminates in a twist ending that feels like it was thought up in a dorm room brainstorming session and never revisited. The twist ending is completely unsatisfying partly because it was predictable, but mainly because it undermined rather than served the ideas the film had been pushing throughout. It was a twist for the sake of a twist.

The first half of this film had me engaged, but the second and third act completely failed to deliver.