Saw this on Saturday - went in completely blind other than the name and the Rotten Tomatoes rating in the 80’s.
I quite liked it. The fight choreography was really impressive, especially that first fight where Gray gives STEM permission to control his body. His movements are so tight and precise while his face is showing total bewilderment and shock - really good acting there. I don’t really go for ultraviolent or gory movies, but this wasn’t too bad. Not much worse, really, than Deadpool 2.
The plot doesn’t hold up to thoughtful scrutiny, but it moved quickly enough and was engaging enough that I didn’t notice until later. They could have done more with the idea of identity and what makes us human vs. AI (Ex Machina did this better) – but it wasn’t that kind of movie.
It’s not a great movie, but it’s a good movie, a fun sci-fi / revenge fantasy / action flick. Something I would call a “guilty pleasure” except it was really good enough not to have to feel guilty about.
I mean: sure; that was a higher profile flick, but if you ignore the star power of Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, it’s just a really good, well-acted niche sci-fi flick (with the requisite social commentary, even). It’s well-made tho, and the RSC isn’t exactly the focus of the narrative, so it comes across as a much better niche sci-fi flick than it might have.
Same thing with the old Robocop for those who were fans of that movie.
Just saw this and loved it. I’m not sure the plot held together very well, both in the big picture view and also in the small plot details, but it was still super fun and well worth the 100 minutes.
Leigh Wannell is well established in Hollywood, though he’s mostly a writer and has only recently started directing. He wrote the Saw franchise, as well as the Insidious franchise. His only two directing credits are Upgrade and Insidious 3. I liked Insidious 3, but I dig that kind of thing so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to others. Upgrade was just awesome fun.
If you haven’t seen it, check out one of his other non-franchise one-offs: Cooties. One of the better zombie comedies I’ve seen. Similar vibe to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but with zombie kids running amok.
Just caught this. I’m not sure why people are trying to downplay it or call it a guilty pleasure. It’s a good sci-fi movie, examining the potential faults of transhumanism and AI, setting up a believable world and an interesting tale. It may have been more profound and felt more original if Ex Machina wasn’t in our recent memory.
Just out of curiosity - I’d probably notice them more on a rewatch, but what are these huge gaping plotholes we’re talking about?
So looking at a couple of reviews, I guess people are considering how STEM was able to manipulate Eron into his plot?
That’s a weird complaint since the entire movie is set up so we see STEM manipulating someone by appearing to be a helpful enabler of their goals. It’s entirely plausible that STEM controlled Eron in a similar way. Sure, he doesn’t have literal control over his body, but Eron was using STEM to run his business/designs/etc. for years. Especially given that Eron was a social recluse who is probably amazed at himself for inventing such an incredible AI, it would be really easy for STEM to manipulate him more and more over time and work his way into his life and his decisions.
By the time of the movie, STEM has probably been dictating every move Eron makes for months or years, purely through the manipulation of the sort that we see in our main character when Stem seems helpful and on his side helping to accomplish his goals. It’s not hard at all to imagine how STEM controlled Eron even before he had a body.
Eron still sensed the potential danger and attempted to limit STEM with the input guards, but was ultimately outwitted.
I’ve been busy and haven’t gotten around to watching this again, but it seems like the reviews are even more positive now than they were when the movie was playing in the theatre; that’s cool.
Ah, well that explains a couple significant plot holes I mentioned in the other thread.
As presented, I thought they were saying that STEM was implanted in and controlling Eron’s body exactly the same way it was controlling our hero. If that’s what you thought, a lot of the plot seemed confused.
The movie had a lot of stuff that looks like a lazy trope on first watch, but makes sense later. For example, when STEM is watching the drone footage and sees a few blurred pixels of tattoo, which he then re-creates perfectly strikes you as an example of the awful “ENHANCE!!!” treatment movies get. But that wasn’t what was happening - STEM knew the tattoo because he knew who he hired to do the job. Also explains why the police couldn’t crack the case based on that info either.
Or for another example, when the awkward CEO guy tries to influence the protagonist by asking him in the hospital room “what would your wife want?” it seems out of place since he’s shown to be awkward and reserved and not good at reading people, but then we later learn he’s being fed that line by STEM.
Or the brief “it was all a dream” fakeout - STEM had been implanting images of Grey’s wife in his mind, even as hallucinations, throughout the movie to test whether he was receptive to what ultimately happened when his “mind broke”, and/or to lay the groundwork for it. One of the hallucinations happened during the hacker/VR room scene, which explained that people can get lost in VR when their mind craves it more than reality.
There were other small things like that which make sense in retrospect, which means the writing had a lot of craft put into it. The more I think about it, the more I like it.
Ah, I hate when threads get split because someone adds some sort of character to the title a hyphen in this case that makes it hard to search for it.
I figured the movie itself was a good explanation for how STEM manipulated Eron. The whole time we’re watching the movie, we think STEM is purely helpful and trying to help Grey accomplish his goals. We see how Grey is seduced into following the instructions of STEM, who appears to be doing everything to advance Grey’s goal while he’s actually advancing his own and fooling/manipulating Grey. So it’s not hard to believe that STEM could’ve manipulated Eron in a similar way, helping him appear to achieve Eron’s goals in a way that did not indicate STEM had ulterior motives.
When Eron is talking about how he had been played/controlled by STEM for years, he was just figuring it out - looking at everything in retrospect and realizing how STEM had been manipulating him exactly as the audience is learning that’s what STEM did to us. Up until near the end of the movie, he still thought STEM was advancing his (Eron’s) agenda. Just as Grey did. Just as we did.
I have to admit not being fond of the trope of the character everyone thought was on good guy’s side turning out to be the bad guy. It tends to render every action taken by that character up to the moment of the reveal nonsensical. This movie’s no exception, but it was a cool ride.
What’s nonsensical? STEM wanted to eliminate any trail to itself, so he gave Grey a reason to want revenge on the people that STEM wanted dead in the first place. The story is consistent from STEM’s perspective and motivations.
Surely there are easier ways to accomplish this goal than for STEM to put itself at risk and… what trail? How was any of this supposed to get back to STEM, if STEM wasn’t going out of its way to draw attention to Grey by, y’know, guiding him through a killspree?
STEM needs to kill Eron, who knows who he is, could possibly exert some control over him, and wields vast resources. If Eron, one of the richest and most powerful people in world is murdered, significantly more police scrutiny is going to be applied than was applied to the case of Grey. Eron/STEM paid the augmented soldiers for the job, which could be found with this increased scrutiny, and those soldiers don’t know exactly what they know, but they know enough to be useful to the investigation.
The murder spree increases the profile of the killings (although killing Eron alone is going to be extremely high profile), but reduces the potential weak points where an investigation could start piecing things together.