Superhero Media: Upgrage

I've heard Upgrade referred to as "the good Venom movie", or at least "a good Venom" movie, and whilst I'll admit that it is a much better film than Venom; there is a lot more going on here than that one notion. Set in a near-future where automation and surveillance are so ubiquitous that criminals are forced to pay hackers to scramble their online identities, most Police are drone pilots and most people have chips in their bodies, Upgrade is strictly more of a Horror film than Superheroes, but it may be worth the watch anyway. Grey Trace is a motor mechanic specialising in old cars who refuses to upgrade to any cyberwear, married to a successful tech professional, when tragedy strikes and he is paralysed in a violent assault. Offered a way to walk again by reclusive tech billionaire, Eron Keen, Grey soon finds himself host to "STEM", a learning AI that can take over his body to do awesome fight scenes and basically just be better than the symbiote in Venom in every way. 

Logan Marshall-Green does a brilliant job of moving like a puppet cadaver in many scenes of Upgrade, and that tends to be the end of most reviews, but as the film was shot in my home town of Melbourne, it actually means a lot more to me than just being cool and fun to watch. You see, part of my Undergraduate Major in Film Studies was focused on Australian Cinema, so I've watched quite a few films made in Melbourne and they always feature two locations, the National Gallery of Victoria and the carpark at Melbourne University. You see, the carpark was the set of the "Last of the V8s" scene from Mad Max, so it's iconic and a bit of a film nerd reference. The Gallery is just a beautiful building, so that's no shocker. Upgrade uses neither building, but opts for some out-of-the-way locations and sections of industrial land that really sell the burgeoning dystopia of the setting, which is fantastic. 

As much as Upgrade is reminiscent of Venom, I got more of a Punisher and Ghost in the Shell vibe from it myself, with revenge not being something Grey wants to do, but feels driven to and the not-quite-cyberpunk-yet milieu of the entire film. Alought much better, Upgrade makes an excellent companion to films like Code 8 and Night Watch, which provide a "darker" setting, but still sit adjacent to the superhero genre in many ways, and could work together along their shared themes of dehumanisation and the entropy of progress. Would STEM be a villain in this world, or is the dial already so far against humanism that wholesale murder doesn't invalidate the possibility of heroic motives? I don't think I'll be going back to Upgrade all that often, other than just to show people something cool that they have not seen, as I did have fun, but there's not a lot to dig down into beyond that. Still, I'll be watching this before I watch Venom again.