Chappie

Released:  March 6^th, 2015

Rated:  R

Distributor:  Columbia Pictures

Starring:  Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Ninja, Yolandi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Sigourney Weaver, Hugh Jackman

Directed by:  Neill Blomkamp

Written by:  Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell

Personal Bias Alert:  likes allegorical sci-fi, not seen anything by Blomkamp

4.9 of 10

            The frustrating thing about Chappie is how much it does right.  The positives aren’t hidden, and they’re easy to appreciate.  But they’re surrounded by flaws both big and small, so that even when you’re reveling in Chappie’s good choices, you have to push aside its distracting mistakes.

            This is the third feature film from writer/director Neill Blomkamp, all of which are the sort of heavily allegorical sci-fi pieces where you understand the allegory from just the plot summary.  Chappie is about the definition of consciousness and life, played out through the struggle of the world’s first sentient robot.  Nicknamed Chappie, he was one of the robotic police officers used in Johannesburg that had been damaged and scrapped, only to be stolen by developer Deon (Dev Patel) for a trial run of his A.I. side project.  Chappie is then stolen from Deon (that’s karma) by a group of thugs, who raise him as one of their own.

            This period, where Chappie is learning about the world, is where the movie shines.  Chappie looks astounding thanks to the work of animators at Image Engine and Weta Workshop as well as the performance by Sharlto Copley.  There was no motion capture involved, but Copley performed the part on set and lent his voice to the final cut, giving the animators detailed body movements and emotional cues to work from.  Chappie, along with last year’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, are the only films to feature CGI characters that actually look like they’re in the same frame as everything around them, and that feat still leaves me floored.  The design of the character is just as important to this feat as the animation, and again Chappie draws top marks.  Drawing heavily from previous robot creations like the droids from the Star Wars prequels, the designers added small touches like emotive, ear-like antennae that bring much needed depth of emotion to the robotic character.

             Thanks to Chappie’s beautiful rendering, it’s easy for the audience to form an emotional bond to the child-like robot.  Yes, he’s big and tough, but he’s also naïve and lost, struggling to find his way in this brave new world.  The amount of compassion this engenders might catch you off guard, especially in a scene where he’s abused by a rival developer played by Hugh Jackman.  Establishing this connection goes a long way towards making the rest of the film work, especially after the film trades in these emotional beats in favor of big, violent action.

            The distracting mistakes of Chappie mostly stems from its writing, which fails to deliver rounded characters, a plausible plot, and any sort of idea about the themes and allegories its playing with.  Pretty much everything but Chappie himself is a farce, as other characters are too extreme to be taken seriously and plot points are shoved in to move the story forward without any regard to reality.  Not helping things is the fact that two non-actors were cast in main roles, Ninja and Yolandi Visser of the band Die Antwoord, who seem to be playing their stage personas and lack the ability to convey complicated emotions.  However, it’s the horribly overdone performance by Hugh Jackman that stands out as the worst.  Granted, his character was the most poorly written, but I don’t know how anyone watched his flailing performance in the climactic battle and didn’t call for a reshoot.

            A story about the first artificially intelligent machine naturally brings up questions of consciousness and existence, and it’s astoundingly disappointing how much these are glossed over in Chappie.  Instead of any actually debate about the answers to these questions, the movie simply chooses one path to go down and never looks back, if it even stops to examine the question at all.  There’s a point where the plot stumbles right into the scenario posited in the Swampman thought experiment, but I’m going to assume that the writers had never heard of it considering that the question it raises is never even acknowledged.  I, however, had this and many other questions gnawing at the back of my brain the entire time, which made the plot really hard to swallow.

            And yet, as frustrating as all these faults are, Chappie comes very close to working.  Blomkamp knows how to film action sequences, and Chappie himself is so endearing that you remain emotionally invested even when the plot does spin out of control.  That you care so much about the robocop is a feat, but most everything else is just a mess.

Other Notes:

Ø  One character is subtitled.  I think it’s because he was speaking broken English with a thick accent (it’s possible it was a different language), but either way, it stuck out like a ridiculous sore thumb.

Ø  This is the kind of movie where the big, indestructible robot continuously gets distracted by guys with little guns that aren’t doing any damage to him.

Ø  It’s like they tried to make an intellectual film, but forgot to put in the intellect.

Ø  Here’s an article about how Chappie was animated:  http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/how-they-did-it-chappie-learns-to-be-a-real-gangsta-exclusive-clip-20150306