Bot your typical revenge flick
In James Cameron’s franchise-launcher, “The Terminator,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin moved with such precision that audiences believed he really was a machine.
That 1984 movie was a major influence on writer-director Leigh Whannell, whose sci-fi flick “Upgrade” hits theaters Friday. After technophobic car mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) and his wife are mugged, she’s killed and he’s left paralyzed. Soon, a mysterious inventor makes him an offer: An artificial-intelligence chip called Stem could be implanted in Trace’s brain, allowing him to move freely again. Once the chip’s in, Trace finds it gives him incredible physical abilities — abilities he can now use to seek vengeance.
Critical to making the film seem real was determining how Trace would move once his body was controlled by AI.
“The thing we did not want was ‘robotic,’ ” Marshall-Green tells The Post. “We felt that a super computer would be efficient, and efficiency meant very neutral, yet sharp.”
Clichéd jerky motions — such as, say, those of C-3PO in “Star Wars”—were out. Instead, the actor modeled his moves on the character he chooses when playing the video game “Overwatch”: Zenyatta, a Buddha-esque robot.
“I loved that idea of kind of flowing like water, yet retaining a . . . thrust, if you will,” Marshall-Green says.
He also worked with a movement coach, Darin Inkster, for two hours every day for a month before filming began — that, on top of fight training. Inkster — a former Cirque du Soleil performer, who worked on 2017’s “Alien: Covenant” and “Thor: Ragnarok” — created what he calls “a library of movement” for Marshall-Green to use in the film.
One of the biggest challenges, Inkster says, was showing the actor how to “separate” his head from his body during the fight sequences — as Trace lets Stem control his limbs, he becomes a passive spectator to his own mayhem. Inkster compares it to “patting your head and rubbing your belly whilst playing chess on horseback.”
Inkster stuck around for the filming, giving feedback in between takes on little details, such as posture. The slightest bit of slouching was a no-go, excruciating as that could be.
“Nothing could prepare me for the pain that my body put me through after I finally decided to get good posture at the age of 40,” Marshall-Green says, with a grin.