Scalding Hot Takes: Upgrade (2018)

For the latest entry in Scalding Hot Takes, I had a choice between either Solo: A Star Wars Story, the gazillion-dollar Han Solo origin story currently proving that it is apparently possible for a Star Wars movie to fail commercially or Leigh Wannell’s Upgrade, a modestly budgeted cyber-thriller about a dude who nearly dies and is rebuilt into something not quite man and not quite machine. 

I didn’t choose Upgrade despite being the smaller, weirder, more personal film. Instead, I chose it precisely because promised to be a smaller, weirder, more personal film. Upgrade does not face the kind of insane commercial demands a movie like Solo does. The pressure on Solo is so intense and extreme that Ron Howard’s troubled spin-off could gross half a billion dollars at the box office worldwide and still be considered an embarrassing failure. 

Upgrade, in sharp contrast, is liberated by a low budget (in the three to five million dollar range) and low expectations. I chose Upgrade in part because it was not directed by the monster who gave the world The Grinch, which I legitimately consider the worst movie of all time. 

What an attractive couple! It'd be a real shame if anything happened to them.

But I also gravitated to Upgrade because it set off the nostalgia centers in my brain. I sensed that Wannell’s scrappy instant cult movie would be even more indebted to the cinema of decades past than Solo, despite Howard’s film being an origin story for a character introduced in film forty-one years ago. 

I was pleased to discover that I was right. I just wrote up the minor but fascinating director Irving Kershner for my First and Last column over at TCM Backlot. Kershner of course directed the best loved Star Wars movie in Empire Strikes Back (although the fierce, protective love people feel towards The Last Jedi is certainly challenging it on that front) before ending his career with a sequel to another iconic science-fiction masterpiece that seemingly came out of nowhere and left an indelible imprint on pop culture. 

As I wrote in my piece, the studio obviously hoped snagging Kershner at the last minute after Tim Hunter bailed would help their troubled follow-up become the Empire Strikes Back of dark comedies about cybernetic law enforcement agents in a dystopian future but Robocop 2 was instead received like a typical sequel: a bad-taste and just plain bad attempt to replicate the success and magic of the original. 

Despite a script co-written by comic book legend/horrible human being Frank Miller, The Wild Bunch screenwriter Walon Green and an uncredited Kershner, Robocop 2 is no overlooked gem. It’s not even a particularly good movie but it is a very entertaining and distinctive bad movie overflowing with provocative ideas half-realized or blown entirely. 

In that respect it’s like The Lawnmower Man, which I would watch again in a heartbeat but would never describe as anything approaching a quality motion picture. Robocop 2 and The Lawnmower Man are, in other words, perfect films to rip off because they play with so many juicy, campy ideas and themes and leave oh so much room for improvement. 

Upgrade is most obviously influenced by the body-horror of David Cronenberg, particularly his work in the 1980s and Phillip K. Dick, who spent his career delving deep into the issues of identity, humanity and technology and the places where they overlap and deviate. But it’s also inspired by junkier, schlockier science fiction from the era when I just started to fall in love with the medium of film.  

Logan Marshall-Green stars as Gray, an All-American slab of beer-drinking, car-fixing man-meat in a future where the boundaries between us and the technology that we depend upon for seemingly every facet of our lives, from entertaining our children to helping us park our cars, has only grown blurrier and blurrier. 

Gray likes a sweet-ass domestic American car above newfangled talking models. But when Gray nearly dies in a vicious mugging that takes the life of his beloved wife and leaves him a paraplegic and an eccentric computer mogul named Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson) who’s a cross between Steve Jobs, an effete Eurotrash villain in a 1980s James Bond movie and the waifish lead singer of a New Wave band offers to implant a miracle doohickey called STEM into his spine, he accepts out of desperation. 

Gray is suicidal. With his wife out of his life, he has nothing to lose. Why not take a chance? I happily concede that I am a sucker for movies about robots, computers or AI that behave in classical, old-time robotic ways. So I loved that STEM isn't just a technological marvel that gives a paraplegic man robot ninja skills whether he wants them or not: no, STEM quickly emerges as not just a character but the best and most multi-dimensional character in the film. 

STEM doesn’t have a body, really, beyond the one it’s piggy-backed on, but it does have a voice. The history of movies about anthropomorphic robot helpers, from Her to Moon, have taught us that you can invest an enormous amount of personality and character in a robot with just a voice if it is the right voice. 

Upgrade finds the right voice for STEM, a creepy, HAL-like cadence that’s polite but with an unmistakably sinister edge even before the bodies start piling up. 

STEM can make Gray dinner. STEM allows him to escape the strictures of his wheelchair but it also offers the questionable and, frankly, troubling option of killing people on Gray’s behalf. Gray’s already melodramatic and entirely too eventful life changes forever when, in the middle of a fight, STEM asks Gray if he’d like to turn his broken body into a murder machine so that he can kill the person he’s tussling with in self-defense. 

Gray is understandably a little weary of choosing the nuclear option but his only other choice is letting himself be killed. So Gray makes a Faustian bargain with the ominous artificial intelligence inside him and allows it to kill on his behalf.

The scene where Gray discovers just how advanced, powerful and deadly STEM is when it starts wracking up a body count is a beautifully elegant fusion of physical comedy and sly fight choreography. 

Marshall-Green plays the scene with the shocked, amazed and horrified expression of someone who is astonished at what their body is suddenly capable of doing. Marshall-Green’s arms and legs are suddenly moving with fatal, robotic, superhuman speed and agility but the look on his face betrays that he is a mere spectator in this bloody battle, an overwhelmed observer rather than an active participant. 

Gray is no Robocop. He’s more like a robo-vigilante, a cyber-Frankenstein with an agenda, a futuristic version of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde. So Gray decides to use his incredible new cyber-skills to track down the monsters who murdered his wife and nearly killed him, a process that leads him to a group of digitally enhanced android bad guys, including a dead-eyed sociopath who looks and acts like Adolf Hitler if Hitler were a slightly built twink.

I love that Upgrade offers a vision of our future that’s as rooted in the world of 1986 as much as it is the world of today, although like seemingly every superior piece of cerebral science-fiction over the past five years, the outsized shadow of Black Mirror hangs heavy over Overgrade, although its dirty, greasy, oil-slicked vision of the future deviates greatly from the Kubrickian whiteness and minimalism of the zeitgeist-capturing English science-fiction anthology. 

Upgrade belongs in a giant clamshell VHS box with an impossibly lurid cover in a video store in 1988 more than it does in our sleek world of streaming. Upgrade toys with multiple geeky genres, from action to buddy comedy to body horror to science fiction, but it is winningly unfaithful to them all.

There’s a lot of deadpan comedy in Gray's relationship with STEM. Watching Upgrade, I found myself thinking about how my wife adores her GPS and anthropomorphizes it. We have a tendency to do that with computers and robots and gizmos: we project personalities and humanity onto the technology we use to make ourselves feel less guilty about being so dependent upon them. 

STEM starts out as Gray’s friendly little robot helper but once it has killed for Gray, and also itself, their bond takes on a dark edge. STEM stops acting like a souped-up super-Siri and begins to seem more like the devil on Gray’s shoulder, encouraging him to ignore his conscience when it gets in the way of his survival. 

It’s a very Phillip K. Dick conceit, the idea that we don’t necessarily control our minds and/or our actions, and sometimes have to share that power and that awful responsibility with sinister entities that, needless to say, may not have our best interests at heart. 

I don’t want to over-sell Overgrade. It’s no masterpiece but it is a funny, distinctive and clever little b-movie sleeper. That’s all I ever wanted, or needed it to be. 

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