Review // Chappie

[projekktor id=’17932′]

With his third feature film, director Neill Blomkamp shows us his grim dystopian future once again. Like his previous efforts (District 9, Elysium) Chappie pits a renegade everyman against an evil, corporate bureaucracy which rules over the violent streets of South Africa. Also like his previous films, the director populates this world with grimy machinery, at once ultra-futuristic and Dickensian. In fact, Chappie has all the same positives and negatives of Blomkamp’s previous work. When the South African/Canadian exploded onto the scene in 2009 with District 9, the gritty DIY style and beautiful special effects felt like a breath of fresh air. Four years later he released Elysium, a film bogged down by a leaden plot and hollow characters, but also a stylish and original vision. With Chappie, the same virtues and faults evident in those earlier works are again present, however here they feel magnified.

Chappie follows Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) a robotics engineer who’s robotic police “Scouts” keep the peace in the violent slums of Johannesburg. Though he’s made out to be the lone creator of this veritable robot army, Deon still just gets a cubicle in the head office of the munitions company overseen by Sigourney Weaver’s Michelle Bradley. Competing with Deon is Hugh Jackman’s Vincent Moore, a war-mongering soldier-turned-engineer struggling to find funding for his own robotics project, a huge, weapons-laden droid called The Moose. While Vincent’s interest in robotics lies in their power to subdue, Deon is more interested in artificial intelligence, messing around with a home-made operating system called Consciousness.exe.

When Deon decides to smuggle a damaged scout from company headquarters in order to test out his AI program, he’s kidnapped by gangsters Ninja and Yolandi (aka Watkin Tudor “Ninja” Jones and Yolandi Visser of Cape Town rap rave group Die Antwoord). Threatened with violence if they don’t pay a debt, the gangsters are desperate for a way to combat the Scouts in order to pull off a major heist. Ninja decides a robot of their own will do just the trick, however when Deon’s robot is activated, it’s more frightened child then cold-blooded criminal. Named Chappie by Yolandi, the robot is given a quick lesson in morality by Deon (don’t commit crimes, don’t shoot people) before he’s chased off by Ninja, who sets to work on training the robot to be a part of their “gang”.

Blomkamp has never been reknowned for his writing, and the script – from Blompkamp and District 9 collaborator Terri Tatchell – has some real teeth-grinding moments. Character motivations are often murky and some of their actions are downright confusing. This isn’t helped by Blomkamp’s choice to cast Die Antwoord.  Ninja too often resorts to shouting in place of actual acting, and the choice to portray the pair as permutations of themselves (they use their own names, they wear Die Antwoord t-shirts) is a tad confusing. They’re strongest contribution actually comes in their music, which Blomkamp uses liberally throughout and helps inject the picture with a certain local colour, as well a screw-you attitude.

In the lead roles Dev Patel and Hugh Jackman are strong, if a little one-dimensional. Patel’s Deon is your textbook nerdy scientist, morally righteous but not all that careful when it comes to bringing sentient beings into existence. Jackman is a lot of fun as the sneering Vincent who expresses his disdain for Deon with regular streaks of salty Aussie slang. Sigourney Weaver appears in an almost meaningless role as the head of the weapons company, but she still manages to chew the scenery whenever she’s onscreen. The real star is Sharlto Copley, who’s motion-capture work on Chappie is amazing. Watching the robot’s slow transformation from frightened child to violent gangster is a captivating and, at times, joyous experience and Copley fills the metal frame with more humanity and truth than most of the actors can muster.

Which is sort of the point. While much of the story has a familiar feel to it (Robocop and Short Circuit are the two most obvious examples), the character of Chappie is charming enough to keep you interested throughout. Beginning as a wide-eyed innocent, Chappie is slowly driven to utter frustration with the humans around him, who break the very rules they try to teach him. It’s a nice reversal of expectations to have the director siding with the virtues of artificial intelligence over the human brain, but similar to his other films, Blomkamp brings up some big ideas and then can’t quite figure out where to go with them. Nevertheless there is enough action and eye candy to satisfy even the most skeptical viewer. Those put off by logical inconsistencies or unbelievable plot points will be groaning by the third act, but as escapist sci-fi Blomkamp’s film is a ton of fun.

With the announcement that he’ll now be helming the next installment in the Alien franchise, Chappie feels like Blomkamp’s last kick at the “original sci-fi” can, at least for the time being. If you’ve seen his previous films, even just District 9, and enjoyed them, then you should check it out. Personally I’m fully on board the Blomkamp bandwagon…though it’s kind of dirty on here.

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.