Upgrade a gritty futuristic B-movie

Logan Marshall-Green in Upgrade. Image courtesy BH TILT.

Upgrade is defined by its inherent identity crisis. It’s a futuristic movie, complete with robot limbs and guns for hands, but the science fiction is a delivery sySTEM for some retro B-movie carnage. It’s a nasty little movie, complete with the flaws inherent to the genre and a rather frustrating plot point a movie like this really shouldn’t require. There’s nothing great or grand about Upgrade, but the movie delivers what it promises with grit and tenacity, unburdened by expectations to do anything more than that.

The movie’s plot is both pretty basic and really bonkers. It’s the typical revenge movie, in which an average guy Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) is the victim of a violent attack that leaves his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) dead and himself paralyzed. Unable to defend his life or seek revenge, Grey gets salvation thanks to an anti-social scientist (Harrison Gilbertson) who implants Grey with a chip that allows him to regain movement. It’s only after the surgery that Grey disobers the chip, called STEM, can speak to him as well. STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden) is worth keeping around, as he can deliver the revenge Grey seeks while helping him evade the watchful eye of Detective Cortez (Betty Gabriel). STEM’s ability to speak to and control Grey are either an added benefit or a very strong reason to worry.

Upgrade treats an artificial intelligence-driven future as an inevitability, although it doesn't have a unique or particularly interesting take about a potential future overtaken by AI. The fear of technology taking over, of humans ceding control to the more convenient alternative is a ragged trope. Upgrade doesn't add much to those concerns, showing a world a few steps beyond the current iteration – smart home technology is more advanced, the self-driving cars sort of work – but is spiraling closer and closer to being controlled by machines. Technology in the movie is depicted as being either a nuisance or a menace, the possible good outweighed by a litany of cons. The newest tech is bad and scary, a device that both causes the destruction of humanity and the rise of a new social order. Upgrade would be a much deeper film if it had something to say about a world on the precipice of losing itself to machines, but writer/director Leigh Whannell uses his tech-driven milieu in a way that is sort of fascinating. Technology, in Whannell's hands, is a tool of brilliant violence, a method of finding new ways to shock the audience with gore and imaginative kills. Whether it's the machine driven man or the men integrated with machines, Upgrade is interested in finding unique ways to kill its characters in cringeworthy ways. A good to great B-movie is defined by how much gratuitous violence it can toss into a tight run time. Even though the movie isn't overly innovative with its kills, the presentation is fresh and gritty, the right kind of mix to keep a B-movie audience engaged.

What Upgrade should be called out for is the use of a death of a significant other to drive the protagonist to action. The issue is a combination of screenwriting laziness – paralyzing Grey is more motivation enough for a revenge flick – and having yet another movie kill a character to advance the story arc of another character is just bad character development. That the significant other is a woman is both unsurprising – it's difficult to count the number of movies in which this scenario is the other way around – and unproductive from a societal aspect. The benefits of doing so are outweighed by the audience frustration of watching yet another movie about white men avenging their wives’ deaths.

Adding to the frustration is the movie didn’t really need to do that at all, as Whannell's script is solid enough it actually detracts from what he’s trying to do. The progression of the relationship between Grey and STEM makes narrative sense and is handled well. The general flow of the film is easy, and credit goes to Whannell for keeping things within a friendly, 95-minute run time. Then there's the twist, and then the twist within the twist, and then the twist within the twist within the twist, and then the twist within the twist within the twist within the twist. It's about as complicated as it sounds, but all of the moving parts work in sync because Whannell provides a decent blend of foreshadowing and red herrings to keep the audience guessing a little bit. And the ultimate twist is really, really dark, aligning with Upgrade's themes, tone, and narrative. It's not a perfect ending, but it is the right one for an old-school B-movie oozing pessimism and hopelessness.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 95 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away
Target audience: B-movie fans.

Take the whole family?: The R rating is well deserved.

Theater or Netflix?: It wouldn’t be the end of the world to wait for a streaming rental.

Watch this as well?: Upgrade borrows a lot from other sources, Frankenstein among them, but for body horror it's hard to go wrong with David Cronenberg's classic Videodrome.

Get Out delivers multitude of horrors

Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

It's pretty easy to see the objectives writer/director Jordan Peele wants to accomplish in his excellent feature debut, Get Out. He shows it in the first scene, where a random African-American man walks down a seemingly peaceful street at night, muttering to himself about being lost as a car ominously drives in the background. Peele, most renowned for his work with Keegan-Michael Key on Key and Peele, plays up the odd humor of the scenario before letting the horror swoop in, all the while playing with the audience's perception on horror conventions. A well-lit suburb at night is about as safe as a place can get, as long as you're white.

The horror Peele mines for Get Out is rooted in the black experience in an extremely white environment, which is the case when photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) spends the weekend with his white girlfriend Rose's (Allison Williams) family (parents Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener and a younger brother played by Caleb Landry Jones) somewhere in the woods. The whole experience is peculiar (as a friend of Chris played by LilRel Howry points out emphatically), but Peele makes it difficult for his protagonist to tell whether or not the situation is based on sinister motivations or the awkwardness from his hosts as indicated through their frequent dips into casual racism. The gap between the two is razor thin from an outside view, with clumsy good intentions and legitimate evil difficult to parse out. Using the slightly off concept is a standard horror trick built to disorient the protagonist and the audience, but Peele employs it as a way of seeing the world through his character's eyes, a clever trick to get one of his main points across.

Peele has many points to make with Get Out, and he uses uses horror as a vehicle for his social commentary about the complexities of racism. One of the most troubling points he makes comes from the fates of servants Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel, respectively), the only two black characters Chris comes into regular contact with after leaving the city with Rose. Their behavior is remarkably discomfiting, exacerbating the overarching weirdness Chris absorbs, but the horror truly arrives when the reason for their odd behavior is revealed. It takes a second to think about it, but once that twist comes and the ramifications of it begin to permeate into the mind, the lack of respect held toward those characters becomes borderline heartbreaking. That’s an underlying theme for this film, in which the scares and fears are reinforced by tragedy.

Get Out is scary to think about, but it also offers its fair share of top notch horror. The film goes heavy on the psychological scares, showcasing the queer ambiance along with a few innovative ideas thrown in to ratchet up the anxiety. An impromptu therapy session between Chris and Keener's psychiatrist Missy results in some subtly bothersome imagery and the most menacing cup of tea ever depicted in film. It takes an innovative filmmaker to transform tea into a tool for evil, and it takes a damn good one to make it work. There is a battle though between serving the horror and throwing in a few laughs to lighten the proceedings and play more directly into Peele's background. It is a tough line to define given how easy it is for horror to devolve into comedy unintentionally, but he more often than not pulls off the tonal shifts with aplomb. He succeeds by having done some homework prior to filming, using some horror tropes (like the menacing groundskeeper) as a way of deriving laughs from the audience while still using them as a way of contributing to the atmosphere. It is funny to see the groundskeeper stare as Chris arrives with Rose, but the look he gives and his general reaction remain eerie regardless of how it’s played. The comedy feeds the horror, which later feeds the comedy that in turn feeds the horror, an ouroboros of emotional fluctuations.

There is a lot to unpack with Get Out and admittedly even more a person could sift through with additional viewings. It’s worth it for the intellectual challenge it offers, yet it does so without skimping on the horrors. Get Out is the ideal horror film, showing what a talented filmmaker can do with a proper understanding of the genre’s depths.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 103 minutes

Genre: Horror

Ask Away

Target audience: Definitely great for horror junkies.

Take the whole family?: It gets pretty gory right around the end, albeit not quite enough to necessarily warrant an R rating. Around age 13 is more than fine.  

Theater or Netflix?: A theater trip would be appropriate for people who like horror.

What else does this film do well?: One of the things Jordan Peele excels at is subtly breaking down horror conventions. There are a few moments where the audience is trained to expect something bad to happen at that moment, only for it to serve as a vital plot point. It is pretty interesting to watch the audience react to its non-reaction, and it becomes a moment worth appreciating once the importance of the scene comes into play.

Watch this as well?: Get Out owes a bit of debt to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers films, along with the original Stepford Wives. For a movie with a similar sense of atmosphere, check out the great House of the Devil.