| Chappie, Neill Blomkamp’s third feature, is set, like his well-regarded debut District 9 (2009), in his native Johannesburg in a recognizable near future, except rather than being overrun with ghettoized aliens, it has been turned into a police state where crime has been largely eradicated by police robots. These robots, dubbed Scouts, are programmed for action and set into motion alongside human police officers who benefit primarily from the shielding they provide. The product of Tetra Vaal, a large tech corporation overseen by Sigourney Weaver’s profit-minded CEO Michelle Bradley, the Scouts are not without controversy, since they represent yet another step in humanity’s handing over their security to an automated force of its own making. The creator of the Scouts, a mousy engineer named Deon (Dev Patel), secretly yearns to crack the boundary between man and machine by creating a robot that is truly intelligent—one that can think and feel and learn in the way a human being does. This puts him in direct conflict with Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman), a hulking soldier-turned-engineer who is banking on his creation, a towering robot that is controlled via direct neuronal connection with a human controller. Thus, the fundamental question is whether humankind’s machine creations can safely operate of their own volition or whether they always need to be kept under human control. Moore’s vicious militarism is right in line with Blomkamp’s previous films, which, like the films of James Cameron (to whom Blomkamp clearly owes a debt), view the military with skepticism, if not outright hostility. Unfortunately, this means that Moore turns into something of a one-note villain, his moral cartoonishness challenged only by the ridiculousness of his inexplicable mullet. One night Deon take home with him a decommissioned Scout and manages upload an artificial intelligence program he’s been working on. Thus is born Chappie, who is like an infant ready to absorb not just knowledge, but language, social mores, behaviors, and a sense of morality (and mortality). Unfortunately, he falls into the hands of a trio of criminals who are in desperate need of a big score to pay a debt to an even bigger and scarier criminal. The trio, two of whom are played by Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser, better known in South Africa as the rap-rave group Die Antwoord, decide that having a police robot working for them is the key to criminal success, and they go about teaching Chappie (who refers to them as Mommy and Daddy) how to be a tough-talking, smooth-moving gangsta, complete with vulgar slang, plenty of bling and “tattoos,” and an ultraviolent attitude. Poor Deon tries to be involved, as well, showing up at the gang’s industrial hideout like a frustrated elementary school teacher to instruct Chappie in the ways of art and culture. Chappie’s computer-chip soul is thus on the line, as he is divided between two fathers representing two completely different ways of life. And, like a child, Chappie naturally gravitates toward that which is more invigorating and enticing, and if the film is successful in any way, it is in endearing us to Chappie’s sing-songy naiveté (supplied by Blomkamp regular Sharlto Coply), even as Blomkamp often undermines his own emotional effectiveness by trying to wring laughs out of the sometimes ridiculous sight of a humanoid robot trying to be all gangsta. It’s a conflict that seems born out of Blomkamp’s indecisiveness regarding the film’s tone, which is perhaps best exemplified in his decision to score much of the film with Die Antwoord’s grating rap-rave, which, in addition to feeling misplaced, also imbues the film with a distracting sense of commercial opportunism. With District 9, Blomkamp demonstrated a seemingly intuitive sense of how to manage science fiction as both social statement and action extravaganza, but with his follow-up, the overly ambitious and thematically misguided Elysium (2013), he swung too far toward the former, making a movie that was preachy and ultimately unbelievable. He’s clearly trying to move back toward the center with Chappie, but it still feels unsteady and thematically muddled; for a film that was sold on the philosophical question of artificial intelligence, little attention is truly paid to the concept, as Steven Spielberg did in his magnificently troubling A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). Chappie’s ability to think and feel is startling and emotionally gripping at first, but after a while it is presented as such a given that any moral ramifications of his machine intelligence fade away and he is just another conflicted would-be hero. 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. That this is Blomkamp’s third attempt to resurrect the idea of thoughtful, socially meaningful science fiction on the big screen is admirable, even if the resulting film doesn’t live up to its promise. Blomkamp is clearly a man of ideas, but with the exception of District 9, he has been unable to fully articulate those ideas through character and action, a problem that is unfortunately confirmed by Chappie’s muddled themes and misguided tonal shifts. Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Columbia Pictures |
Overall Rating: (2)
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