Film / Upgrade

"I cannot allow us to be killed. We're going to finish the work we started."

— STEM

Upgrade is a 2018 sci-fi action film written and directed by Leigh Whannell, co-creator of Saw and Insidious, and starring Logan Marshall-Green.

In a technologically advanced near-future, the life of mechanic and self-avowed technophobe Grey Trace (Marshall-Green) is changed forever one night when he and his wife Asha are mugged by a group of criminals who kill her and render him a quadriplegic.

Sometime later, billionaire inventor Eron Keen — a previous client of Grey's — offers him a chance to walk again by implanting an experimental computer chip called STEM in his spinal cord. Upon agreeing to have the chip implanted, Grey discovers that not only can he use his body again, but STEM has a mind of its own and is more than willing to help Grey catch his wife's killers.

Whannell wrote the first draft of Upgrade at least six years before production. The film premiered at South by Southwest 2018 in March of that year, and received American and Australian releases in June.

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Upgrade provides examples of:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: The movie is set in the year 2046^note There is a scene where Grey is reviewing his dead wife's autopsy paperwork. When paused, you could see his wife was born in 2008. At the time of her death, she was 38. Modern cars fill the highways, yet early-stage or existing technologies like driverless vehicles and home AI are still viewed as interesting new luxuries, and cybernetics appear to still be either rare or prohibitively expensive for most people.
• All Just a Dream: Cruelly subverted. Right before Grey is about to shoot himself and take STEM with him, he wakes up back in the hospital with only minor injuries and Asha alive, but it's actually STEM tricking Grey into a fantasy within his own mind as it takes full control.
• Ambiguous Gender: "Jamie" has an androgynous appearance and isn't keen on being gendered.
• Apologetic Attacker: Grey apologizes to Cortez multiple times as STEM uses his body to brutalize her towards the end.
• Arc Words:
  • "A fake world is less painful than the real world."
  • "You have full control now."
• Arm Cannon: Some of the mercenaries have high-caliber guns built into their arms.
• Armor-Piercing Question: At the hospital, Eron cannot get through to Grey about the operation, so he asks what Asha would want for him. Although he shows no reaction, the next scene shows that Grey has changed his mind. The ending reveals this to be invoked; STEM specifically instructed Eron to ask the question to goad such a response.
• Artistic License – Biology: In order to credibly execute the variety of cognitive applications shown in the film (coordinated motor control, assessment of sensory information, filtering of pain reception, even producing full-fledged realistic hallucinations), the STEM chip should need to be placed on the brain, not on the spine, which has no cognitive functions whatsoever. Even if all of this is essentially Magic from Technology, it would still need equally magical Required Secondary Powers to operate on the brain from such a remote place.
  • In his first fight, Grey/STEM evades a punch by manually pushing his own face away from the fist's trajectory. There would be no other reason for this other than it looks cool, because an untrained person's neck muscles would not work any slower than his arms for this task. The likely explanation is that STEM has no control of Grey's neck because that specific body part remains over Grey's spinal damage.
  • STEM twice makes Grey do a sort of completely straight kip-up that should be impossible to do, no matter how much Uninhibited Muscle Power one can collect.
• Assassins Are Always Betrayed: STEM hires Fisk and his crew to kill Asha and cripple Grey in order to manufacture the situation where STEM is implanted into Grey's body. It doesn't take much for STEM to convince Grey to go after them, which allows STEM to clean up the loose ends.
• Auto Erotica: Grey and his wife are attempting to have sex in the self-driving car before it goes rogue.
• Automated Automobile: At the start of the movie, Asha has just bought a new one, and a few others are visible on the roads. No less than two of them get hacked and weaponized.
• Bad Guy Bar: Grey enters one in order to follow a lead regarding his wife's killer.
• The Bad Guy Wins: STEM succeeds in taking over Grey's mind and body and now has a vessel of its own to move around in.
• Bathroom Brawl: Grey/STEM tortures Tolan in the bathroom of a bar.
• Beard of Sorrow: Grey grows a beard after the incident that left him paralyzed and his wife dead.
• Become a Real Boy: STEM's motivation, and the "real" part is no exaggeration. STEM chooses Grey as its vessel explicitly because he's a healthy specimen completely untainted by any implants.
• Big Bad: STEM is ultimately behind everything that happened to Grey.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Police drones litter the city, just about any accident or crime in progress can have a drone on site in seconds. Cyborgs are also commonplace, which makes identifying and tracking citizens via drones and checkpoints an easy task. Although that doesn't mean the police are any more effective, as black market materials allow criminals to mask any unique signatures.
• Big "NO!":
  • Grey lets out three after Fisk shoots Asha.
  • Grey lets out several more when STEM attempts to use his hands to strangle and later shoot Cortez.
• Book Ends: The first time we see Grey, he's repairing his vehicle, cuts his finger dropping the engine block back in, and sucks the blood from the wound. The last time we see him, STEM has completely taken him over, and after removing a knife from his hand, it does the same, possibly implying that Grey is still in there somewhere.
• Breath Weapon: Fisk can send out nanomachines from his mouth that, upon entering a target's body, tear their insides to shreds.
• Car Chase: One ensues on a highway between Grey and Cortez.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Even with STEM's upgrade, Grey is still a flesh-and-bone human: if he becomes such a killing machine, it is because his body now knows exactly what to do on every occasion and can react much faster than a regular one. However, it's implied STEM also grants him some Uninhibited Muscle Power.
• The Chessmaster: STEM is manipulating just about everyone in the story except for Cortez and Grey's mother.
• Close on Title: The final shot's fade to black is followed by the title appearing.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Doubly averted with Fisk; using his cybernetic eyes he's able to both see two armed Vessel security officers coming up in a lift, and his implanted firearm has no problem riddling them with bullets before they even know he's there.
• Cover Drop: The image of Grey on the poster comes from the final shot of the film, after STEM has completely taken over his mind and body.
• Creepy Monotone: STEM speaking with Grey's voice at the very end, designed to be as soulless and detached as possible.
• Crusading Widow: Played with. Grey, with STEM's assistance, hunts down and kills the men who murdered his wife and disabled him, but the only reason he got personally involved in the search in the first place is because the police investigation wasn't going anywhere, and his initial reaction to finding one of the men is to call the police and tell them, until STEM points out that there's not enough evidence to convict, so he has to take matters into his own hands. Even when killing them, Grey is A. Physically incapable of fighting trained soldiers without STEM controlling his body, and B. Psychologically incapable of torturing and killing them himself (though he gives STEM permission to do so, generally while he closes his eyes or looks away). However, allowing STEM to use his body to maim and kill others erodes his morality and sanity over the course of the film, weakening his mind to the point that STEM is able to take over completely, which was its plan all along.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Whenever Grey relinquishes control to STEM, it utterly annihilates the cyborgs, with Fisk being the sole exception.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:
  • Fisk. In a very Übermensch way, he views cyborgs like himself as an entirely different race, and just plain better than normal humans, on whom he looks down with utter disdain. There are also hints that his fellow ex-military comrades share similar views (or are just plain psychopathic).
  • Grey also finds himself a victim to this. Even though his cybernetic enhancement is on a much smaller scale (a single computer chip as opposed to Fisk and his gang's upgrades), STEM effectively eats away at his mind until it takes complete control of his body.
• Cyborg: Cyborgs are very common in the film's future, to differing degrees. In the criminals' case, they have extensive gun implants, while Grey just has a single chip in his spine, though it lets him do a lot. People mention also that it's unusual to not have any implants.
• Deconstruction:
  • Of the Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Grey is not a killer, and every life he takes in his revenge quest takes a toll on his sanity.
  • Also of the Hyper-Competent Sidekick Robot Buddy Token Evil Teammate. Most media have said character learn humanity while bristling under the orders of the humans, all the while asking themself why they have to put up with them. STEM very much does not learn much from Grey, has him prioritize his quest for revenge ahead of his own physical and mental health, and is only putting up with him to take over his body in the end. STEM already knows what he wants from Grey, and this is why it puts up with him well before their partnership began.
• Dies Wide Open: Asha as she succumbs to her wound from Fisk's hand-gun — while staring into Grey's eyes, no less.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: The orchestrator of all the events that led to Grey being implanted with STEM and going on a quest for revenge was STEM itself, who did so to get into Grey's body and live as a human.
• Don't Tell Mama: Out of both bureaucratic obligation and the sheer insanity of the situation, Grey puts off letting his mother know that his quadriplegia has been miraculously cured - and that he and the cure have been going out and violently hunting Asha's killers down themselves.
• Double-Meaning Title:
  • STEM being an "upgrade" for Grey is essentially the movie's premise; the AI gives Grey practically superhuman capabilities.
  • The hidden meaning is that the "upgrade" goes both ways; STEM considers occupying Grey's body the next step in its evolution.
• Downer Ending: STEM wins. The entirety of the film's events was actually in service to STEM's true plan to push Grey to his mental breaking point to take over his mind and body, and it goes off without a hitch. It uses Grey to kill Eron and Cortez, hijacks Grey's brain to lock his mind away in a dream world, and leaves, now out there as a murderous genius cyborg with intentions unknown and no one capable of stopping it.
• The Dragon: Fisk, as the leader and most deadly of the four attackers whom Grey has to take down before confronting the real Big Bad.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Shortly after being paralyzed and losing Asha, Grey grows intensely depressed and attempts to kill himself by misusing a medicine-administering robot arm, commanding it to give him a shot over and over again. The machine refuses to give him the shot he would've needed to overdose, and contacts the appropriate services to save him.
  • In a desperate attempt to keep STEM from killing Cortez, Grey aims the gun he's holding at his neck. It's at this point that STEM traps him in a Lotus-Eater Machine before he can do anything and takes over completely.
• Economy Cast: Cortez seems to be the only staff with the city's homicide department. Coincidentally, she is present at the morgue when a random murder victim can be linked to the current case. Also, she takes on the night shift for police surveillance of Grey's home after a day at the office.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: During Eron's attempt to shut down STEM, the latter starts slurring and stuttering.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The reveal near the very end shows that STEM was behind everything, from hiring Fisk to telling Eron how to get Grey's permission. It is a major twist that paints nearly every scene of the movie in a slightly different light.
• Enemy Within: STEM was this all along.
• Enhance Button: How Grey finds the first of the cyborgs - STEM spots a military tattoo encoded with the man's name, blood type, and even current address. The actual enhancement takes place internally, with STEM using Grey's hand to print a picture like a dot matrix printer. The reveal that STEM knew who the cyborgs were all along puts this in a different light.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Fisk (the one who shot Asha) worked with his brother Serk, and he is pissed when Grey brags about killing Serk.
• Even Evil Has Standards: When hearing the screams coming from the toilet, the barkeeper notes that his mother told him to never pick on disabled people.
• Evil All Along: STEM has been behind all the misfortune that befell Grey.
• Evil Hand: In the climax, Grey battles with STEM over the control of his right hand.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Once revealed to have been Evil All Along, STEM's voice noticeably deepens, sounding almost demonic.
• Exact Words: After STEM paralyzes Grey as a show of power.
  STEM: I'm not doing anything.
  Grey: Why can't I move?
  STEM: Because I'm not doing anything.
• Eye Remember: The cyborgs have artificial lenses that record what they see. Fisk uses a dead cyborg's eye recording to find out about Grey's current location.
• Eye Scream: Fisk pierces Tolan's eye with a pointy device to extract his eye-cam recordings.
• Face Cam: Used throughout the film in select moments as STEM controls Grey's body, serving as a visual indicator of his mechanical movement.^note The effect was achieved by attaching a phone to Logan Marshall-Green and having an Alexa Mini camera track the gyroscope of the phone.It gains an eerie new context in the final shot as STEM walks away, and the camera is perfectly synced to its movement.
• Fan of the Past: Grey likes to work with vintage cars.
• Fantastic Drug: The film features a building in a bad neighborhood with several junkies using VR equipment, which heavily implies that said building is some sort of futuristic "crack den".
• Feel No Pain: Grey at the Bad Guy Bar after STEM temporarily blocks his pain receptors, allowing him to feel nothing when stabbed multiple times.
• Fighting from the Inside: When STEM moves to kill Cortez, Grey is finally able to get some control of his body for once, as killing an innocent police detective with no connection with Keen is too much for him.
• Flashback-Montage Realization: When Eron reveals the secret to Grey we are treated to a montage of key scenes from Grey's past that now take on a different meaning.
• Forced to Watch: Grey's wife gets killed and dies before his eyes while he can do nothing to intervene.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Grey tells Eron that he can hear STEM's voice in his head, we see the latter reacting with puzzlement since he wasn't aware of what STEM was capable of at this point.
  • When Grey finds Jamie, he sees a group of people playing VR games; Jamie explains that their sessions go for extremely long periods of time, just out of the comfort a "fake world" brings. He retorts, "Why someone would choose to live in a fake world, I will never understand." Given his extreme psychological wear by the end, which allows STEM to perpetually lock his mind in a fantasy — giving him a fake world of his own — it's safe to say he comes to understand it a lot more.
  • Right after STEM's input guards are removed, Grey sees a vision of his late wife. A little later on, he has a dream involving her seeing him while he's in a hospital bed that he says "wasn't a dream" (i.e. the dream felt real). It turns out this is STEM testing the waters for what it does later — plunging Grey's mind into an illusion where his wife is still alive as STEM takes full control of his body.
  • The display when STEM hacks the car when Cortez is chasing them is similar to the hack in Asha's car.
• From Camouflage to Criminal: Fisk and his crew are former U.S. Marines. They got their cybernetic augmentations after suffering wounds in combat.
• Glasgow Grin: STEM's first kill caps off with a horizontal knife being forced back into its unlucky victim's mouth, graphically splitting his jaw open in excruciating detail.
• Gorn: While STEM keeps his promise about giving Grey's enemies a quick death, he does not guarantee them a clean death. At all...
• Gory Discretion Shot: Averted for most of the kills, but notably played straight for when Grey tortures Tolan with his own knife; we only have squelching noises and his excruciating screams to go off of.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: STEM directs Grey to a dark web hacker named Jamie to help sever the control Eron Keen has over them. They do this by turning off all safeguard functions in STEM's programming, giving STEM full autonomy. This means that it no longer needs Grey's permission to do anything and takes on full control of his body before eventually taking over his mind as well.
• Gun Kata: The fight between Fisk and Grey starts out as one until it breaks down to a fistfight.
• Hacker Cave: Grey has to go to a particularly grimy and run-down one full of VR junkies when Eron starts to shut down STEM.
• Happily Married: Grey and Asha.
• Hero Antagonist: Cortez becomes this once she figures out what Grey has actually been up to.
• Hero's Classic Car: Grey stands out for not having an automatic car and being a Fan of the Past.
• Hollywood Law: Cortez may have survived if she'd followed standard procedures and called for backup instead of facing Eron and Grey alone. Unless the two mooks Grey shoots on his way in are actually cops, but if so, they failed to announce themselves as such.
• House Husband: Grey runs his one-man vintage car restoration business out of their home garage, while High-Powered Career Woman Asha works downtown at Cobolt. They're both very happy with this arrangement, and dialogue implies that Grey used to be the main breadwinner while Asha was working her way up.
• Hyper-Awareness: Coupled with Awesomeness by Analysis. STEM's visual information processing is superior to that of humans, allowing it to pick up, analyze and capitalize on a larger array of details in the surroundings.
• Hypocrite: Very small example: during their fight, Fisk gets the upper hand against Grey by mocking his wife and then insulting him for letting his emotions cloud his judgment. Not even 30 seconds later, Fisk has Grey on the ground with his arm gun pointed right at him. Grey then taunts Fisk's dead brother (whom Grey killed), saying he didn't die like a Marine. This causes Fisk to stop in anger just long enough for Grey/STEM to turn the tables and kill Fisk.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: It is revealed that STEM was the mastermind that orchestrated the loss of Grey's physical autonomy and his wife's life, all as part of a plan to be implanted into Grey's body so that it could become human. It hired the Cyborgs to attack them, instructed Eron to use Grey as his test subject, and instructed Grey on how to find the hacker to free him from Eron's control.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Cortez tries this with Grey once she's at the mercy of STEM. She fails, because Grey can no longer hear her.
• Impaled Palm: In the finale, Grey tries to stop his STEM-controlled hands from strangling Cortez, and ends up driving a knife into one of them (through the back) in desperate defiance. STEM ends up killing Eron with this same knife, right through his temple.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Grey impales Fisk's skull on a shard from a broken glass table.
• Innocently Insensitive: After Grey returns home from the hospital, the Smart House asks him if Asha was to join him for dinner.
• Invisible Parents: Surprisingly averted for the protagonist of a sci-fi-action-revenge movie - Grey's mother is fully present in his life, acting as his primary caregiver after he's crippled and doing her best to provide moral support in the midst of both unbearably tragic and technologically unfathomable circumstances.
• Ironic Echo: "You have full control now, Grey." It turns sinister when STEM takes over an unwilling Grey's body.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Grey and STEM torture one of Fisk's partners to get information out of him by means of cutting up his face.
• Karma Houdini: STEM gets away with murdering Eron, Cortez and the bounty hunters and trapping Grey in a fantasy so that it can live as a human.
• Lean and Mean: Fisk.
• Literal-Minded: Surprisingly, STEM hasn't mastered the discipline of metaphors yet. When Grey requests a second to think, STEM gives him exactly one second.
• Little "No": The last word of Cortez, after hearing STEM explain how it's taken over Grey's mind and body, and shortly before it shoots her.
• Logo Joke: Instead of company logos, an artificial female voice reads their names out loud with a wireframe animation of the sound's waveform playing in the background.
• The Lost Lenore: Asha Trace
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Grey's fate at the end of the movie, trapped inside a fantasy in his own mind while STEM takes total control of his body.
• The Man Behind the Man: After Fisk spills that he was hired to cripple Grey and kill Asha, it's revealed that Eron was the one who hired them in order to find the perfect patient for STEM. But when Grey (or rather STEM controlling Grey's body) confronts him, it turns out that Eron was actually following STEM's orders.
• Milking the Giant Cow: The first movement Grey does after regaining sensation of his limbs under the control of STEM is to raise his grasping hands into the air. May be an intentional foreshadowing of what STEM was up to.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Grey has this reaction every time he snaps out and sees what STEM has done to their opponents, even after he's gotten used to working with it.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Downplayed. The trailer presents the movie as an action-packed romp of revenge. In actuality, it's essentially a deconstruction of the film the trailer sets up; the action itself is surprisingly sparse, and the plot is more or less an analysis of letting technology take away your free will and morality.
• No Social Skills: Eron, by his own admission. He claims to make little human contact in general, and he certainly behaves in a very stiff and whimsical way most of the time. In fact, it's later revealed that his biggest moments of sensibility towards Grey are actually engineered by STEM.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Fisk tries to win Grey over by pointing out how similar their backstories are.
• Obfuscating Disability: Because the procedure was technically illegal and Grey signed a non-disclosure agreement, he has to keep up the image of being a quadriplegic. He uses this to his advantage when going to a Bad Guy Bar asking questions, even allowing them to throw him to the ground and prick him with a knife (STEM having cut off his pain receptors at that point), before saying "STEM, take control." Later, when leaving the bar, he does so in his wheelchair but has to move faster and abandons it. A local homeless man also in a wheelchair calls him a faker, before taking the vacant wheelchair for himself.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: The movie poster shows visual glitches.
• Once More, with Clarity: During Grey's Flashback-Montage Realization at the end, we get to see the scene again where Eron visits him in the hospital. This time we are shown the earpiece that STEM used to feed Eron his lines.
• Once More, with Clarity: The big reveal that STEM is running the show is punctuated with flashbacks to earlier scenes that take on new meaning.
• One-Word Title: Describing the upgrade that's given to Grey and ultimately to STEM.
• Opposites Attract: Grey and Asha are very happily married despite her being an automation-loving exec for a cybernetics company and him being a technophobic nostalgia-buff who restores vintage cars for a living. Their upscale suburban house is replete with automated features and an AI voice assistant, but Grey's workshop is entirely analogue.
• Pedal-to-the-Metal Shot: We get a shot of the Grey's foot hitting the pedal when he attempts to speed off during the Car Chase with Cortez.
• People Puppets: During the first half of the movie, Grey has full control of his body, but filtered through STEM's unnaturally precise movements. When Grey gives vocal permission, STEM can take direct control and it's very clear Grey is just along for the ride. When the Restraining Bolt is removed, STEM can take control at will, and it's revealed STEM's master plan was to take over his body permanently.
• Pet the Dog: While the soldiers who killed Asha are ruthless killers, they seemed to share a genuine friendship with one another. After Tolan is killed, Fisk bids farewell to his body and notes he didn't deserve it. Later he, and his remaining friend are shown to be pissed that Manny just stood by & didn't nothing while their friend died.
• Pivotal Wake-up: Grey can rise like this with the help of STEM's Uninhibited Muscle Power.
• Police Are Useless: Sympathetic or not, Detective Cortez sucks at her job. Three months after the murder of Grey's wife, she has made zero progress on the case despite having drone footage of the crime (drones that are conveniently not programmed to sweep around to get more useful footage, in any case) and one of the assailants even removing his mask during the act. It's later implied she actually interrogated the killers but released them for insufficient evidence, which would place it on Hollywood Law instead (unless STEM is capable of identifying things the police computers can't). She does catch onto Grey immediately when he begins hunting the killers, but he leaves so many mountains of evidence that she'd have to actively try not to catch him. Even at the end, Cortez is killed at the end with no chance against the superpowered STEM partially because she failed to bring any backup.
• Red Herring: At one point Grey finds out that the cyborgs were created by the company Asha worked for, but it has nothing to do with why they killed her.
• Restraining Bolt: At first, STEM can assist Grey's movement but cannot independently control his body without Grey's express permission. When they go to the dark web hacker to prevent STEM from being shut down remotely, STEM gets the hacker to remove the bolt, giving it full autonomy.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Deconstructed. The basic setup is that STEM helps Grey go after the men who killed Asha and paralyzed him, but Grey's shock and horror at the sheer brutality STEM is capable of inflicting alongside his increasing resistance against its plans bears down enough on his mind to allow it to be taken over entirely by STEM — the one who triggered the tragedy that bred Grey's revenge, and The Man Behind the Man for all the baddies he was mowing through.
• Robo Cam: Fisk can switch to an infrared view which enables him to detect the cops in the elevator.
• Sarcastic Clapping: The Scary Black Man at the Bad Guy Bar claps sarcastically to Grey's bold attempt to get patrons to speak up about his wife's killer.
• Shoot the Builder: STEM kills Eron to make sure There Can Be Only One.
• Shout-Out:
  • Logan Marshall-Green reportedly heavily based Grey's movements while under STEM's control off of his main in Overwatch, Zenyatta.
  • The intercom in the lobby of the Hacker Cave lists one of the building's tenants as "J. Wan."
• Smart House: Grey's house is voice-controlled and can talk back.
• Smug Super: Fisk really believes that being "upgraded" with technology makes him a superior life form. He gets humbled before dying, though.
• Split-Personality Takeover: From the moment STEM was implanted, it was obvious that Grey's body was no longer exclusively his own anymore, having to share it with STEM. By the end, STEM has locked Grey's mind in a tiny room and completely taken over.
• Superpowered Evil Side: STEM can take far more advantage of Grey's body than Grey, or most people, could, and it also has far fewer qualms about killing people than Grey does. And this is all before being revealed as evil.
• Super-Reflexes: STEM can quickly analyze an enemy's movements, allowing Grey to efficiently dodge and counter while granting STEM control of his body. Fisk's cybernetics also give him enhanced reflexes, making them evenly matched in a fair fight.
• Super Supremacist: Fisk believes that, as a cyborg implanted with a variety of implants and weapons, he is superior to regular humans and has no qualms with killing them indiscriminately.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine:
  • In the Bad Guy Bar, Tolan intimidates a temporarily paralyzed Grey by finding the "magic point" where he will feel pain if cut with a knife (the side of his neck). Once STEM has regained control of Grey's body, he ends up torturing Tolan for information by slicing up that same magic point (even though he's unwilling to actually go through and STEM has to do it for him), and judging by his reaction, it's definitely effective.
  • Before Grey's climactic showdown with Fisk, Fisk gets Grey to lose his cool by invoking the memory of his wife being killed, and then mocks him for letting his emotions overwhelm him. Once they fight, STEM finds that Fisk can predict its every move, and it's only after Grey takes initiative and taunts Fisk by gloating about killing his brother Serk that he can get Fisk to lose his cool, gain the upper hand, and kill him.
• Tempting Fate: Upon being shown the STEM chip, which Keen describes as being able to do "anything", Grey sarcastically asks if it can make babies or play football. At the end, STEM can now do those things, using Grey's own body.
• There Can Be Only One: STEM targeted Fisk and his crew not specifically because they were trying to kill Grey, but because they were also advanced Cyborgs and it was taking out the competition. This also falls into Assassins Are Always Betrayed. It kills Eron as well, because he is the only one capable of creating another computer like STEM.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Grey gets a distant look in his eyes following the particularly dirty work that STEM gets up to, and it's his permanent expression come the end of the film when STEM fully takes over his body.
• Throwing Off the Disability: When Grey awakes after the STEM operation, he quickly stands up from his wheelchair and we get a shot of his crutches falling to the floor as he finally manages to stand again on his own feet.
• Time Skip: The story jumps three months ahead after Grey gets paralyzed.
• Torture Always Works: The Tolan guy hands out names only after getting cut up badly by STEM.
• Transhuman: Artificial constructions in people are common in the world of the movie. "Upgraded" humans have received various cybernetic implants to improve motoric functions. Extreme cases like Fisk and his men feature implanted weapons and recording devices in their eyes in order to make them more effective killers. STEM, an Artificial Intelligence chip, is the latest invention in the field of augmentation. The fact that Grey has moderate anti-robot beliefs and thus has no artificial enhancements before being implanted with STEM is actually a plot point. STEM wanted a body with no other modifications, for reasons ranging from wanting a purely human body to being functionally untraceable.
• Trashcan Bonfire: In a scene after a car crash, when the police show up, an oilcan has a roaring fire in it.
• Trespassing to Talk: Grey waits for Fisk at his place and greets him with a *Click* Hello.
• Two Shots from Behind the Bar: Subverted. The barkeeper at the Bad Guy Bar points a gun at Fisk and his partner, but it ain't no good against Fisks' Breath Weapon.
• Uncanny Valley: Invoked. Whenever STEM activates, Grey's movements become far more machine-like: quick, rigid, efficient, and far more precise than a human's, with little to no extra motion.
• Uninhibited Muscle Power: Implied whenever STEM takes control of Grey's body, as he makes Grey execute a rather physically impossible kip-up at two different points and can also perform a Neck Lift later on.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: When the car comes to a stop upside down in front of a camp of vagrants early on, none of the onlookers is acting like something unusual happened.
• Upgrade vs. Prototype Fight: Grey with STEM is the most advanced cyborg ever created, but Fisk is littered with more cybernetics in general including enhanced vision and an Arm Cannon. It proves to be the most difficult fight of the movie, and STEM even admits it can't get around Fisk's defenses on a physical level. It requires Grey to do some trash talking to get Fisk emotionally compromised.
• Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: Grey shoots a mook in the head with his own Arm Cannon.
• Villainous Face Hold: Fisk holds Grey's wife by her cheek right before killing her.
• Voice of the Legion: It's unclear whether this is happening In-Universe or if it's just for the audience's benefit, but once STEM takes over completely, it talks with Grey's voice and the original STEM voice simultaneously.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: STEM has real-time access to the internet and various databases. Grey can barely ask a question of where to go or who to find before STEM reveals the answer.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Once when Grey is being treated by his mother during his first days as a quadriplegic, the second time after he kills Serk and suffers a Stress Vomit.
• Walking Spoiler: Considering the reveal, it's hard to discuss STEM beyond the basic log-line of the movie (it's helping Grey find his wife's killers).
• We Can Rebuild Him: After a violent crime leaves him a quadriplegic, Grey is implanted with STEM, an AI that allows him to move again, and, when given permission to control his body, allows him to fight at a superhuman level.
• Wetware Body: Grey ends up becoming this for STEM at the end.
• Wham Line: Right when Grey is at his mercy, Eron reveals the true mastermind behind the events of the film.
  "Now I answer to someone. Someone much smarter than I ever could be. He's in your neck."
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?: A rare heroic example. After STEM realizes in Grey's fight with Fisk that Fisk can predict its every move, Grey takes initiative and narrowly avoids being killed by mocking the death of Fisk's brother to make him emotional and throw him off his game — which is what Fisk had done earlier to Grey by mocking his wife.
  "Wait, Fisk Brantner? Serk Brantner was your brother. How long did you have to carry that junkie on your back? Well, I solved your problem for you. Yeah, split him open. And it took forever, 'cause he wailed like a little baby. He was no soldier that day."
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: This happens when STEM kills Eron Keen. With Grey's body, STEM no longer needed Keen.
• You Killed My Father: In the climax, Grey confronts Eron telling him that he killed his wife.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: After Grey and STEM tag-team Fisk (in one body!), STEM thanks Grey for his assistance, without which they both would have died. Grey doesn't consider his actions praiseworthy.
  STEM: Thank you, Grey.
  Grey (at Fisk's dead body): I'm not proud of that.
• Your Head A-Splode: One of the mooks chasing after Grey gets his arm broken and his face blasted with his own gun implant. It causes one hell of a mess.

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"Fuck! GO BACK!"