Check Your Warranty

Film: Upgrade
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

I mentioned yesterday that the They Shoot Zombies list has recently updated. One of the things that happened with the new update is that a couple of movies that I reviewed on my monthly roundups now appear on the list as entries. This means a rewatch, something I’m not really looking forward to in terms of Psycho Goreman, but one I very much looked forward to with Upgrade. It’s been a couple of years since I watched Upgrade, and it’s a film I liked quite a bit the first time through.

It’s also a film that suffers slightly from the fact that it very much plays like a feature-length Black Mirror episode. It kind of speaks to the success of Black Mirror that any dystopic near-future science fiction can easily come across as an episode of the show. Upgrade is a bit more involved than a typical episode, but it wouldn’t shock me if this was at least temporarily conceived of as an episode for an early season.

We are in a future of self-driving cars and rampant technology, and like any good dystopia, we’re going to have a lot of crime and a world where tech is expensive and human life is cheap. We start relatively idyllic, though, with the Nic Cage character named Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green), who restores antique cars for a living. Grey’s wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) works for a company that makes augmentations for humans. Grey has just finished his latest project and asks her to go with him to deliver it.

The car is delivered to Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), who is clearly a stand in for Elon Musk. Keen is a world-renowned innovator, and during their visit he shows Grey and Asha his latest invention: STEM. STEM is a chip that, according to Keen, can control human motor functions completely.

If you think that bit of information is a set up for what is to come, you’ve seen a movie before. On their way home, Grey’s and Asha’s self-driving car goes haywire and crashes in a difficult part of time. Before help can arrive, they are confronted by a group of four men who kill Asha and paralyze Grey. Months later, Grey has returned home, which has been upgraded to care for him with some help from his mother (Linda Cropper). But, and you knew this was coming, a return to the hospital prompts a visit from Eron Keen, who tells Grey that STEM can be implanted in him and return him to complete functionality.

So what we’re going to get is Grey once again able to walk, but forced to keep that a secret, because the surgery would be experimental and illegal. While his case is looked into by Detective Cortez (Betty Gabriel), Grey is now capable of looking on his own, and is now greatly enhanced by STEM, who it turns out can talk to him directly inside his own head (voiced by Simon Maiden). More importantly, when Grey finds himself in situations where he doesn’t know how to react or is incapable of acting in a particular way, he can give over control to STEM, who is capable of acting for him. This leads to some rather amazing fight choreography, where Grey puts the beatdown on people while simultaneously looking like a terrified spectator. It’s honestly the best bit of acting from Logan Marshall-Green in the film, and just as honestly one of the better performances of its year.

As the story continues, what is happening is slowly revealed, in its own way like a noir punk. While the story is a good one, it’s the violence that is truly noteworthy. It is sudden, shocking, and brutal in several places, and is often greatly enhanced by the fact that Grey is clearly not in control of what is happening to him when the violence is happening. This is a very smart movie, the kind that gives meat to the idea of cyberpunk as a genre or subgenre, and it works its way to a climax that is as inevitable as it is surprising.

Upgrade is one of the reasons I was so disappointed in Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man a couple of months ago. This is a film that comes from a singular vision and is unrelenting in telling the story it wants to tell. If you don’t mind moments of shocking violence (both on screen and implied), it would be hard to not appreciate this film a great deal.

Why to watch Upgrade: This is what cyberpunk should be.
Why not to watch: Grey Trace? Really? Was Studly Ninjadick taken?