The Weekend Review: Chappie

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

Neill Blomkamp was all the rage back in 2009 when he co-wrote and directed District 9.  It was a maddeningly new take on science fiction that mixed social outrage with verisimilitude to produce something that nobody had really seen before: basically the Schindler's List of alien flicks.  Audiences loved it (shelling out over $115 million against a $30 million budget in the US alone) and so did critics (awarding it a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 81 on Metacritic).  Hell, even the stuffy voting body at the Academy nominated it for four Oscars - and not just for technical achievements either, but for things like Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Chappie, however, marks the third time that Blomkamp has told roughly the same story in the last six years.  District 9 was great and all, but did we really need to retell it with robots?  Between its middling reviews and lackluster opening weekend gross, the answer is a roaring "sort of" and a deafening "maybe."  It's not that Chappie is a bad movie by any means, just that it's more of what we've already seen in District 9 and Elysium, only this time with less confidence in what it ultimately wanted to be about.

In 2016, Johannesburg is so hopelessly overrun by crime that they mechanize their entire police force.  In the wake of their unparalleled success at reducing crime rates and breaking up organized crime rings, weapons manufacturer Tetravaal funnels further funding from less promising projects - such as engineer Vincent Moore's own attack robot program - into Deon Wilson's police droids.  But when Wilson succeeds creating truly artificial intelligence in a junked droid named Chappie, it gives Moore everything he needs to destroy his rival and everything that he's worked to build.

Chappie might have three times the ambition that District 9 ever did, but it comes with only one third of its focus.  There are three major conflicts in the film - Vincent Moore's jealous rage toward Deon Wilson (engineer vs engineer), Wilson's failed attempts to save Chappie from a down-on-its-luck gang looking to use him in their latest heist (engineer vs gang) and the gang's desperate attempts to repay the money that they owe their psychotic boss (gang vs gang).  There's room in the movie to develop any two of these conflicts, but not all three, which is a real shame, seeing how potentially interesting any one of these conflict are on their own.

Coupled with its lack of narrative focus is its lack of a clear, singular theme.  Given how many different ways it could take its central premise of true artificial intelligence, Blomkamp evidently couldn't settle on just one.  At times, the movie wants to be about the influence parents hold over the development of their children, while at others it wants to be about how ultimately inhumane the world as a whole can be.  Near the end of the film, however, it decides that it wants to be about the tangibility of consciousness - about the soul and the very thing that makes us human.

An extension of this narrative and thematic ADD is that Chappie seems incapable of settling on a cohesive tone for its story.  You would think from all of the trailers that Chappie was an action-packed sci-fi romp with a cute-looking robot learning human behavior in less than favorable surroundings.  And, in a sense, you'd be right.  The climax is an exciting series of chase scenes and action sequences and the very beginning of the movie is the cutest thing this side of Monsters Inc.

The middle third of the movie, however - in which we watch what essentially amounts to the systematic abuse of a minor by a pair of unfit parents while his birth father fails to regain custody of him - is thoroughly unpleasant.  At one point Chappie is released in an unfamiliar part of town next to a group of hoodlums with every reason to hate a police droid.  They taunt him, beat him and light him on fire, chasing him into the arms of Moore, who then dismembers him and attempts the rough equivalent of a robo-lobotomy.  Despite what the gang tells Chappie - that he's invincible and can't be hurt - we see the very real physical trauma that he goes through: him limping and stumbling through the back allies of Johannesburg, still smoldering from the flames, his body punctured and dented.  We see him collapse into the arms of his mother, crying about the traumatic ordeal his so-called father put him through just so he can toughen him up.

Despite its innumerable flaws and its dramatic shifts in narrative, tone and theme, Chappie is a refreshingly well made sci-fi movie with far more meat on its bones than many better made films.  With it, Neill Blomkamp proves once again just how consistently good and outrageously ambitious a writer-director he is: one who knows equally well how to stage exciting action scenes and explore deeply scientific ideas.  All he needs to do now is to figure out how to trim down everything he wants to say on a given subject into a single movie.

Rating:  7/10

Worth Buying:  Not if you already own District 9.

So what is your favorite movie about artificial intelligence?

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