For those who don’t know, Luke Scott is the son of one of the most famous and influential directors of this generation, Ridley Scott, who made films like Alien and Blade Runner. Luke has been waiting a long time to make his directorial debut, but now he has finally gotten the chance to do so. With his father as a producer, he has finally made a film that involves creating and challenging humanistic life and Playing God. And that movie is Morgan.    

The film basically follows this prototype named Morgan, who is a human—cybernetic hybrid. Her age and intelligence grows at an exceeding rate, and she is raised and protected by a bunch of idiotic scientists. Kate Mara plays a character named Lee Weathers, and her motivation is tasked to see if Morgan is a working A-OK experiment or a drastic failure that must be terminated. Unfortunately, they make Morgan emotionally distraught, which leads to her breaking loose and escaping the laboratory. The scientists must either attempt to capture Morgan or kill their lives’ work.

I wanted to give Luke Scott a chance – I really did – after all, he’s making his directorial debut on a movie he really is passionate about, but I think he really dropped the ball hard on this one. For the first half of this movie, nothing genuine or exciting or emotionally engaging happens. Throughout the movie, people are spouting out exposition about how the experiment was a success and also wasn’t a success, and characters talk for long periods of time in monotone robotic voices. Nothing was engaging at all, and I swear on my life, it made me fall asleep for a split second.

The acting in this film, for the most part, is wooden. Kate Mara’s character talks without a semblance of emotion, the rest of the scientists are standard non-emoting scientists who have no personality, and there are no scenes to make us even care about these characters. Also, am I the only one to think that there was no point in having Paul Giamatti in this movie? He barely has any screen-time and doesn’t make an emotional connection with the audience.

One of the good things about Morgan was Morgan herself, as a matter of fact-she had emotional weight in her scenes, had a sliver of a motivation behind her, and most of all, she was a CHARACTER.  

Most of the fight scenes in the movie are alright, but what really bites this film in the rear, is the editing and camera movement. This film has some of the wonkiest and most spastic editing I’ve seen this year. How you ask? Well, I’ll be happy to provide an example. There is this fight scene towards the last act of the movie, and while my bored and unengaged self was watching this film, I opted instead to count how many shots there were used in that single fight scene. And once that fight scene ended, I counted a whopping 35 shots in that one fight scene. Morgan also has a very uneventful and somewhat anticlimactic resolution. It’s a resolution that starts somewhat suspenseful, and after the scene is over, you’re like, “Well, that happened.”  

You know what I like to a certain extent? Movies that involve Playing God. You know what I also like? Movies that aren’t this one. It’s not to say that Morgan is the worst thing ever  -it isn’t – there are promising elements in this movie, but the movie isn’t disappointing just because of all the hype that was behind it, and all the cast that was brought in the project; it’s disappointing because it’s lifeless, generic and it devoids of any kind of entertainment that I hope to expect. The film acts like it’s so genuinely smart, when in actuality it’s utterly comical and stupid, while at the same time, having a premise and story that has been done so many times before. This is a movie I won’t remember in the years to come. If Luke Scott goes back to making movies, I hope he dodges the sophomore slump with his next film, because this film is not a bright spot in his career.

Morgan is like a failed science experiment the students had it in the bag with a well-planned hypothesis and kept improving with repeated tests, but when they show the teacher how great they did, the project fell completely apart. For my money, I’d rather watch something else, like Don’t Breathe and The Shallows, but for everyone else, stay far away from this utter facile disappointment.