My Own Little World

I don’t see many horror films. Part of this is due to films like Hereditary that scare the living daylights out of me, as I, like many normal people, don’t often choose to scare myself. A larger portion of my aversion to the genre, perhaps, is the reputation mainstream horror films have these days. Especially when looking at Blumhouse-produced films, they are plain garbage. The characters make the worst possible decisions every time they have a choice presented to them simply to drive them into a terrible situation that will somehow kill them mercilessly with blood and gore everywhere, and often the scares used are cheap gimmickry and fake jump scares that do nothing but relieve the audience and bore them into their seats. Seeing Unfriended: Dark Web yielded almost that exact response from me. I was either laughing or scoffing at this movie for all of its eighty-eight minutes because of how ridiculously stupid its characters are. It made me furious yet enthused because Dark W...

Upgrade really, really, really tries to be smart. It knows that it has the confines of a familiar story arc of a man seeking revenge for the killing of his wife. It knows it has a small budget which means it cannot do anything too ambitious. It knows that it needs to have an aesthetic like films much more intelligent and meaningful than itself. Upgrade knows something else, too: it has a get-out-of-jail-free card inside the mind of its protagonist. And that makes it one of the laziest films I have seen this year. STEM, the computer implanted in the protagonist Grey’s spinal cord, can do whatever it wants to with Grey’s body if he gives it permission to do so. We see this happen near the beginning of the second act in a fight scene that caught me by surprise with its tone and fun cinematography, both of which were altered dramatically from the moments before it. As scenes like this began to make a pattern, however, my mind began to see how the script was using STEM as...