"Upgrade": Stop Hitting Yourself, Dave
The 2018 cyberpunk action movie Upgrade ducks into a lot of techno-philosophical corners, and I recommend it if you have a decent-to-high tolerance for grisly violence and a moving depiction of despair over the total loss of physical ability. I may come back some time to talk about those philosophical and gizmological avenues, but for now I just want to talk about the fights.
Grey, the protagonist of Upgrade, is paralyzed from the neck down in an attack that leaves his wife Asha dead. He plunges into the emotional abyss I imagine any person would in those circumstances, until a techno-miracle comes along. An artificial intelligence called Stem is implanted into his damaged spine that does the work his spinal nerve clusters no longer can. Soon, he learns that not only can this machine allow him to move, it can autonomously pilot him. As the story sinks deeper into bloody revenge, he’s forced into life or death struggles that he, an ordinary person, can’t win. But the computer in his head can.
Stem’s style of fighting is unlike anything I’ve ever seen on film, because the choreographer clearly did a ton of puzzling out how a fundamentally non-human entity with the advantage of massive processing power would fight. When humans train to fight, most of what we’re doing is re-training our instincts. Fighting happens too fast for our brains to think about, so the more our bodies know what to do ahead of time, the better. It’s not that we don’t make decisions in fights, but if we haven’t preemptively shaved off most of the conscious component of any given action, it’ll be too late once we’re in a spot where we need it.
Stem doesn’t have to do that. It doesn’t have to know every martial art to beat every opponent. It doesn’t even have to know one martial art. It has processing power. Imagine getting into a fight where you can effectively slow down time as much as you want, using that time to calculate the speeds and end points of every single move your opponent makes. Using it to research biomechanics or whatever you want. Imagine your opponent, from your subjective view, frozen in front of you, as you take subjective minutes, hours, or days to decide how to react to what they’re doing.
Stem fights like a chess computer. The way that Grey’s body moves is as someone who doesn’t know how to fight at all, but somehow knows exactly where, when, and how to move. No stances, no guards, no nothing. Those things are all part of setting your body up to work on its own and minimize the time between thinking and moving as much as possible. Stem can think as much as it wants. Fundamentally, the way Stem fights is not a martial art. I’m not even sure what to call it. Real-time martial architecture? Martial engineering analysis? Whatever it is, it’s different than any other movie fighting you’ll see. Go see it.(again, if you’ve got a tolerance for both physical and emotional anguish. There’s lots of that.)
