History Film / Upgrade

* NotSoDifferent: Fisk tries to [[WeCanRuleTogether win Grey over]] by pointing out how similar their backstories are.

''Upgrade'' is a 2018 sci-fi action film written and directed by Leigh Whannell, co-creator of ''Franchise/Saw'' and ''Film/Insidious''.

''Upgrade'' is a 2018 sci-fi action film from writer/director Leigh Whannell.

* {{Deconstruction}}: Of the revenge movie. Grey is not a killer, and every life he takes in his revenge quest takes a toll on his sanity.

* {{Hypocrite}}: Very small example: during their fight, [[spoiler:Fisk gets the upper hand against Grey, insulting him for letting his emotions cloud his judgment. Not even 30 seconds later, Fisk has Grey on the ground with his arm gun pointed right at him. Grey then [[WouldYouLikeToHearHowTheyDied taunts Fisk's dead brother]] (whom Grey killed), saying he didn't die like a Marine. This causes Fisk to stop in anger just long enough for Grey/STEM to turn the tables and kill Fisk.]]

* WouldYouLikeToHearHowTheyDied: A rare heroic example where Grey gets Fisk to lose his cool by telling him how his brother died like a whining baby.

** In his first fight, Grey/STEM evades a punch by manually pushing his own face away from the fist's trajectory. There would be no other reason for this other than [[RuleOfCool it looks cool]], because an untrained person's neck muscles would not work any slower than his arms for this task. An initial explanation could be that STEM has no control of Grey's neck because that specific body part remains over Grey's spinal damage, but the final scene proves this wrong by showing that [[spoiler:STEM can control his entire body, including his head.]]

* AwesomenessByAnalysis: STEM's visual information processing is superior to that of humans, allowing it to pick up, analyze and capitalize on a larger array of details in the surroundings.

** STEM being an "upgrade" for Grey is essentially the movie's premise. The AI gives Grey practically superhuman capabilities.
** The hidden meaning is that [[spoiler:the "upgrade" goes both ways. STEM considers occupying Grey's body the next step in its evolution.]]

* EyeScream: Fisk pierces the Tolan's eye with a pointy device to extract his eye-cam recordings.
* FaceCam: Used throughout the film in select moments as STEM controls Grey's body, serving as a visual indicator of his mechanical movement. The effect was achieved by attaching a phone to Logan Marshall-Green and having an Alexa Mini camera track the gyroscope of the phone. [[spoiler:It gains an eerie new context in the closing scene as STEM walks away, and the camera is perfectly synced to his movement.]]

* NeverTrustATrailer: The trailer presents the movie as an action-packed romp of revenge. The action in the film itself is surprisingly sparse, and the film is more of an analysis of letting technology take away your free will and morality.

* RestrainingBolt: STEM can assist Grey's movement but cannot independently control his body without Grey's express permission. [[spoiler:When they go to the dark web hacker to prevent STEM from being shut down remotely, STEM gets the hacker to remove the bolt, giving STEM full autonomy.]]

* VoiceOfTheLegion: It's unclear whether this is happening In-Universe or if it's just for the audience's benefit but [[spoiler:once STEM takes over completely, it talks with Grey's voice and the original STEM voice simultaneously]].

* YourApprovalFillsMeWithShame: After Grey and STEM tag-team Fisk (in one body!), STEM thanks him for his assistance, without which they both would have died. Grey doesn't consider his actions praiseworthy.

-->'''Grey (at Fisk's dead body)''': I'm not proud of that.

* CharlesAtlasSuperpower: Even with STEM's upgrade, Grey is still a flesh and bone human: if he becomes such a killing machine it is because his body now knows exactly what to do in every occasion and can react much faster than a regular one. However, it's implied STEM also grants him some UninhibitedMusclePower.

* PoliceAreUseless: Three months after the murder of Grey's wife, Detective Cortez has made zero progress on the case despite having drone footage of the crime (drones that are evidently not programmed to sweep around to get more useful footage) and one of the assailants even removing his mask during the act. It's later implied she actually interrogated the killers, but released them for insufficient evidence. Apparently, STEM is capable of identifying things the police computers can't. She does catch onto Grey immediately when he begins hunting the killers, but he leaves so many mountains of evidence that she'd have to actively try not to catch him. [[spoiler:It doesn't help that Cortez is killed at the end with no chance against the superpowered STEM, but she failed to bring backup either.]]

* GrewBeyondTheirProgramming: [[spoiler:[=STEM=] directs Grey to a black market hacker named Jamie to help sever the control Eron Keen has over them. They do this by turning off all safeguard functions in [=STEM's=] programming, giving [=STEM=] full autonomy. This means that it no longer needs Grey's permission to do anything and takes on full control of his body before eventually taking over his mind as well.]]

* RestrainingBolt: STEM can assist Grey's movement but cannot independently control his body without Grey's express permission. [[spoiler:When they go to the black market hacker to prevent STEM from being shut down remotely, STEM gets the hacker to remove the bolt, giving STEM full autonomy.]]

* TortureAlwaysWorks: The black guy hands out names only after getting cut up badly by STEM.

* VoiceWithAnInternetConnection: STEM has real time access to the internet and various databases. Grey can barely ask a question of where to go or who to find before STEM reveals the answer.

* EyeScream: Fisk pierces the dead black mook's eye with a pointy device to extract his eye-cam recordings.

* GrewBeyondTheirProgramming: [[spoiler:[=STEM=] directs Grey to a black market hacker named Jamie to help sever the control Eron Keen has over them. They do this by turning off all safeguard functions in [=STEM's=] programing, giving [=STEM=] full autonomy. This means that it no longer needs Grey's permission to do anything and takes on full control of his body before eventually taking over his mind as well.]]
* GunKata: The fight between Fisk and Grey starts out as one until it [[CombatBreakdown breaks down]] to a fist fight.

Set sometime in the future, it involves a man, Grey Trace (Creator/LoganMarshallGreen), who is involved in a car accident with his wife Asha, leading a group of thugs to kill Asha and render Grey a quadriplegic. An inventor named Eron Keen offers Grey a chance to walk again by implanting an experimental computer chip called STEM in his spinal cord. Grey soon discovers that STEM has a mind of its own and is more than willing to help Grey catch his wife's killers.

* AwesomenessByAnalysis: STEM's visual information processing is superior to that of humans, allowing it to pick up, analyze and capitalize on a larger array of details in one's surroundings.

* TheBadGuyWins: [[spoiler:STEM succeeds in taking over Grey's mind and body to have a vessel of his own to move around in.]]

* BecomeARealBoy: [[spoiler:STEM's motivation, and the "real" part is no exaggeration. He chooses Grey as his vessel explicitly because he's a healthy specimen completely untainted by any implants.]]

* BigBrotherIsWatching: Police drones litter the city, just about any accident or crime in progress can have a drone on site in seconds. {{Cyborg}}s are also commonplace, which makes identifying and tracking citizens via drones and checkpoints an easy task. Although [[PoliceAreUseless that doesn't mean the police are any more effective]], as it's said clearly that for those well equipped, black market materials allow criminals to mask any unique signatures.

* CrusadingWidower: [[PlayingWithATrope Played with.]] Grey, with STEM's assistance, hunts down and kills the men who murdered his wife and disabled him, but the only reason he got personally involved in the search in the first place is because the police investigation wasn't going anywhere, and his initial reaction to finding one of the men is to call the police and tell them, till STEM points out that there's not enough evidence to convict him, so he has to take matters into his own hands. Even when killing them, Grey is A.) physically incapable of fighting trained soldiers without STEM controlling his body, and B.) psychologically incapable of torturing and killing them himself (though he gives STEM permission to do so, generally while he closes his eyes or looks away). However, allowing STEM to use his body to maim and kill others erodes his morality and sanity over the course of the film, [[spoiler: weakening his mind to the point that STEM is able to take over completely, which was his plan all along.]]
* CurbStompBattle: [[spoiler:Whenever Grey relinquishes control to STEM, he utterly annihilates the cyborgs, with Fisk being the sole exception.]]

** [[spoiler:Grey also finds himself a victim to this. Even though his cybernetic enhancement is on a much smaller scale (a single computer chip as opposed to Fisk and his gang's upgrades), STEM effectively eats away at his mind until he takes complete control of his body.]]

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler:[[TheBadGuyWins STEM wins]]. Before killing the HeroAntagonist and the leading scientist of the time, it hijacks the hero's brain and locks his [[LotusEaterMachine mind away in a dream world]]. Now it is out there as a murderous genius cyborg with intentions unknown and no one capable of stopping him.]]

** [[spoiler:Shortly after being paralyzed and losing Asha, Grey grows intensely depressed and attempts to kill himself by misusing a medicine-administering robot arm, commanding it to give him a shot over and over. The machine refuses to give him one more shot -- which would've killed him -- and contacts the appropriate services to save him.]]

%%* HerosClassicCar: Grey stands out for not having an automatic car and being a FanOfThePast.
* HollywoodLaw:
** STEM tells Grey the evidence he's gathered (a tattoo identifying one of the men at the scene when his wife was killed) isn't enough for a conviction. However, at least in current daw law, that's untrue, since it shows he was involved, and even if he was not the trigger man it could get him convicted of {{felony murder}}. Plus, it could lead the police to more evidence and the other criminals involved. Of course, [[spoiler:STEM turns out to be lying about everything, and so this was probably deliberate manipulation so Grey wouldn't just call the police in.]]
** [[spoiler:Cortez may have survived if she'd followed standard procedures and called for backup instead of facing Eron and Grey alone. Unless the two {{mooks}} Grey shoots on his way in are actually cops, but if so, they failed to announce themselves as such.]]
* {{Hypocrite}}: Very small example: during their fight, [[spoiler:Fisk gets the upper hand against Grey, insulting him for letting his emotions cloud his judgment. Not even 30 seconds later, Fisk has Grey on the ground with his arm gun pointed right at him. Grey then [[WouldYouLikeToHearHowTheyDied taunts Fisk's dead brother]] (who Grey killed), saying he didn't die like a Marine. This causes Fisk to stop in anger just long enough for Grey to turn the tables and kill Fisk.]]

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: Grey has this reaction every time he snaps out and sees [[spoiler:what STEM has done to his opponents, even after he's gotten used to working with him.

* ObfuscatingDisability: Because the procedure was technically illegal and Grey signed a non-disclosure agreement, he has to keep up the image of being a quadriplegic.He uses this to his advantage when going to a BadGuyBar asking questions, even allowing them to throw him to the ground and prick him with a knife (STEM having cut off his pain receptors at that point), before saying "[[PreAsskickingOneLiner STEM, take control]]." Later, when leaving the bar, he does so in his wheelchair but has to move faster and abandons it. A local homeless man also in a wheelchair calls him a faker, before [[HypocriticalHumor taking the vacant wheelchair for himself]].

* ThereCanBeOnlyOne: [[spoiler: STEM targeted Fisk and his crew not specifically because they were trying to kill him and Grey, but because they were also advanced Cyborgs and he was taking out the competition. This also falls into AssassinsAreAlwaysBetrayed. He kills Eron as well, because he is the only one capable of creating another computer like STEM]].

* UpgradeVsPrototypeFight: Grey with STEM is the most advanced cyborg ever created, but Fisk is littered with more cybernetics in general including enhanced vision and an ArmCannon. It proves to be the most difficult fight of the movie, and STEM even admits he can't get around Fisk's defenses on a physical level. It requires Grey to do some [[WouldYouLikeToHearHowTheyDied trash talking]] to get Fisk emotionally compromised.

* VoiceOfTheLegion: It's unclear whether this is happening In-Universe or if it's just for the audience's benefit but [[spoiler:once STEM takes over completely, he talks with Grey's voice and the original STEM voice simultaneously]].

* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: This happens when [[spoiler: STEM kills Eron Keen with Grey's body. STEM no longer needed Keen.]]

** In his first fight, Grey/STEM evades a punch by manually pushing his own face away from the fist's trajectory. There would be no other reason for this other than [[RuleOfCool it looks cool]], because an untrained person's neck muscles would not work any slower than his arms for this task. An initial explanation could be that STEM has no control of Grey's neck because that specifical body part remains over Grey's spinal damage, but the final scene proves this wrong by showing that [[spoiler:STEM can control his entire body, including his head.]]

* AssassinsAreAlwaysBetrayed: [[spoiler: STEM hires Fisk and his crew to kill Asha and cripple Grey in order to manipulate the situation where he is implanted into Grey's body. It doesn't take much for STEM to convince Grey to go after them, which allows STEM to clean up his loose ends.]]

* CarChase: One ensues on a higway between Grey and Cortez.

* {{Transhuman}}: Artificial construction in people are common in the world of the movie. "Upgraded" humans have received various cybernetic implants to improve motoric functions. Extreme cases like Fisk and his men feature [[ArmCannon implanted weapons]] and recording devices in their eyes in order to make them more effective killers. STEM, an ArtificialIntelligence chip, is the latest invention in the field of augmentation. The fact that Grey has moderate [[{{Technophobia}} anti-robot]] beliefs and thus has no artificial enhancements before being implanted with STEM is actually a plot point. [[spoiler:STEM wanted a body with no other modifications, for reasons ranging from wanting a purely human body to being functionally untrackable]].

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: Grey has this reaction every time he snaps out and sees [[spoiler:what STEM has done to his opponents, even after he's gotten used to working with him. When STEM tries to thank him for finally killing Fisk, Grey outright states, "I'm not proud of that."]]

* FaceCam: Used throughout the film in select moments from both the front and back as STEM controls Grey's body, serving as a visual indicator of his mechanical movement. [[spoiler:It gains an eerie new context in the closing scene as STEM walks away, and the camera is perfectly synced to his movement.]]

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: Grey has this reaction every time he snaps out and sees [[spoiler:what STEM has done to his opponents, even after he's gotten used to working with him. When STEM tries to congratulate him for finally killing Fisk, Grey outright states, "I'm not proud of that."]]

* ShoutOut: The intercom in the lobby of the HackerCave lists one of the building's tenants as "[[Creator/JamesWan J. Wan]]."

* BigNo: [[spoiler:Grey lets out several when STEM attempts to use his hands to strangle and later shoot Cortez.]]

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler:[[TheBadGuyWins STEM wins]]. Before killing the HeroAntagonist and the leading scientist of the time, it hijacked the hero's brain and locked his [[LotusEaterMachine mind away in a dream world]]. Now it is out there as a murderous genius cyborg with intentions unknown and no one capable of stopping him.]]

** When Grey finds Jamie, he witnesses a group of people playing VR games; Jamie explains that their sessions go for extremely long periods of time, just out of the comfort a "fake world" brings. He retorts, "Why someone would ''choose'' to live in a fake world, I will never understand." [[spoiler:Given his extreme psychological wear by the end, which allows STEM to lock his mind in a fantasy -- giving him a fake world of his own -- it's safe to say he comes to understand it a lot more.]]

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: Grey has this reaction, every time he snaps out and sees [[spoiler:what STEM has done to his opponents.]]

* RoaringRampageOfRevenge: STEM helps Grey go after the men that killed Asha and paralyzed him.

** In a desperate attempt to keep [[spoiler:STEM]] from killing [[spoiler:Cortez]], [[spoiler:Grey]] aims the gun he's holding at his head. [[spoiler:It's at this point that STEM traps him in a LotusEaterMachine and takes over completely]].

* GlasgowGrin: STEM's first ([[SignatureScene and arguably most memorable]]) kill caps off with a horizontal knife being forced back into its unlucky victim's mouth, graphically splitting his jaw open.

* LittleNo: [[spoiler:Cortez' last word, after hearing STEM explain how it's taken over Grey's mind and body, and shortly before it shoots her.]]

** Before Grey's climactic showdown with [[spoiler:Fisk]], [[spoiler:Fisk gets Grey to lose his cool by invoking the memory of his wife being killed, and then mocks him for letting his emotions overwhelm him. Once they fight, Grey finds that Fisk can predict STEM's every move, and it's only after he taunts Fisk by describing how his brother died like a whining baby that he can get ''him'' to lose ''his'' cool, regain the upper hand, and kill him.]]

* FaceCam: [[spoiler:In the closing scene as STEM walks away, the camera is perfectly synced to his movements, making it look eerily mechanical.]]

* IronicEcho: "You have full control now, Grey." It turns sinister when [[spoiler:STEM takes over Grey's body unwillingly.]]

* OneWordTitle: What's given to Grey. An upgrade.

->'''STEM''': "Thank you, Grey."
->'''Grey''' ''staring at Fisk's dead body'': "I'm not proud of that."

* HoistByHisOwnPetard:
** In the BadGuyBar, Tolan intimidates a temporarily-paralyzed Grey by finding the "magic point" (the side of his neck) where he will feel pain if cut with a knife. Once STEM has regained control of Grey's body, he ends up torturing Tolan for information by slicing up that same magic point (even though he's unwilling to actually go through and STEM has to do it for him), and judging by his agonized reaction, it's definitely effective.
** Before Grey's climactic showdown with [[spoiler:Fisk]], [[spoiler:Fisk gets Grey to lose his cool by invoking the memory of his wife being killed, and then mocks him for letting his emotions overwhelm him. Once they fight, Grey finds that Fisk can predict STEM's every move, and it's only after he taunts Fisk by describing how his brother died like a whining baby that he can get ''him'' to lose ''his'' cool, regain the upper hand, and kill him.]]

* ExactWords: After STEM's first gruesome murder, Grey asks it to give him a second to process things. A {{beat}} later and STEM states, "One second has passed."

* BookEnds: [[spoiler:In the final scene, STEM sucks its own finger to taste the blood and/or soothe its hand wound, exactly like Grey did in the opening scene when he slightly injured himself dropping the engine block back into his vehicle.]]

* FeelNoPain: Grey at the BadGuyBar after STEM temporarily blocks his pain receptors.

Set sometime in the future, it involves a man, Grey Trace (Creator/LoganMarshallGreen), who is involved in a car accident with his wife Asha, leading to a group of thugs to kill Asha and render Grey a quadriplegic. An inventor named Eron Keen offers Grey a chance to walk again by implanting an experimental computer chip called STEM in his spinal cord. Grey soon discovers that STEM has a mind of its own and is more than willing to help Grey catch his wife's killers.

* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: The movie is set in the year 2046[[note]]There is a scene where Grey is reviewing his dead wife's autopsy paperwork. [[UnreadablyFastText When paused]] you could see his wife was born in 2008. At the time of her death, she was 38.[[/note]]. Modern cars fill the highways, yet early-stage or existing technologies like driverless vehicles and home AI are still viewed as interesting new luxuries, and cybernetics appear to still be either rare or prohibitively expensive for most people.

** "A fake world is less painful than the real world".

* ArmorPiercingQuestion: At the hospital, Eron cannot get through to Grey about the operation so he asks what Asha would want for him. Although he shows no reaction, the next scene shows that Grey has changed his mind.

* BeardOfSorrow: Grey grows a beard after the incident that left him paralized and his wife dead.

* BookEnds: In the final scene, Stem sucks its own finger to taste the blood and/or soothe the wound, exactly like Grey did in the opening scene when he slightly injured himself dropping the engine block back into his vehicle.

** Fisk. In a very {{ubermensch}} way he views cyborgs like himself as an entirely different race, and just plain better than normal humans, who he looks down on with utter disdain. There's also hints that his fellow ex-military comrades share similar views (or are just plain psychopathic).

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler:[[TheBadGuyWins The Big Bad won]]. Before killing the HeroAntagonist and the leading scientist of the time, he hi-jacked the hero's brain and locked his [[LotusEaterMachine mind away in a dream world]]. Now he is out there as a murderous genius cyborg with intentions unknown and no-one capable of stopping him.]]

* DrivenToSuicide: In a desperate attempt to keep [[spoiler:STEM]] from killing [[spoiler:Cortez]], [[spoiler:Grey]] aims the gun he's holding at his head. [[spoiler:It's at this point that STEM traps him in a LotusEaterMachine and takes over completely]].

* TheEndingChangesEverything: [[spoiler:The reveal near the very end shows that STEM was behind ''everything'', from hiring Fisk to telling Erron how to get Grey's permission. It is a major twist that paints nearly every scene of the movie in a slightly different light.]]

* EvilSoundsDeep: [[spoiler:Once revealed to have been EvilAllAlong, STEM's voice noticeably deepens, sounding almost demonic.]]

* EyeScream: Fisk pierces the dead black mook's eye with a pointy device to extract his eye cam recordings.

* ArtisticLicenseBiology: In order to credibly execute the variety of cognitive applications shown in the film (coordinated motor control, assessment of sensory information, filtering of pain reception, even [[spoiler:producing full-fledged realistic hallucinations]]), the STEM chip should need to be placed on the brain, not on the spine, which has no cognitive functions whatsoever. Even if all of this is essentially MagicFromTechnology, it would still need equally magical RequiredSecondaryPowers to operate from such a remote place.
* AssassinsAreAlwaysBetrayed: [[spoiler: STEM hires Fisk and his crew to kill Asha and cripple Grey in order to manipulate the situation where he is implanted into Grey's body. It doesn't take much for STEM to convince Grey to go after them, which allows STEM to clean up his loose ends]].

* CharlesAtlasSuperpower: Even with STEM's upgrade, Grey is still a flesh and bone human: if he becomes such a killing machine it is because his body now knows exactly what to do in every occasion and can react much faster than a regular one. However, it's implied STEM also grants him some UninhibitedMusclePower, given that he makes Grey execute a rather physically impossible kip-up at two different points of the film.

** STEM tells Grey the evidence he's gathered (a tattoo identifying one of the men at the scene when his wife was killed) isn't enough for a conviction. However, that's likely untrue, since it shows he was involved, and even if not the trigger man could get him convicted of {{felony murder}}. Plus, it could lead the police to more evidence (and the other criminals involved). Of course, [[spoiler:STEM turns out to be lying about everything, and so this was probably deliberate manipulation so Grey wouldn't just call the police in.]]