Brilliant and Criminally Overlooked Cyberpunk Movie with 88% RT Score Just Joined Netflix
If you’re fresh out of Altered Carbon and Bladerunner, here’s the perfect flick to scratch your cyberpunk itch.
The genre of cyberpunk, as niche as it might seem at first, provides but a backdrop for humanity’s everlasting problems and conflicts and merely adds a spectacular aesthetic. It’s not that technology is bad or corporations rule over the world; it’s that people abuse power and position themselves above those they deem different.
If you’re a true cyberpunk connoisseur, you must, like us, be starving for new movies and TV shows in this setting. But we’ve got you: here’s the best cyberpunk film you’ve never heard about.
It’s an Upgrade from Classic Cyberpunk
Is it possible to make a groundbreaking cyberpunk movie with only $3M in production budget and a director who almost exclusively tackled horror films before? Apparently, it is — and that’s how Upgrade came to be. Coming from The Invisible Man’s Leigh Whannell and starring Prometheus’ Logan Marshall-Green, this 2018 flick delivers a much-needed breath of fresh air to the genre.
Upgrade steps away from the classic cyberpunk cliches and tropes and rebuilds it from the modern perspective. We’re not in the 1980s anymore, so our vision of a dark dystopian future with technology running wild and societies torn apart by inequality is different… But still similar, at the same time. That’s what Upgrade does.
Upgrade Deserves More Recognition
Leigh Whannell’s movie doesn’t exactly reinvent cyberpunk but adds a great touch to it, modernizing the genre while telling a very familiar but nonetheless compelling story. It’s a story of a man who seeks to avenge his wife, but in a twist, he’s no hero — and relies solely on a larger-than-life tech billionaire’s behavioral chip to bring violent justice upon his enemies. Except, the chip is rigged, just as he feared.
“Descartes might have coined the whole notion of a mind-body split, but could never have foreseen it pitched, for midnight movie crowds, as such a crazy spectacle,” The Telegraph’s Tim Robey eloquently put it.
Upgrade is a unique case of critics and viewers agreeing with each other wholly: on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie boasts 88% Critic and Audience Scores at the same time. On IMDb, the movie received a complementary 7.5/10 score. It’s an absolute must-watch for any and all cyberpunk fans and overall good movie enjoyers.
Source: The Telegraph