#chappie

This could have been a lot worse.


An over simplified view on what makes humans ‘sentient’ and robots incapable of being such; then proposes the evolution of the machine to feel without any logical explanation. Consciousness is somehow quantified via a helmet that can process neurotransmissions into data.

Deon is an engineer for a robotics company, they designed a series of robots that help fight crime where it runs rampant in South Africa (basically like RoboCop). Deon, unsatisfied with his work and hungry for the next step in robotics, engineers a new type of A.I. from his home that has the capability to 'feel.’ Without wanting to take a risk on his newfound A.I. the CEO of the company refuses Deon’s proposal to test it out on a robot. Meanwhile, two criminals down on their luck hatch a plan to kidnap the engineer of the robots to, for a lack of better words, “make a like a remote or something to switch em off like a television.”

Instead of going off on a tangent on why this movie wasn’t good, I am going to start with how this movie could’ve passed as an “above average” film.

One of the main issues of this film is its exposition; sci-fi is all about the exposition, especially ones that aim to be blockbusters and or action flicks — it’s good to get a clear explanation out of the way for a clear line of awesomeness to ensue. Example; The Matrix, we get a little bit of action in the beginning to spark our interest and then we get a lot in the middle explaining the purpose of The Matrix and then the last 40 mins of the movie we get the lobby scene followed by the bullet time etc.

Chappie was onto something with its beginning with scientists explaining the unsurprising aspect of evolution that has transpired and then it falls flat on its face. If we are talking about the evolution of the robot, why not pursue Moore’s Law and compound it with Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns? There’s a story in there where Deon the engineer could have created a processor for these robots that he unknowingly knew was too advanced for his own pride blinds him to this fact, and thus the robots learn on their own and they create their own robot that devoids Asimov’s rules for robotics, and now we have an interesting character in Chappie being one of a kind.

Believe me, I really wanted to like this film, and actually prayed for its success. I still love Blomkamp and am excited for Alien 5, but ever since District 9, his follow ups have been getting progressively worse.

His decision to include Die Antwoord, and I literally mean Die Antwoord (they didn’t change their names), was NOT the answer (haha get it?). They did add a sense of wonderment to the film, but they took away from it as well as this was a clear promotion for the band as they spray painted Chappie with one of their album names on the side of his head and branded him with one of their popular monikers “Get Rich” in their signature font. The tattoos on Ninja and Yolandi, I can accept as it gives the film authenticity, but their over the top style only brought an imbalance to the film as Blomkamp had to find actors to keep up with Die Antwoord’s own eccentric style, which just ended up looking unnatural, not to mention their tracks played nonstop throughout the film.

If at all anything the film does a good job following the rules of a children’s novel and or cartoon in which an exposition climax and denoument must be encompassed in a 30mins period, but in the instance of Chappie everything drags on uncomforatably long — if it’s going to be over stylized satire go that route, if it’s supposed to be a provocative thought piece make it so and without outside elements that so obviously influenced the filmmaker — look instead to Ex Machina.

Apparently, a lot of people disagree on the film’s quality as the film is currently rated a 7/10 on imdb, which is absolutely preposterous to me as I see it as a 6, realtive to the imdb scale. A 7 or above still ranks the movie as being genuinely good, but certain core aspects of the film cause a great divide amongst people’s opinions, but a 6 is a clear cut indication that one needs to turn their brain off and completely suspend belief, because even at its lowest this film was somewhat entertaining.


2/4

Unfortunately,Chappiewill never earn a decent amount of supporters. It is far from a disaster, but it drops the ball too often with brushed over techie plot holes, failed tonal shifts, being too light handed with its social commentary and most unfortunate of all, it kind of fails at moving us and at the end of the day, this is what it wants to achieve the most. It is not totally devoid of…

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