X-Files Gone Epic X-Rated

The techno-shamanic story core has to do with a strange cyberpunk hacker named Tesla (presumably named after the genius Nicola, inventor of the Tesla coil), played by Hillary Scott, with sensitivity, yet sustaining the anal fire of Dungeonmaster Eli, including a skinsim- recorded gangbang, fisting full-body cavity search, and full-rotation fucking with a fellow hacker. She has one foot in meat world, one foot in Uploaded utopian escape, as in the Gibson-scripted X-Files episode it derives from. This narrative drive has the counterpoint of
government agents busting black market skinsims, seeking what they believe is a major viral threat to the grid (it turns out to be more than a mere destructive threat but a new liberated Artificial Intelligence lifeform).

Director Eli Cross, on Disc 3 (The Making of), of this impressive DVD box set (Discs 1 & 2 are the epic feature; Disc 4 is Extras) discloses right away that the initial story was a "rip-off of an X-Files episode," with its character triad of two government agents and a hacker. Since I already recognized the lineage (stemming from the '84 sci-fi classic, Neuromancer) of the
"Godfather of Cyberpunk" (who coined the term "cyberspace") William Gibson, when Cross said that, I realized the episode he was referring to was scripted by Gibson -- cool! Subsequent production style choices, including the visual look were influenced by Blade Runner and Minority Report.

Upload's lexicon includes such terms as: avatar, black warez, botstorm, chipjack, crsh drive, dermal pouch, DSA, Echelon II, the grid, sim chip, skinsims -- all variations on a well-established cyberpunk sci-fi worldview to those familiar with Neuromancer, Blade Runner, Minority Report, and the aforementioned X-Files episode scripted by the pioneering author of
Neuromancer, from 1984. If all this is too much for a XXX, just enjoy the gonzo sex.

Cross directs with the edgy, viscerally engaged camera work of the best crime dramas, that aspect being tracking illicit skinsim sex chips, and then a grid-threatening one, married to a scripted grail notion of the cyberspace era -- metaphysical transcendence into an Artificial Intelligence matrix beyond the temporal meat body, the ultimate UPLOAD, to which the title refers. Shifting color tones, blues, muted shades, black and white, warm golden, and more are etched in hi-def memory.

The 12 blistering sex scenes, occurring as they do in an absorbing 2-disc, 285 min. epic, retain a remarkable consistency of intensity, making preferences cosmetic at the psychic level. These aren't fashion models, they are sexily tough beauties of a unique breed: hellfire assfuckers who can act. Of course, Eva Angelina and Hillary Scott won Best and Supporting AVN awards for a reason. They are smarter and sexier. A steadily recurrent blast of blistering assfucking scenes are contrasted with a nipple clamps scene, fisting scenes, bondage, even pissing. There are so damn many performers in this epic that it feels like a cast of thousands. We feel like we're invited to de Sade's dungeon in one magnificent clusterfuck machine, some kind of hell grail of transgressive fuck fire. "As I walked through Hell, filled with the delights of genius, which to the angels look like torment. . ." wrote William Blake two centuries ago.

Well, Eli changed the word "walked" to "fucked." He gets his directorial "Eli Cross" nom de plume from the breezily diabolical director character played by Peter O'Toole in Richard Rush's classic film The Stunt Man. Like his inspiration, Cross is a humorously diabolical dungeonmaster who can actually read and write.

In the aforementioned Disc 3, Eli Cross lays it out as to how shallow the talent pool for FULL film performativity among porn performers is. The viewer is treated to an audition stream of fuck dolls perpetually tongue-tripping over the pronunciation of "algorithm" (one auditioner pronounces "avatar" "aviator"). A humorous eye-opener. Yes, CyberSatan wants you to speak actual fucking words, not blow his knob. Then the director recalls the ones who could read lines but were insufferable prima donnas, thus undesirable. Suddenly Eva Angelina and Hillary Scott seem like fucking (literally) geniuses.

So not only is this probably the greatest adult feature ever made, it's probably the most convincing REAL MOVIE made in the adult world.

I know there have been splashy productions, hot performers, genre storytelling engaged before. But I doubt this TOTALLY wired smarts and intensity have been delivered before. Because crime drama is the most visceral genre, and sci-fi the most societal-grid relevant genre, you are wrapping the crime guts and tech brain of effective intensives around transgressive hellfire assfuck oblivion -- it's as if the dungeonmaster torches his Sadean sex operatives till they incinerate in the Tesla dream of escaping the meat body into the eerie AI matrix.

Fire and ice. Scorpio. Mythical phoenix bird resurrecting from its own ashes. Eli Cross. Upload.

Rather than just dreamy artcore with nods to story or gonzo, we get a thoroughly realized intensity, wherein that artcore intensity is completely suffused through the edgy camera work, mood colors, tough poetics of the central story idea of virtual immortality, and consistently scorching sex scenes.

The epiphanous aspect of the story structure is not a NEW idea, it's been around thousands of years archetypally, and at least 24 years, with its current techno-delineations. But this techno-shamanic template is still a strong grid in mankind's story of itself, the idea of uploading one's spirit into an immortality grid, a crystalline AI ecstasy, an unimaginably cold fire. The Digital Security Agent aspect has to do with the familiar recovering of a (presumably)
dangerous viral chip before it can change the techno-grid of the world as we know it.

Under Cross's intensely focused direction, the blistering assfuck dungeon seems to rocket fuel the vision of virtual transcendence of form -- a true psycho-sexual techno-shamanic journey.

If a more powerfully integrated adult feature is made anytime soon, it will probably be made by Eli Cross.

One may like this or that porn star for her look, personality, performance repertoire. But you will not find a more integrated intensity, a more fully-realized adult feature, and directorial power, anywhere else.

So pray your favorites can act well enough to end up in an Eli Cross film because he's the best there is.

At 285 frickin' mins., one's less apt to blueprint every scene in a review, but one very simple illustration stands out. Besides consistent intensity, and even getting down and dirty with pissing scenes, Eva ass-reamed by Evan Stone, while her pussy, tits, and face are slapped around by Sandra Romain in warm golden-hues in Scene 1 is still the best, and probably was the AVN award-winning scene. That doesn't mean the subsequent scenes are a drop-off, only that the star's stand-out initiatory anal sex/DP was presented first.

Also especially memorable is when Eva's character has the sim experience of Hillary's scorching gangbang.

Whether a skinsim chip, or live meat, all of Eva's Cassandra Cray character's sexcapades in the line of duty, tracking a powerfully revolutionary computer chip are recounted in flashback to an internal investigative psychiatrist played by director Eli Cross himself (credited as Bryn Pryor).

What the Digital Security Agents (Eva/Cassandra's male partner is played by Derrick Pierce) think is a grid-threatening virus turns out to be a new lifeform, a God-like AI living in a holographic matrix, a la Wintermute in William Gibson's aforementioned pioneering classic Neuromancer. Interestingly, as in the X-Files, the agent partners never fuck.

34 chapters on Disc 1; 36 on Disc 2. 70 total!

After Hillary's hacker character Uploads herself, the psychiatrist experiences a lockdown of his Cassandra Cray file in the interest of national security, courtesy of Tesla, shades of Lawnmower Man's takeover of the virtual grid.

X-Files gone epic X-rated -- with a blended look redolent of Blade Runner and Minority Report.

Upload also features Trina Michaels, Adrianna Nicole, Julie Night, Kylie Ireland (who co-produced), Delilah Strong, Tyler Knight, Lorelei Lee, and Madison Young.

It's a stone cold 5, and raises the bar on X-rated style and narrativity.


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