Review of Upgrade (2018) by Angel_Sigh — 26 Jul 2018

I've just finished watching it as I write this. It's a very dark film, and the early scenes, where the protagonist is reduced to a quadraplegic, are genuinely grim. It's pretty gory, and the fight scenes are fairly frequent, but while a lot of the reviews make it sound like the Matrix or similarly elegant films, the hand-to-hand combat is instead robotically efficient and deeply visceral, as during extreme moments the hero cedes control of his neocortex to an onboard computer chip, STEM, that acts as the protagonist's onboard, hyperviolent Alexa.

Those fight scenes have a creepy, lurching quality as our hero is effectively puppeteered by STEM and with their jarring switches of camera angle throughout they're not entirely enjoyable to watch. What makes it hard to look away is the spectacle of a human being operating completely unconstrained by normal reaction times or the slowness of thought that makes human beings graceful but ineffective fighters.

Seeing two humans both operated by STEM-like systems, going at one another full-tilt, is the film's high-point. It's genuinely unsettling, not for the violence but for the mathematical precision of it all.

(If that's what proxy wars between countries will look like, with AI soldiers fighting each other instead of humans, it might end up being even scarier than warfare as it stands today.) It's a bit of a grindfest, with little light or humour, and the future world in which the film takes place is a little claustrophobic, probably due to budget constraints, but what elevates it above other films in the revenge genre is the brutal, ugly efficiency of the fight scenes and, more than that, the sinuous plot.

It's got a kind of momentum that only increases as the film goes on, while the effectively minimal score throbs underneath. The aesthetic is like a very cheap Bladerunner but it conveys something of the griminess of what takes place.

It's a grubby film all told, and it's not washed clean with a happy ending. There are no likeable characters, no-one really to root for beyond the protagonist, an actor from something I can't put my finger on, and who is instantly unlikeable but grows on you very mildly as you watch.

So you're not going to skip out of the cinema afterwards. As I've said, it's the narrative that ends up elevating it. It keeps you guessing throughout, propels the hero forward with clean lines and clear motives, and finally, just when you expect a relatively straightforward, messy, unsatisfying conclusion, the whole film is pulled together at once by one of the most elegant moebius strip twists that I've seen in a very long time.

It really is worth seeing for the the precision and beauty of the bow that's finally tied at the end. When the curtain was pulled back I just had to shake my head and laugh at the audacity of it all. TL:DR - come for the fight scenes, stay for the elegantly conceived narrative.