UPGRADE

UPGRADE (also known as STEM). Leigh Whannell, director, script. Australia: Blumhouse Productions, Goalpost Pictures (production) / BH Tilt and OTL Releasing (US theatrical release), Madman Entertainment and Madman Films (Australia distribution), 2018.[1]

Usefully summarized on Metacritic, "After his wife is killed during a brutal mugging that also leaves him paralyzed, Grey Trace (Logan Marshall Green) is approached by a billionaire inventor with an experimental cure that will 'upgrade' his body. The cure - an Artificial Intelligence implant called STEM - gives Grey physical abilities beyond anything experienced and the ability to relentlessly claim vengeance against those who murdered his wife and [apparently] left him for dead."[2]

See for a number of relevant motifs including extensive police and other problematic surveillance, epitomized by drones and with the objective correlative of shots of technologically-augmented eyes. The term “biomechanical” occurs in the dialog, and some featured characters are cyborgs, but with their fleshliness emphasized with shots showing the embedded mechanisms. The “Stem” implant in the protagonist is quite small, and that point is stressed, with the small size of the implant contrasted with its power over the protagonist’s body and the over-all computer-takeover trope, and Stem's ability to communicate with the protagonist through a figuratively large voice: cf. and contrast HAL 9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) and Colossus in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT. For the healing, co-opting, and robotic movements of the protagonist, cf. Paul Verhoeven’s ROBOCOP (1987); for the concluding shots, cf. the important 2015 film, EX MACHINA combined with the VR illusion of the original Star Trek episode “The Menagerie.”[3]

The protagonist’s vocation is restoration of classic 20th-c. “muscle cars,” that are contrasted with Prius-like driverless cars that become places of threatening confinement/containment as their controls are taken over by the film’s antagonist(s). Throughout, note repetition of hexagons. For what one might make of it, note well that “Stem” is pronounced the same as “STEM,” the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math courses in the USA[4] and Science, Technologies, and Mathematics in Australia.[5]

In one line of dialog the protagonist makes explicit the relationship between automation and unemployment, and we see images of homeless people and people — primarily men — who are hooked into and hooked on virtual reality; the VR addicts are defended this far by a hacker: the virtual world is better for them than the real (note for conclusion of film).