FrightFest '18: Upgrade

****/****
starring Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Benedict Hardie
written and directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw I can't imagine I'll ever see a better Venom movie than Leigh Whannell's Upgrade, the story of a mild-mannered Luddite mechanic named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) who one day, after delivering a tricked-out antique ride to cyber-genius Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), is paralyzed in a terrible accident and forced to watch his girlfriend, tech-company functionary Asha (Melanie Vallejo), get assassinated by modded-out thugs led by psychopath Fisk (Benedict Hardie). In the film's near-future, there are limited Tetsuo: The Iron Man body modifications like guns embedded in gunsel's palms and enhanced limbs and vision alongside more common advances like self-driving cars and A.I. assistants. The tech, in other words, is entirely credible at first, as the film eases us into nanotechnology and an A.I., STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden), implanted in Grey to not just "cure" his paralysis but also, when allowed to operate independently, turn Grey into a one-man vengeance puppet. The first scene of STEM's emancipation is a glorious invention of fight choreography and performance philosophy: Grey is literally possessed, doesn't really "invest" in what his body's doing to other bodies, and, at the end of the sequence, begs with the last not-dismembered bad guy to please not get up off the floor. It's a Buster Keaton gag, really--the stone-faced centre of a violent storm. Marshall-Green's performance reminded me of both Steve Martin's in All of Me and Jeff Fahey's in Body Parts. In a year that saw another instalment in Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible series, this here is the year's best action scene.

But Upgrade is more than just superior action sequences--it's a film about caregivers for the recently disabled and the frustration and despair of a person losing his independence. Grey partners with Det. Cortez (Betty Gabriel) to find his wife's killers, but countermeasures have developed to defeat the future's drone surveillance and law-enforcement mechanics and Grey is left with his thoughts and plans for suicide. Then Keen offers him a second chance with STEM and Grey suspends his suspicion of technology long enough to have his entire body hardwired and hijacked by a machine intelligence. Upgrade is a cautionary tale about the breaking point between technology that we understand and technology that we don't. There's a great moment where the computer driving a car is hijacked and the passengers find themselves completely at a loss as to how to operate their vehicle. There came a point where people weren't able to work on their cars anymore because of solid-state innovations; there will come a point where people won't be able to drive their cars, either. Grey locates Asha's killers, of course, and there's a showdown with Fisk that ends in a way that's maybe unexpected, though it's Keen who provides the real conflict of the premise. He wants to see his creations proliferate in the world not for his profit, but to satisfy a natural procreative impulse through unnatural means. It's a Frankenstein story in this way, as Grey agrees time and again to surrender his agency again after he's so recently regained it.

The film transitions into a story about artificial intelligence and what it wants even as it continues to play out the question of who a man is, i.e., if his identity is dictated by the acts of his body or the feats of his mind. STEM gains sentience as one knew he must, and testament to Upgrade's cleverness that clues to STEM's design have been placed in plain sight from the beginning. It's the rare film that's smarter than its audience and also not a dick about it. It doesn't talk down, it plays fair, and its grim resolution is the kind of grim that's also exhilarating. STEM is a lot like Ex Machina's Ava in that he appears to care about people but sees them as the means to an end. Their motives are unknowable. I heard a thing once that the way that A.I. would eventually destroy the world is that it would decide the best thing to do would be to make forks or something and then proceed to exhaust the world's resources in that pursuit. Upgrade honours the idea that our ultimate undoing will likely be as a result of our thinking we can predict what anything we create will "want"--that it would want anything at all. There's a hard sci-fi conversation at the centre of this deliriously fun B-movie confection. It's tight as a drum and a surprise in almost every way, and in consideration of the whole and of our place at this moment in our history, on the precipice of one way of doom or the next, it's one of the best movies of the year.