It is never a good thing when a story’s misdirection turns out to be more interesting than the actual direction from which it is trying to distract you. And that is precisely what goes wrong with Morgan, the feature directorial debut of Luke Scott, son of celebrated director Ridley Scott (who serves here as a producer). The screenplay by Seth W. Owen operates on the principle of hiding the story’s big twist in plain sight, which it does reasonably well. Unfortunately, though, the big revelation near the end short-circuits the film’s most interesting dynamics in favor of something much more routine and cynical, and it doesn’t help that the twist bears a striking similarity to the underlying questions regarding the humanity (or lack thereof) of the protagonist in Ridley Scott’s most famous film, Blade Runner (1982). In that film, set in the near future, Harrison Ford played a bounty hunter named Rick Deckard who was tracking down a group of wayward “replicants,” genetically engineered human clones who needed to be “retired”; yet, by the end of the film (especially in its later cuts), it is quite clear that Deckard is the very thing he is hunting.

And so we have Morgan. For much of the film, which unfolds almost entirely in and around an isolated research facility deep in the otherwise untrammeled woods, we are led to believe that the plot involves an icy risk assessment expert named Lee Weathers (Kate Mara), who is given carte blanche by her corporate overlords to investigate an incident at the facility in which Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy), a genetically engineered human-like entity, stabbed one of the facility’s workers (Jennifer Jason Lee) repeatedly in the eye (we see the incident unfold in chilling real time via security camera footage in the film’s opening sequence). With her sensible, slicked down hair and power-gray suits and black heels, Lee is stern, unflappable, and all business as she goes about her investigation, but as the story unfolds we begin to see that there is more to her than meets the eye. We learn literally nothing about her background even as we learn quite a bit about everyone else, and soon we see that she is an expert in hand-to-hand combat and handling weapons and is virtually superhuman in her ability to withstand physical violence. Well, as it turns out, she is something other than human; in fact, she is a genetic creation of the same corporation that engineered Morgan, and her investigation was really just a test of her abilities and willingness to adhere to a directive, something that the more emotionally complex and unstable Morgan is incapable of doing.

We learn all of this late in the game, although there is a steady accumulation of clues—particularly involving Lee’s lack of emotional affect, her robotic determination, and her incredible physical prowess—that makes the revelation less shocking than simply inevitable. The problem is that this twist draws attention away from what the film had successful done up until then, which is build a fascinating and ethically perplexing quandary around Morgan’s ontology. As played by Anya Taylor-Joy, last seen earlier this year as the teenage Puritan drawn to the dark side in The Witch (2016), Morgan is simultaneously creepy and pathetic, vicious and sympathetic (it helps that Taylor-Joy has an usually drawn face that can be accentuated to look either childlike or alien).

Other science fiction films, notably the aforementioned Blade Runner and the Steven Spielberg-Stanley Kubrick collaboration A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), have asked probing questions and mined the dramatic depths of issues involving non-human entities that look and, more importantly, act and feel like humans. If something is capable of human emotion, especially love, does it have the right to be treated as human? At one point does mimicking become the thing itself? Those are the fundamental questions at stake in the first two-thirds of Morgan, as Lee assesses whether or not Morgan is a failed experiment due to her violent outbursts and needs to be eliminated. Having spent the previous five years “raising” Morgan (she grows and matures at an accelerated rate), the scientists, particularly the team leader Dr. Lui Cheng (Michelle Yeoh), the lead geneticist Dr. Simon Ziegler (Toby Jones), the behaviorist Dr. Amy Menser (Rose Leslie), and Dr. Darren Finch (Chris Sullivan), who calls Morgan “buddy,” are reluctant to—for lack of a better word—kill her because they have come to see her as not just a human, but a kind of daughter. Given her violent outbursts, including one particularly grisly assault on a pompous psychologist (Paul Giamatti) who clearly doesn’t know when to stop provoking (more shades of Blade Runner), it is clear that she is dangerously unbalanced, even if at other times she acts like a naïve child. Yet, her apparent humanity makes her elimination feel like murder.

And, if that had been Morgan’s primary goal, it might very well have succeeded as another philosophically probing fable about the dangers of scientific hubris and the perilous human desire to transcend humanity by literally recreating ourselves, which we last saw in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), but has roots going back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). However, as it turns out, the most interesting aspects of the film—the questions about Morgan’s humanity, the ethical tear the scientists feel about creating something capable of human emotion that is fundamentally an “it,” our own emotional roller coaster in coming to grips with what Morgan is and why she does what she does—is just an elaborate ruse meant to distract us from the fact that Lee is the thing she hunts and that the corporation overseeing the project has no interest in doing the right thing, but rather finding the best product at any cost.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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