Upgrade

Upgrade was a 2018 underground low-budgeted cyberpunk action film that in spite of solid word of mouth, wasn’t a film that ever truly caught on. It had a promising premise about a recently crippled man being given an implanted chip that gives him back his movement but takes away his control, a unique style that blended traditional sci-fi action with a dark comedic edge, unknown but still good actors that knew how to juggle both styles, and a tone that brought the dark and bloody side of sci-fi back into the mainstream. In spite of little reception, the film looked like it would offer up a lot from its trailers (with many claiming it was providing a tone, attitude and even story that should’ve been given to the similarly themed but wildly different Venom movie that was released around the same time). When people finally got around to tracking this film down and giving it a shot, they would witness a film that is fairly competent, yet nowhere near the level of amazing the hushed whispers were fanning it up to be. In a futuristic environment where technology rules all, a technophobe named Grey (played by Logan Marshall-Green) has his whole life destroyed when he’s left paralyzed by an attack from four men who also kill his wife, Asha (played by Melanie Vallejo). Left with no life left in him, Grey’s former client, tech innovator Eron (played by Harrison Gilbertson) offers him an AI implant that could gift him his walking back. After the procedure proves successful, Grey realizes that the AI, STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden) can speak freely to him and gives him the tools necessary to take revenge on the people that took his wife from him, along with whatever mental scarring could come along with it. With a literal new drive and powers out of his realm, Grey will go down the dark path of revenge while slowly realizing STEM isn’t the cleanest tech to have within his body. Though the film was received well by both audiences and critics and did rake in a decent box office of $17 million against its very small $3 million budget, the movie sadly isn’t the trailblazer it was built up to be. Coming across as more sorrowfully underwhelming than anything drastically bad, Upgrade doesn’t really have many flaws on the surface, but the pros aren’t nearly strong enough to ignore all the things that needed to be improved to make this a flowing project.

There was clearly a lot of effort put into this movie, but it feels like it lacks a sense of direction and structure. The main concept of a different entity taking over your body and forcing you to do this you don’t want to do isn’t really something that unique as several ghost and scary stories have dealt with split personalities, several comic book heroes and villain have struggled with being controlled mentally and physically tore between doing good and giving into your inner demon (like Venom), there was even a coming-of-age comedic musical that tackled the idea of an AI infecting the minds of lost impressionable teenagers called Be More Chill, so to say this idea is wholly original is a bit stretchy. With that said however, using this idea within the realms of sci-fi horror and providing it with the same energy as a classical 80s action movie with all the familiar grim and unfiltered dirty chaos that comes with that age of movies, it lends its way beautifully to some obvious good commentary; how the overly technology environment has left normal people out of the loop and unable to progress on their own, how this progression calls into the all-too-familiar fears of artificial intelligence growing too powerful and could inevitably be humanity’s downfall, and above all else, technology advancing so much that its next step is to evolve and ‘’upgrade’’ a human being, to the point that natural-born humans are obsolete. That is all good stuff that the film could balance alongside its familiar revenge-based narrative, and while these themes are present and addressed, it’s not nearly touch up upon enough to really left an impact. The biggest problem with the movie is its pacing, as it’s way too quick and speeds through a lot of scenes and ideas that need a lot more development to really be interesting. Ironically, this mindset would work fine in an 80s action movie where it could balance its craziness with occasional good commentary, but this movie’s calmer demeanor and more oppressive environment doesn’t make that tone function well. It’s ironic and a little pointless to complain about a film of only 100 mins being too short, but for what this concept is and what great roads that it could be taken down, it needed more time to really find its footing and evolve itself beyond a pretty standard revenge story just with a sci-fi edge. The director and writer for this movie is Leigh Whannell, who would eventually go on to direct, The Invisible Man, another film with a great premise that just isn’t executed as strongly as it could’ve been, and it feels like these are issues that need to be addressed. The overall narrative feels pretty watered down and incredibly basic outside of this one premise and all of these wonderful concepts and elements that should be interesting don’t get the proper development because of how rapidly it passes through any moment where they could sit down and discuss. This pace would’ve fit better with a high-flying action sci fi with its own dosage of comedy, but this more down-to-earth, heavy, and intense style needs a style that matches that delivery. With that said, if someone were to ignore the deeper elements this idea has and just wanted a simplistic action sci-fi with a comedic dark edge, it does it fine as the plot is basic but comfortably familiar and it’s not like the movie has no thought put behind it.

The characters are also pretty basic and aren’t given much development or arcs, mainly because the movie isn’t really set up for it to delivery on any kind of character growth. The focus seems to be much more on what the AI can do and what this is doing to the lead character, which is interesting on some level, but because the film doesn’t sit with its thoughts and therefore doesn’t let the audience into the lead’s thought process, it doesn’t give them much. All of them feel like basic cut-outs you’d see in any random sci-fi film or even generic action film, and in a story and premise that feels like it is trying to be a bit more, that’s a little disappointing. The lead’s descent to madness isn’t that bad but could have been a bit more flowing and better paced out, the girlfriend literally serves no purpose outside of being motivation for the lead to get revenge on (you can tell why this was compared to an 80s film as they literally took the ”fridging” trope and reused it for this movie) Betty Gabriel as the detective chasing him down is your typical cop character without much else going for her, and most of the bad guys are all insanely dull and boring to watch. This feels more like a scripting problem than an acting one, as most of the performances are not that bad. Logan Marshall-Green manages to do the serious stuff as well as the goofier stuff fine enough and his interactions with the AI are pretty good, but given the direction it goes in, it would’ve been nicer to truly explore this relationship a little more. The only real character that feels pretty well set-up is STEM itself, as this AI is a pretty memorable role and takes a pretty standard formula and adds its own flair. A psychotic AI is nothing new, but the conversations he has with the main character and how it becomes quite apparent through his fast, blunt responses and his excessive brutal violence that not only is he driving his host insane, but he’s more in control than he wants his host to realise, are delightfully messed up.

Even the visual style and presentation is correct in some areas, but not strong enough to fully function. Having the environment not be super high tech should be an issue but making it more about enhancing previously created items as opposed to inventing new stuff is a nice touch to hint towards the end results of the film and works really nicely as an environment that feels different, but not overly foreign. The style and production design by Felicity Abbott is pretty colorless, but some of the harsher tones that come through the neon-colored light later on giving it this second-hand, gritty atmosphere adds a nice balance. Even so, it doesn’t help that the world-building overall is pretty bad, being slightly confused as to what is possible and what isn’t to the point where it feels like people should be able to do things when they can’t and vice versa. Most of the action and dark humor was praised the most by critics, and overall, those elements are some of the better portions of the film, even if they too aren’t perfect. The action is handled in a pretty fun way as it’s much more about preciseness than force, the gruesome nature, while not as graphic as it could be, can be felt in a lot of these movies, and the cinematography by Stefan Duscio does a pretty cool trick where the motion on certain shots feel robotic and stiff in the same way the character would be moving, and that leads to a few creative moments that feel stilted in a good way Even the dark comedy works pretty well in connection with the action (which is where a lot of it comes from), the reactions from the lead as well as the sudden brutality can be so out-of-nowhere, sometimes it can get a laugh, but the action scenes, while fun and funny, all kind of feel the same after a while and it can get a little predictable. While the style is nice, it needs variety to stand out and when all the action is the same, it starts to lose that uniqueness.

As a movie in general, Upgrade is not a bad film per say, rather a horribly unsatisfactory one. With the quiet build-up around it as this indie movie that had so many positive elements, the results are nowhere near as impressive as they should have been with this concept, with this style and with this production. It technically still works as a generic action movie and just by having it function as a serviceable action film makes it still the better Venom movie, but competent should not be where this movie lays. It has some good performances, it has some memorable shots, it does have a decent sense of dark humor, and some of the concepts and sprinklings of commentary are interesting, but it just needed more time to develop these ideas. If this were made into a mini-series, it would work so much better and would have more time to make the world more authentic, the characters more interesting, the action more creative, and the story more engaging. Thoughts are in place for a sequel to be made in the coming future and hopefully that movie can reach the levels that this movie couldn’t. A decent flick but one that definitely needs a few upgrades.