Brain chips that help people restore their bodily functions, such as hearing, vision, and movement was a sci-fi dream that may soon come true, thanks to companies like Neuralink lead by Elon Musk.
Before that, many films have been made about similar technologies, and one of the most interesting movies about brain chips was “Upgrade – 2018” created by Leigh Whannell, and starring Logan Marshall-Green and Betty Gabriel. However, brain chips also have a dark side. They could be used to control people and make them behave like robots. So, if you are a fan of this movie genre, find here our chosen list of movies like Upgrade and enjoy watching them.
Anon – 2018
A sci-fi movie created by Andrew Niccol, starring Clive Owen and Afiya Bennett, and it is one of the movies like Upgrade.
The movie is set in the future where no one can commit crimes because the government forced people to get an ocular implant to record everything they see, but a new series of murders occur without any records. Not only that, but the records from the victims’ implants were replaced with the murderer point of view! This makes them wonder what is going on? Detective Sal Friedland of the metropolitan police force investigates these crimes, but he gets confused when he meets a strange girl. He couldn’t reload any information about her from his ocular implant. This makes him think she could be a key to solving the crimes.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Movie Type: Crime, Mystery and Sci-fi.
Automata – 2014
Another addition to the movies like Upgrade list. The movie was created by Gabe Ibáñez, starring Antonio Banderas, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen and Dylan McDermott. The movie is set in a global incidence that annihilated more than 97% of human beings, and there’s only 21 million people left alive on Earth.
ROC Corporation is a company producing robots. They make a new model called Automata Pilgrim 7000, and gave it two strict rules to operate by: the first one is that the robot cannot attack a human, the second one is that the robot doesn’t have permission to develop itself nor any other robot. However, soon a police officer shot a robot, putting the blame on it for attacking him. This makes the company hire Jacq Vaucan, an insurance agent, to investigate what is really happening.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 49 minutes.
Movie Type: Action, Drama and Sci-fi.
Hold the Dark – 2018
An action movie directed by Jeremy Saulnier, starring Jeffrey Wright and Alexander Skarsgård. It is about an incident in Northern Alaska when a group of kids were killed by a suspected wolf attack.
The incident makes Russell Core, a naturalist, visit the area to reveal what truly happened. He met the young mother of one of the victims, called Medora Slone, her husband is fighting in Iraq, and is responsible for a lot of violent actions there. When the husband comes back home and knows about what happened to his daughter, he seeks revenge and starts shooting people, but this series of coincidences reveals an unexpected secret.
Movie Time: 2 hour and 5 minutes.
Movie Type: Action, Drama and Crime.
Code 8 – 2019
A crime movie created by Jeff Chan, starring Kari Matchett and Robbie Amell. It’s about people with special powers who become second-class citizens because of the machine dominance on industry. This makes them poor. Connor Reed is one of them. He could not offer a decent therapy for his sick mother, because he is overworked and underpaid. Eventually, he joins a group of criminals working for the drug lord in his city to become a rich man.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 38 minutes.
Movie Type: Action, Drama and Crime.
Mute – 2018
A sci-fi movie and one of the movies like Upgrade. The movie is created by Duncan Jones, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Paul Rudd.
Leo is a young boy from the Amish, he became mute after an accident and his religious mother refused a surgery that can give him his voice back. In 2035, Leo works in a strip club in Berlin, Leo defends a waitress called Naadirah after one of her customers harassed her sexually. She becomes so thankful to him, and they both love each other, but after a while Naadirah disappeared and Leo tries his best to find her. His search takes him to the dark underworld of his city, where he meets two American surgeons that know something about her. Could he return back his love and the only reason to stay in Berlin?
Movie Time: 2 hours and 6 minutes.
Movie Type: Thriller, Mystery and Sci-fi.
Zone 414 – 2021
A Crime movie directed by Andrew Baird, starring Guy Pearce and Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz. The movie is set in the future about a human-like robot colony, but the colony creator’s daughter disappears and he hires a private detective called David Carmichael, who cooperates with Jane the advanced A.I. robot. While the duo is investigating the crime, they revealed many secrets about Zone 414 or the robot’s colony, and learn the true reasons behind its existence.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 38 minutes.
Movie Type: Adventure, Crime and Drama.
Tau – 2018
Another AI movie and a great addition to the movies like Upgrade list. The movie is directed by Federico D’Alessandro and starring Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein and Gary Oldman. The plot is about Julia, who was used in a fatal experiment lead by an advanced artificial intelligence called TAU, the system developed by a sociopathic person called Alex.
Julia seeks her freedom from the TAU bravely and to win her freedom she needs to connect with the machine and defeat it in an inequivalent battle.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 37 minutes.
Movie Type: Horror, Drama and Sci-fi.
Simulant – 2023
Another AI movie directed by April Mullen, starring Robbie Amell, Jordana Brewster and Sam Worthington. The movie is about Faye who recently became a widow. She tried to replace her late husband with a highly intelligent human-like robot. However, the robot gets the help of a hacker to unleash all its abilities and develop consciousness. However, the government hunts it down to prevent a robot uprising.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 35 minutes.
Movie Type: Crime, Thriller and Sci-fi.
Project Power – 2020
A sci- fi movie created by Mattson Tomlin, starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s about a new kind of drug going viral in the streets of New Orleans. The drug gives you a superpower for 5 minutes after you take it, but you can’t really predict what will really happen to you, and which superpower you will get. You may become immune to bullets, or invisible, or become very strong. Frank is a local cop; he teams up with a young drug dealer and a former soldier to track the gang responsible for creating it.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 53 minutes.
Movie Type: Crime, Action and Sci-fi.
Wrath of Man – 2021
A thriller movie and one of the movies like Upgrade, created by Guy Ritchie, starring Jason Statham, Holt McCallany, and Josh Hartnett. It is about Patrick Hill who is working for an armored vehicle company called Fortico Security. As they are working in Los Angeles transporting money, Patrick defends his money truck against armed men that wanted to steal it, and he killed all of them. However, he hides a lot of secrets, and nobody knows for sure on which side he is, the guards or the thieves?
Movie Time: 1 hour and 59 minutes.
Movie Type: Crime, Action and Thriller.
Spiderhead – 2022
Another addition to the movies like upgrade list, directed by Joseph Kosinski, starring Chris Hemsworth. It is about medical trials done on human. The movie is set in the future from the point of view of a prisoner seeking his freedom by volunteering for a pharmaceutical experiment. For the experiment, he needs to take a drug that lets people feel love and empathy. However, the drug confuses him and makes him doubt his feeling because he doesn’t know whether the feelings are true or just a drug effect.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 46 minutes.
Movie Type: Crime, Action and Drama.
Mortal Engines – 2018
A movie set in a post-apocalyptic world, and it is one of the movies like Upgrade, directed by Christian Rivers, starring Hera Hilmar and Robert Sheehan. The main character in the movie is Hester Shaw, the young woman who has the power to stop the predatory gigantic moving cities which destroy everything in their path. Hester teams up with Tom Natsworthy, and they both fight together to survive in a ruthless world.
Movie Time: 2 hours and 8 minutes.
Movie Type: Adventure, Action and Fantasy.
Mother/Android – 2021
Another post- apocalyptic movie and an addition to the movies like Upgrade list. The movie was created by Mattson Tomlin, starring Chloë Grace Moretz and Algee Smith. The main character in the movie is Georgia who is trying to escape with her boyfriend Sam from their city to become safe from a violent android uprising. Georgia is pregnant, and she finds herself involved in a war with robots working by artificial intelligence. She needs to keep her child safe with his father.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 50 minutes.
Movie Type: Sci-fi, Drama and Thriller.
iBoy – 2017
The movie is directed by Adam Randall, starring Bill Milner and Maisie Williams. It’s about Tom, a 16-year-old that gets shot after he defends his girlfriend from a violent attack, but when he wakes up from a coma, he discovers that a piece of his smart phone got embedded in his brain and made him develop a superpower. Tom used his new powers to take his revenge on the people that attacked him and his girlfriend.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Movie Type: Sci-fi, Crime and Action.
Science Fiction Volume One: The Osiris Child – 2016
Another addition to the movies like Upgrade list. The movie is directed by Shane Abbess, starring Kellan Lutz, Daniel MacPherson and Isabel Lucas, and it’s about interplanetary colonization in the future, from the point of view of Sy Lombrok, a nurse haunted by a dark past, and lieutenant Kane Sommerville who is working for a military contractor. Both of them make an unexpected alliance to find Kane’s daughter Indi, amidst a global crisis.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 35 minutes.
Movie Type: Adventure, Drama and Action
Morgan – 2016
A movie directed by Luke Scott, starring Kate Mara and Anya Taylor-Joy. It’s about Lee Weathers who works in a genetic-engineering company called SynSect as a risk-management specialist.
Her company sent her to deal with a new project called “L-9” which is an artificial entity provided with a synthetic DNA, and made using nanotechnology, they called it “Morgan”. Morgan is smarter than humans. She has emotions and matures faster. She becomes like a teenager at 5 years of age, but after a while Morgan started showing some violent behavior, escaping from the research center. The movie poses the question of whether it is safe to create a humanoid creature in the future.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 32 minutes.
Movie Type: Sci-fi, Horror and Action.
Repo Men – 2010
The movie is set in the future where science made artificial human organs successfully. “The Union” is one of the companies involved in this industry, producing very expensive organs, and selling it by installment payments.
They also have agents called repo men that retrieve the artificial organ if the client does not pay. One of these agents is Remy, and his job makes his social life a disaster and creates many problems between him and his wife, so he asked the management to make him work as a salesman, but he got involved with a singer called Beth who owes his company a lot of money and gets chased by the other repo men. The movie is directed by Miguel Sapochnik, starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 51 minutes.
Movie Type: Sci-fi, Thriller and Action.
Bloodshot – 2020
Another addition to the movies like Upgrade list. The movie is directed by Dave Wilson, starring Vin Diesel and Eiza Gonzalez. It’s based on the comic character Bloodshot by Valiant Comics. The plot is about Ray Garrison who was murdered with his wife, and is brought back to life by some experiment using nanotechnology to become a killing machine. When they first started the experiment and trained him with other super soldiers, he couldn’t remember anything from his past life, but later his memories came back and he chased the murderers.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 49 minutes.
Movie Type: Sci-fi, Adventure and Action.
Transcendence – 2014
Another sci-fi movie directed by Wally Pfister, and starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy. It’s about an AI researcher called Dr. Will Caster, who is working on a scientific project to give the machine an advanced consciousness.
His research makes him famous but also makes him a target for anti-technology groups. His wife Evelyn is also his work partner, she and his friend Max Waters have a big role in his success. When Caster dies his dream comes true when Evelyn attempts to merge his consciousness with his machine, but with all this power his behavior becomes erratic and he wants to control everything.
Movie Time: 1 hour and 59 minutes.
Movie Type: Sci-fi, Drama and Action.
I Am Mother – 2019
One more sci-fi movie, and a fine addition to the movies like Upgrade list. It’s created by Grant Sputore, starring Luke Hawker and Rose Byrne. The movie is set in the near future after an extinction event on Earth.
There’s an underground bunker containing an advanced AI and human embryos. The computer raises a human from a stored embryo to repopulate the Earth. The computer calls itself “mother”, and raises the girl alone. One day the power goes out and the girl with the computer mother went outside the facility to look for the source of the disturbance. They found that it was a mouse. The girl wants to keep it, but the mother thought that it could be a source of infection, so it burns it.
After a while, a wounded woman shows up outside the facility and the girl hides her inside. However, when the mother knows about her, it also considers the woman as an infection source and sends the girl for an urgent examination. Could the woman meet the same fate as the mouse? And could there be more living human beings out there?
Movie Time: 1 hour and 53 minutes.
Movie Type: Sci-fi, Drama and Mystery.
