My preference is for movies with happy endings.  I have been moved by films with less than cheery conclusions.  American Beauty (1999) comes to mind, which features Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) being murdered in the final minutes.  He may be dead, but he realizes what is important in the end, that being the love of his family.  We never know when death will come for us, so it is important to have the right perspective as soon as possible.  This is a major reason why I practice my Faith, and it informs my desire for positive cinema rather than negative.  With today’s flick, I thought I was going to get what is my inclination with Upgrade (2018), only to have it snatched away at the last moment.  Come along with me as I explain how we get to that point.

The point at which Upgrade begins is some time in the undetermined future, though you would not know it from the opening scene.  In a world virtually controlled by computers in a digital space, Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is determined to be analog.  He repairs old, combustible engine cars to then sell while his corporate driven wife, Asha Trace (Melanie Vallejo), is driven home by a robot car.  Before they can make any plans for the evening, Grey remembers that he has to deliver a restored vehicle to a wealthy customer.  Entering a beautiful, spacious, and state-of-the-art beachside home, Asha is delightfully surprised when it turns out to be the home of billionaire entrepreneur and genius, Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson).  Eron is socially awkward, but seems flattered when Asha fawns over her husband’s famous clientele.  It is not long after this introduction that Eron decides to show the Traces his latest invention: a computer chip called STEM.  He says that it will change the world, allowing people to do whatever it is they could put their minds to do.  Before leaving, Grey dismisses this in favor of wanting to keep humans in control.  On their way home, being in their driverless automobile, it begins to disobey their commands and causes them to crash.  Before the authorities can arrive, mysterious men appear, putting a bullet into Asha and shooting something into his neck.  The shot paralyzes him and all he can do is watch while she slowly passes away.  Grey awakens in the hospital a quadriplegic, and it appears that he has nothing to look forward to but to be taken care of by Pamela (Linda Cropper), his mother, for the rest of his life.  He attempts to commit suicide by overdosing on medicine, by the machines will not let him go through with his self-destruction.  While back in the hospital, Grey receives a visit from Eron, who offers STEM as a way of being able to walk again.  Grey initially refuses until Eron wonders aloud what Asha would have her husband do.  With this encouragement, Grey is at Eron’s home getting the surgery to have STEM implanted on his spinal cord.  It does not take Grey long after waking up from the procedure for him to be able to move all his limbs, STEM doing the work for him.  Yet, because the device is still being tested, Eron warns Grey that the seemingly cured man must hide this small miracle.  What is still causing angst for Grey is the fact that his wife’s killers have yet to be apprehended.  Not long after getting the implant, he is sent a box of folders from Detective Cortez (Betty Gabriel) regarding Asha’s case.  While his looks over the documents, a voice begins speaking clearly inside his head.  It soon becomes apparent that this is STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden).  At first, Grey wants nothing to do with the presence, but eventually comes to talk to it as it lends valuable insight into what can be gleaned from the evidence.  The information takes them to a house of one the men that attacked him and Asha after their accident.  Before Grey can escape, the man spots him in his house.  During their struggle, Grey learns he can let STEM take over and fight for him, and the computer does so far more competently than Grey could do.  Not only does STEM excel in defending Grey, but it goes further, murdering a person it considers a threat.  Grey is traumatized by this act and tries to tell STEM they can no longer kill.  Eron is also angered by Grey’s action, saying that the quadriplegic strayed away from where he should be and thereby ran the risk of getting caught.  Nonetheless, Grey is back out the next night, following a lead to seedy bar his and his wife’s assailants frequent.  There is another brutal confrontation, and while STEM does not kill anyone, it sheds a lot of blood in order to learn a name: Fisk Brantner (Benedict Hardie).  By this point, though, Eron has discovered that Grey has wondered off again and is attempting to shut down STEM.  Before this happens, STEM directs Grey to a nearby hacker who is able to decouple the chip from Eron’s network.  Now free, STEM forces Grey to go after Fisk because it sees enhanced individuals like Fisk as a threat to STEM’s existence.  It is at this moment, though, that the film begins to go off the rails.  First, the inevitable twist comes when by scanning Fisk’s phone, Grey learns that the gunman had been hired by Eron.  Officer Cortez, too, learns from Pamela that it is the wealthy inventor behind what has been happening to Grey.  She gets to his house just as Eron reveals that STEM had forced him to hire Fisk.  This is because STEM wanted a human body free of any other electronic input.  In other words, STEM has been manipulating everything all along, and now wants to see Detective Cortex die.  Grey mentally fights with all his might, and soon he wakes up in the hospital with Asha claiming he had been out for two days.  In reality, this means that STEM has finally broken his mind.  With one last pull of the trigger that sees to Detective Cortez’s demise, he walks away possessed by a computer chip.

The word possession is not one this Catholic likes to use, though I am not sure how else to describe what happens to Grey at the end of Upgrade.  It all fits together plot-wise, but I guess it also means that evil triumphs.  This is one of the reasons I do not enjoy The Exorcist (1973).  Instead of being defeated by the ultimate good that is God and His presence, the demon torturing poor Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is transferred into Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller).  On the one hand, it can be said that Regan is saved, but the evil remains in the world.  I am not sure how this result is any different than what happens in Upgrade.  Of the many problems with possession of this kind, be it digital or spiritual, is that it overrides one of God’s most precious gifts: our free will.  Obviously, The Exorcist treats this in more direct religious terms, but the lessons are no less pertinent in Upgrade.  Indeed, the argument could be made that the latter of these is more insidious.  STEM slowly ingratiates itself into Grey, feeding on his desire for avenging Asha’s death and thereby gaining more control of his life.  As seen in the end, he has no choice in his actions.  He is at the mercy of a robot that believes it has become human.  What complicates this view is that STEM can never experience the Pinocchio moment, if you will pardon the expression, because it lacks the ability to exist without Grey.  It can lock him in his own mind, but Grey is still present.  Faith works differently.  It is a free choice of the human spirit that seeks God first before all things.  We can not choose God and compound the problems we face in the world.  On the other hand, we can pick God and be better equipped to face those challenges.

Perhaps I am being unfair to STEM in Upgrade?  Maybe it will find God and have a conversion experience?  I have my doubts, sadly.  Throughout the proceedings, aside from its care for its host, it treats humans as disposable.  Still, I wanted to like the movie . . . all the way up until the end.  It is also a bit bloody in getting to that point, as a word of caution.