Chappie (2015)
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Every child comes into the world full of promise, and none more so than Chappie: he is gifted, special, a prodigy. Like any child, Chappie will come under the influence of his surroundings—some good, some bad—and he will rely on his heart and soul to find his way in the world and become his own man. But there's one thing that makes Chappie different from any one else: he is a robot.
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Among her employees is a sweet, nerdy Indian guy (Dev Patel, marginally more believable, on account of being an actual Indian, than Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit) who dreams of instilling consciousness in these buckets of bolts.
However you dress up the movie, it really is a clunky mashup of Short Circuit (1986) and RoboCop (1987) — with large dollops of Mr. Dickens’ Oliver Twist thrown in.
Short Circuit's Johnny Five was one of those gentle, self-aware robots, inclined to tolerate humankind's failings rather than hunt us to extinction.
It’s idiotic, incoherent and downright punishing to sit through – unless you’ve been hankering for an ultra-violent remake of Short Circuit in which Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy are played by Die Antwoord.
“RoboCop,” “Short Circuit” and even “A.I.” have been cited as inspirations for “Chappie,” but they’re so prevalent in parallels, it feels like elements are directly lifted.
Unfortunately, for me it is a movie that does not pay homage to previous films (“Robocop,” “Short Circuit” come to mind) but borrows liberally and directly from these and other movies.
Their model here is clearly Paul Verhoeven's 1987 classic, "RoboCop," but where that movie gave us bloody good fun, "Chappie" offers mostly mean-spirited violence and a generally dismal worldview.
The film goes beyond the ideas put forth in Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop to a reality in which robots make up most of Johnnesburg’s police department.
With “Chappie,” the director and co-writer (with Terri Tatchell) opts for cute (like Number 5 in “Short Circuit”) combined with a “Robocop” bad corporate guy trying to take control of the killer robot biz (very much like Ronny Cox in the latter film).
Much of what transpires is borrowed heavily from Paul Verhoeven’s brilliantly biting satire, “RoboCop” especially “The Moose” – a clear (homage?) clone of the mega bipedal ED-209 that RoboCop has to go titanium to titanium with.
Meanwhile, at a robot factory overseen by Sigourney Weaver, engineer Vincent (Hugh Jackman) fumes over the poor reception of his pet project, a tank-like law enforcer that resembles RoboCop's ED-209.
Visually, Chappie often feels oddly overblown, particularly in Blomkamp’s decision to visualize near-futuristic criminality through cast-off costumes and punk hair from Mad Max, which, along with the painfully obvious visual similarity of the Moose to Phil Tippet’s memorable ED-209 from RoboCop (1987), makes the film feel overly derivative.
Fittingly for a film about creating a new form of life, Chappie is a Frankenstein production: it chops together familiar ideas and design from many far better features, including Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Andrew Stanton's Wall-E.
From Ridley Scott's Blade Runner to last year's Transcendence, these stories that ponder the gap between man and machine often reveal filmmakers unsure of where they fit in — they get so involved in the question that they forget to create real characters to ask it.
Other than that, much of what Blomkamp sets out to do becomes a maddening snarl of bits of other movies (“Blade Runner,” “E.T.” and “*batteries not included,” to name a few) and motifs that span creation, the precipitous edge of human reliance on machines and state of consciousness versus corporal being that never quite cook together.
With Sharlto Copley as the Jar-Jar Binks-like voice of Chappie, Dev Patel as Chappie’s “creator” (cue “Blade Runner” references), Hugh Jackman in a mullet and khaki shorts as an industrial adversary and Sigourney Weaver as an irritable CEO, as well as an awful lot of Sony products, including a Vaio laptop that somehow manages to funnel human consciousness from one portal to another in a matter of minutes.
“Robocop,” “Terminator,” “E.T.” and “Blade Runner” are all represented here, lovingly coated in a John Carpenter-esque score.
Design choices including an electronic score that finds Hans Zimmer quoting his own work with Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) and Vangelis's sound from '80s genre films (Blade Runner) don't help to dispel the impression that Chappie is Frankenstein's-monstrously stitched together from heartier tales of yore.
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Blomkamp and his District 9 co-writer Terri Tatchell return us to a crime-ridden Johannesburg, where robot-cops are apprehending or killing street-gangsters.
For director Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Elysium), the third time hardly qualifies as a charm.
The South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp gave Hollywood a jolt of creative electricity with his 2009 debut, "District 9," an inventive and wickedly funny parable about space-alien apartheid on planet Earth.
Starting with his ingenious, justly celebrated debut, “District 9” (2009), Blomkamp has employed the trappings of science fiction to cast a darkly satirical eye on our troubled species, albeit to steadily diminishing returns: Like 2013’s ambitious, disappointing “Elysium,” this lower-budget, smaller-scaled thriller imagines a society on the brink of collapse, only to resolve its intriguing scenario with a startling lack of follow-through or finesse.
Blomkamp showed a lot of promise with his debut film, "District 9" that mixed serious thematic issues into a rousing sci-fi action story.
His 2009 feature debut "District 9" was both thoughtful and entertaining.
In musing over the relationship between a creator and his creation, as well as flirting with the eternal nature versus nurture argument, echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its many screen adaptations can be glimpsed.
For director Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Elysium), the third time hardly qualifies as a charm.
His disappointing follow-up, "Elysium," tackled two not-so-sexy issues -- immigration and health-care reform -- with such simplistic thinking and contrived storytelling that it seemed to come from a different director.
Sigourney Weaver takes over Jodi Foster’s bad lady boss part from “Elysium” and gives Moore the order to kill the rouge robot.
Starting with his ingenious, justly celebrated debut, “District 9” (2009), Blomkamp has employed the trappings of science fiction to cast a darkly satirical eye on our troubled species, albeit to steadily diminishing returns: Like 2013’s ambitious, disappointing “Elysium,” this lower-budget, smaller-scaled thriller imagines a society on the brink of collapse, only to resolve its intriguing scenario with a startling lack of follow-through or finesse.
But since then, it's been diminishing returns: 2013's mildly underwhelming "Elysium" and now "Chappie," an unfunny stumble revisiting the core idea of one of his early short films.
(His sophomore effort, “Elysium,” was underwhelming.)
But while his model here appears to be the glorious original RoboCop, what landed on the screen is more like a cheaper, somewhat brainier Transformers movie, both in its sugar-high pacing and its strained humor.
And Chappie teasingly toys with everything from drone warfare to artificial intelligence – at least until we get a rock ’em-sock ’em robot finale that plays like some unholy combination of Transformers and Real Steel .
It even ends with an eye-watering robotic shoot out that would make Transformers director Michael Bay proud.
We get the same predictable turns and hollow reasoning as other movies loosely based on machines, like Transformers.
Like the robots in Chappie, Marty also suggests a snide version of the demography; both protagonists are as objectionable as some found Star Wars’ Jar Jar Binks and the hip-hop robots in Transformers.
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This doesn't have many original ideas, though I had fun picking out all the references to other SF movies (RoboCop, Westworld, and The Terminator, to name a few).
Chappie wears its sci-fi influences on its sleeve, with The Terminator and RoboCop readily evoked.
The screen has seen any number of robot creations that has managed to demonstrate remarkably human characteristics—HAL 9000, WALL*E and Samantha from " Her " immediately leap to mind—but Chappie, despite the best efforts by Blomkamp to humanize him (such as slapping a "REJECT" sticker on its forehead), is almost stunningly unappealing.
Genre completists may be reminded of still more recent dramas — from “Her” and “Transcendence” to “Automata” and “Ex Machina” — that have touched on such heady topics as robot sentience, transferred consciousness, and the always-tricky matter of human-bot relations.
Later, Chappie downloads all relevant information on the Internet (just like recent films Her and Avengers: Age of Ultron) in order to find a way to move human consciousness from one machine to the next, but in the middle of all that enormous knowledge gathering doesn’t learn that throwing stars don’t put people to sleep.
From WALL-E to Blade Runner to Spike Jonze’s recent Her, movies are full of artificially intelligent creations who have captured the imagination of audiences, and in doing so blurred the line of what it truly means to be human.
Outside Chappie’s character arc and a potentially rich but derivative premise about social conditioning (borrowed from The Terminator, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Her), the rest of the film is about as useful and overblown as Vincent’s clunky robot scheme.
The cool idea, explored somewhat in “Her,” is that any sentient being must, in a sense, grow up in the world of its creator.