By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Leigh Whannell
Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Benedict Hardie, Melanie Vallejo, Christopher Kirby, Clayton Jacobson, Saching Joab, Michael. M Foster, Richard Cawthorne and Simon Maiden.
Rating: Very Good.
Leigh Whannel, creator of the first “Saw” film brings “Upgrade”, a science fiction/action/thriller that delivers.
The movie takes place in the near future and centers in Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) a mechanic who is happily married to Asha (Melanie Vallejo), who works for a prestigious tech company.
Everything will change for them when both Grey and Asha suffer an accident and are attacked by thugs who kill Asha and leave Grey paralyzed.
One day Grey is approached by Eron Keen (Harrison Gilberston) a tech innovator who recently created a gadget named Stem. Keen offers Grey to implant Stem in to his neck, allowing him to walk again.
Grey reluctantly agrees and his life will radically change. The trouble starts when Stem begins to talk into Grey´s head, has total control on him, which will lead him to seek revenge against the men who were responsible for Asha´s death and will not rest until he achieves his goal.
“Upgrade” is a film that has a very original concept and I like the fact that takes place in the future. I feel the film is criticism towards how we depend on technology and all the technological advances that have been in our society recently.
I do see a lot of influence on early movies from John Carpenter and some of Wes Craven´s work due to the psychological elements that are involved in here. I can imagine that Leigh Whannel used some films of the previous filmmakers as a source of inspiration here.
The action sequences they are really good, but I feel that sometimes they look kind of cartoonish. I understand why is this since we are seeing a man who is being controlled by a gadget and it´s reasonable to see these reactions from the main character.
Logan Marshall-Green did a really good job in portraying the character and he was very convincing.
The look of the film is very dark and I believe that breaks with all the conventionalisms of the typical science fiction film, which some of them can be very colorful.
Here what really works is that we see a character in a constant struggle since he is a quadriplegic.
Leigh Whannel did a good job with his directing. I liked the tone of the film that he used here and the timing of the film was very good.
There were things that took me completely by surprise, one of them a big twist that happens in the third act of the film that does works and Whannel was very smart on using that element.
On the not so good parts of the film were that the rest of the characters were not as fleshed as Grey and I didn´t see any motivations. This is focused on the assassins, who you hate and one cop that I felt that they needed more development.
The only thing that I knew from “Upgrade” was all the noise that the film created in this year´s South By Southwest festival, which most people were praising about it and I can see why. I went to see this movie with my mind completely in blank and I definitely enjoyed it.
For Science Fiction and Thriller lovers this is a movie you cannot miss and I highly recommend it for it`s originality and the levels of tension this movie possesses.