6.5 / 10
Morgan is the film Luke Scott made instead of inheriting his father’s career on better terms.
Ridley Scott’s son directed his first feature in 2016. The film flopped. It deserved better than the box office gave it and less than the marketing implied. The 6.5 is honest. Morgan is a competent, well-cast, well-shot science fiction thriller that arrived two years after Ex Machina and got compared to Ex Machina by every critic who reviewed it. The comparison was unfair, and it was also accurate.
Morgan isn’t as good as Ex Machina. Morgan is also a different film than Ex Machina. Both things can be true.
Morgan frustrates me more than a bad film would, because I can see the good one hiding inside it. Ten minutes of this movie grip me harder than whole thrillers manage, and the rest of it keeps wandering off to do paperwork. I respect the people who made it, and I wish somebody in the edit had been braver.
The Setup
Lee Weathers (Kate Mara) is a corporate risk-management consultant working for an unnamed biotech company. The company has been developing an artificial humanoid being called Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy) in a remote research facility. Morgan has recently attacked one of the staff scientists, Dr. Kathy Grieff (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who survived with severe injuries. Lee is sent to the facility to evaluate whether Morgan should be terminated or whether the project can continue. The research team disagrees with the corporate office about the suitable response. The film is the evaluation.
The premise is efficient. The film doesn’t waste time on origin material. Morgan exists. The research team has raised Morgan. Morgan is five years old chronologically and physically appears to be in her late teens. Morgan has accelerated learning, accelerated physical development, and the emotional regulation problems that come from being effectively a teenager who has never lived outside a laboratory. The corporate evaluation is the plot. The plot is over within ninety-two minutes.
The Cast
Kate Mara plays Lee Weathers as a woman doing a job she finds distasteful.
Mara’s performance is calibrated for a reveal that the film delivers in the third act. She plays Lee as efficient, controlled, professionally distant, and physically capable in ways that register as slightly strange on first viewing without being obvious. I think she’s the most underrated thing in the film, because the payoff arrives so late that most viewers have stopped watching her closely. The second viewing lets the audience see what Mara was doing the whole time.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays Morgan in one of her earliest major roles.
She’d done The Witch the previous year. She hadn’t yet become the actress she’d become with The Queen’s Gambit. Morgan is a transitional performance. Taylor-Joy is already capable of the physical stillness that would define her later work. She can sit motionless for entire scenes while delivering everything the character needs through controlled facial movement. The performance shows what she’d later deliver in better films.
Paul Giamatti appears for one scene as Dr. Alan Shapiro, a behavioral psychologist brought in to evaluate Morgan. The scene is the centerpiece of the film. It runs approximately ten minutes. It’s the only sequence in the entire production that matches what the marketing implied. Giamatti plays Shapiro as a man who has interrogated dangerous subjects before and who believes he can break Morgan within the time he’s been allotted. The scene escalates. Shapiro begins professionally. Shapiro becomes provocative. Shapiro becomes cruel.
Morgan responds to the cruelty in ways the film has been setting up since the opening sequence. That scene is the reason the rating climbs above a 5. I’d pay for a ticket to those ten minutes alone, and I think Giamatti understood exactly what a one-scene part can do when an actor refuses to waste a second of it.
Toby Jones plays Dr. Simon Ziegler, the lead scientist who has been raising Morgan. Jones brings the familiar mixture of warmth and unreliability that he’s brought to every supporting role for two decades. Ziegler loves Morgan as a daughter. Ziegler also designed her as a product. The contradiction is the character. Jones plays both halves without flagging which one is dominant in any given scene.
The supporting cast is loaded. Michelle Yeoh as Dr. Lui Cheng. Rose Leslie as Amy Menser. Boyd Holbrook as the cook. Jennifer Jason Leigh recovering from her injuries in a hospital bed. Brian Cox as the corporate boss in a brief late appearance. The film is overcast for its runtime. Several major actors get fewer than five minutes of screen time. The casting suggests the production thought it was making a more important film than the script supported.
For Writers
The Lee Weathers reveal in the third act depends on clues planted throughout the first two acts that most viewers miss on first viewing. Lee doesn’t blink when she should blink. She doesn’t breathe heavily when she should breathe heavily. Lee processes pain differently than the humans around her. She asks specific questions about Morgan’s design that a corporate consultant shouldn’t need to ask. The film doesn’t announce these signals. It lets them sit in the background while viewers focus on Morgan’s increasingly visible strangeness.
The lesson for writers is that twist endings work best when the evidence has been visible the entire time but framed as belonging to something else.
The audience must be able to rewatch and see the foreshadowing they missed. Morgan accomplishes this even when other elements of the film fail. The reveal is the part of the screenplay that works.
The Giamatti Scene
The Shapiro interrogation runs for ten minutes. The scene is structurally separate from the rest of the film. The camera setup is different. The cutting rhythm is different. The lighting is different. The performance tone is different. The whole sequence is a self-contained chamber drama within the larger film.
Shapiro begins by asking Morgan baseline questions designed to establish her cognitive functioning. Morgan answers calmly. Shapiro escalates. Shapiro asks Morgan whether she enjoyed attacking Dr. Grieff. Morgan deflects. Shapiro asks Morgan whether she considers herself human. Morgan deflects. Shapiro asks Morgan whether she understands that the people who created her will eventually kill her. Morgan stops deflecting. The escalation is the entire architecture of the scene.
Giamatti plays Shapiro as a man enjoying himself. Shapiro has done this before. He understands that breaking subjects requires patience and cruelty in specific proportions, and he has the proportions calibrated.
The pleasure he takes in the work is what makes the scene so unsettling. Morgan is the creature and Shapiro is the human, and the film earns credit for forcing the audience to admit the human is the more disturbing presence in the room.
The scene ends with violence. Morgan’s response to Shapiro’s escalation is the violence the rest of the film has been building toward. The release is earned because Shapiro earned it. The film never recovers the energy this scene generates. The remaining hour runs at lower intensity because nothing else in the production was constructed with this level of care.
The Ex Machina Problem
Ex Machina came out in 2014. Alex Garland wrote and directed. The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. It became the reference point for any later science fiction production about an artificial humanoid being evaluated under controlled circumstances. Morgan arrived two years later and had to work in the shadow of a film that had already done several of the same things better.
The similarities are real. Both films are set in remote research facilities. Both films feature visiting outsiders evaluating artificial humanoid female characters. Both films explore questions about consciousness, control, and corporate ownership of synthetic beings. Both films end with the synthetic being escaping the facility.
The differences are also real. Ex Machina is structured as a three-character chamber drama with Caleb evaluating Ava under Nathan’s supervision. Morgan is structured as a corporate procedural with multiple staff members each occupying different positions in the ethical question. Ex Machina is interested in seduction and manipulation as core themes. Morgan is interested in parental loyalty and corporate liability as core themes. The films are exploring different questions within the same general territory.
Morgan suffers in the comparison because Ex Machina executed its premise more skillfully. The Garland film is better written, better directed, better photographed, and better acted across the whole ensemble. Morgan has individual elements that match Ex Machina. The Giamatti scene is as good as anything in Ex Machina. The Taylor-Joy performance is comparable to Alicia Vikander’s work. The film around those elements doesn’t maintain the level the individual elements achieve.
The Direction
Luke Scott directed. The film is competent without being distinguished. Scott shoots functional coverage. He moves the camera when the camera should move. He frames characters in ways that communicate the institutional relationships the screenplay is establishing. He doesn’t embarrass himself.
He also doesn’t produce any individual shot that the audience would remember a week later. The film looks like the work of a director who has watched his father shoot films for thirty years and learned the basic vocabulary without developing his own.
The pacing is the most visible directorial weakness. The film runs ninety-two minutes and feels like a production that wanted a longer cut and couldn’t find twenty more minutes worth keeping. The first hour establishes the facility and the staff. The Giamatti scene is the inflection point.
Then the third act collapses into a chase that resolves the plot mechanically and loses me. I’d have cut it to eighty minutes and kept the ending psychological. The middle length serves neither approach.
For Writers
Morgan shows the cost of constructing a story around a third-act reveal when the first two acts don’t give the audience enough to do. The Lee Weathers twist is well-foreshadowed. The twist also fails to recontextualize the film in ways that make first-act material feel different on rewatch. A successful twist makes the audience want to rewatch immediately. A failed twist leaves the audience feeling that the film has been a setup for the reveal instead of a story with stakes of its own.
Morgan trends toward the failed model. The lesson for writers is that twists work best as final elements that intensify stories that were already working. Twists don’t work as the entire reason a story exists. Build the story first. Add the twist as the layer that raises the foundation. Don’t build a story whose only purpose is delivering the twist.
The Score
Max Richter composed the score. Richter is one of the better film composers working. His score for The Leftovers is some of the best television music of the previous decade. His work on Morgan is restrained. The score is atmosphere instead of commentary. Strings sustain notes for long durations. Piano figures emerge briefly and recede. The score doesn’t announce its presence, but it also doesn’t generate the emotional weight that better film scores produce for thriller material.
The score is consistent with the rest of the production.
Competent. Well-made. Not memorable. Richter delivered exactly what the film required without delivering more than the film required. A composer with a different approach might have pushed the material toward higher emotional tones. Richter chose restraint. The choice is defensible, but it also limited the film’s reach.
The Cinematography
Mark Patten shot the film. Patten had worked as a camera operator on multiple Ridley Scott productions including Prometheus and The Counselor. Morgan was his first major credit as director of photography. The cinematography is professional. The interiors of the research facility are lit with cool tones that suggest institutional sterility. The exteriors in the Northern Irish countryside are lit with overcast natural light that establishes the isolation of the facility. The visual approach is consistent with the screenplay’s intentions.
The film doesn’t produce any individual visual sequence that exceeds the requirements of the moment. There’s no shot in Morgan that justifies the price of admission on its own. Compare the lake sequence in Ex Machina or the dance sequence or the final corridor shot. Garland’s film has multiple individual shots that audiences remember years after viewing. Morgan has competent coverage and nothing more.
The Box Office
On the money side, the film cost approximately eight million dollars to produce. The film earned approximately eight million dollars worldwide. Studios consider that a failure because marketing costs aren’t recovered. The film’s distributor effectively buried it after the opening weekend underperformed. Twentieth Century Fox had been expecting a modest hit that would establish Luke Scott as a director who could deliver commercial science fiction. The performance didn’t deliver that result.
The failure was partly a marketing problem. The trailers emphasized the corporate-evaluation premise without giving audiences enough information to understand why they should care. They also gave away too much of the second-act material while protecting the third-act reveal in ways that confused viewers about what the film was about. A clearer campaign might have produced a clearer audience response. The campaign that ran didn’t.
What Works
The Giamatti scene is excellent. The Taylor-Joy performance is better than the screenplay supports. The Lee Weathers reveal works as a twist on rewatch. The corporate evaluation framing is efficient world-building that establishes everything the film needs in the opening fifteen minutes. The supporting cast is overqualified for the material but handles it well. The score is restrained without being absent. The cinematography is functional without being distracting.
What Does Not Work
The third-act chase is mechanical. The film resolves through physical action when the setup has been promising resolution through psychological insight. The other research staff don’t get enough screen time to register as individual characters before the violence begins. Michelle Yeoh gets parked in a handful of scenes, and Rose Leslie deserved more too. The Brian Cox appearance is brief enough to feel like footage from a different production.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Morgan is the example case for how a single brilliant sequence can raise a competent film without lifting the surrounding material to its level. The Giamatti interrogation scene is one of the better single sequences in any science fiction thriller of the previous decade.
Giamatti’s performance, the writing of Shapiro’s escalation, the cutting rhythm of the scene, the way Morgan’s controlled stillness contrasts against Shapiro’s accelerating cruelty, the eventual eruption of violence as response to provocation instead of as random outburst, all of these elements work at the highest level the film reaches.
The rest of the film doesn’t match this level. The first hour is competent setup. The third act is mechanical resolution.
As a whole, the film averages to a 6.5 because the Giamatti scene pulls a 5/10 production up by approximately a point and a half. The lesson for writers is that brilliant individual sequences don’t save mediocre overall works.
The Giamatti scene is the reason to watch Morgan. The rest of the film is the reason most viewers don’t remember Morgan a week after seeing it. Aim for consistency across the whole production. Brilliance in one sequence can’t compensate for adequacy everywhere else.
Is Morgan worth watching?
A 6.5. Morgan is a competent science fiction thriller with one excellent sequence and several solid supporting elements assembled around a script that doesn’t quite deserve them. Luke Scott directed his first feature without embarrassing himself and without distinguishing himself. The cast is overqualified. Paul Giamatti’s interrogation scene is the reason to watch the film. Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance suggests what she’d become in later productions. The Lee Weathers twist works as twist without making the rest of the film stronger on rewatch.
My verdict: the film deserves more credit than the box office gave it and less than its cast suggested.
I land on 6.5 because I can’t hand a whole movie credit for ten minutes, and I can’t push it below average when those ten minutes are this good. Watch it for the Giamatti scene and stay for Taylor-Joy. The ending still lets it down, because a film this interested in who counts as human deserved a smarter finish than a chase.
