Review: ‘Chappie’

“Chappie” is an update on the “Pinocchio as a robot” story, the sentient cyborg wants to be real sort of thing, a kind of South African “Short Circuit” blended with a little “Robocop.” With a mix of comedy, science fiction, action and a bit of social satire, “Chappie” is a good movie blending some cool ideas and featuring incredible special effects, and would have been great if the story itself was just a little more developed.

It is the very near future and things, as always in these kinds of movie, have gone to complete shit. In Johannesburg, South Africa, the police have contracted a weapons company to provide hundreds of drone cops, robots that accompany the police officers and are helping to drop crime rates everywhere. Engineer Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) is the creator of these robots called Scouts, yet he himself just is a worker drone within the massive weapons company anyway. On the side he’s managed to create an artifical intelligence program that he could install into a robot to test out, but when his boss (Sigourney Weaver) refuses to give him a discarded robot to work with, he ends up stealing it so he could do the A.I. testing on the down low. But wouldn’t you know it, Deon gets kidnapped himself by a trio of gangsters who then end up stealing his robot with the brand new A.I. program, and they name is Chappie (Sharlto Copley) and teach it to gangsta lean, curse and throw ninja stars, all so they can use it in a heist to make a bunch of money.

Also Hugh Jackman plays a rival engineer who hates Deon’s Scouts and wants to get the company to fund his project, which is a giant ED-209 looking monstrosity which is controlled by a human the whole time. So there’s that.

There are a lot of moving parts in this movie, and at only two hours, some of these things weren’t going to get the development needed. For example, there are the three gang members, Amerika, Ninja and Yolandi, and the reason for them wanting to kidnap the engineer in the first place is really because they want to steal his “on-off” switch for the robots because they are forced to get 20 million…dollars? Not dollars? They didn’t specify…20 million something to pay off some insane gang leader so they want to turn off the Scouts so they can do some thieving. Why even bother with this anonymous bad guy gang leader? To make Amerika, Ninja and Yolandi not seem as bad in comparison? They could have just made them three thieves who came up with the idea to stop the scouts without having to contrive some sort of impetus for them to do so. It just adds additional characters and scenes that end up taking away from Chappie time.

Then there is someone like the boss of company, whatever her name is. Jane Doe or something. She is such a boring character, giving Sigourney Weaver nothing to do other than sit or stand behind a desk and make announcements over the PA system in the office. This character existed solely as an excuse to move along a couple of plot points. She is on the same level of importance as the one factory worker who we see a couple of times as he makes repairs and answers a couple of questions for Deon or Hugh Jackman.

Alot of this could have been cut back to develop Ninja and his posse a little more because we are following them around a good deal, as they are in possession of Chappie, but we hardly know anything about them. Ninja is a dick. Yolandi is sweet natured. And Amerika looks like Spanish Cuba Gooding Jr. That’s all we know. This could have been an opportunity to introduce some stereotypical street gangsters and then slowly reveal through their interactions with Chappie how they are normal people, too, with hopes and dreams and aspirations and shit like that, with complexities of character, but nope, we get none of that, they just exist to be weird surrogate parents for Chappie.

So what about Chappie? Fortunately he does grow as a character, mostly because that is the plot of the movie really. When he is turned on, it is explained that he has to learn everything like a normal people would, except that it would be able to learn at an accelerated pace, what with it being a robot and all. So Chappie starts out as a scared little baby and he learns all sorts of stuff over the first few days of its life, and pretty quickly comes to some moral and existential quagmires. For example, in one scene it is pointed out to Chappie that his “maker” (Deon the Engineer) put him in a flawed body that would be running out of battery life within a few days, hence making death inevitable for Chappie, who was just learning the joys of life. This throws Chappie for a loop and makes him hate his maker, questioning him openly about why he would make Chappie just to die, which is the question that man has been asking himself since he first discovered he was doomed to die one day.

There is also some social commentary with this aspect of Chappie, because though it wasn’t his choice, he found himself with poor “street” people and with a body that is about to give out, and despite making a promise to his maker to not commit any crimes, he finds that due to his position, the only way to survive is to commit crimes. He has to turn his back on his maker and his promise to live a good life because that’s the only way he sees for himself to be able to live at all. He is a victim of his surroundings, and it would seem that “Chappie” comes down on the side of nurture in the nature versus nurture argument. Ninja and Yolandi actually argue about what they should be teaching Chappie and have different parenting styles, so to speak. Ninja even drops off Chappie in a rough area and forced it to find its way back home, and Chappie ended up getting attacked and set on fire and beat up and supposedly learns a tough lesson about how hard the world is, but then Ninja seems to regret this decision because Chappie got beat up so bad by the world, so its like a parent who throws his child to the wolves to learn how to survive and then when it doesn’t go so well the parent has to wonder if he made the correct choice.

But I guess that’s really it for development. Deon is a nothing of a character, which is a shame because he is probably the second most important character in this story, just behind Chappie. As his creator, we are given no reasons for why Deon is going through so much, or why he sees this as so important. At one point he simply says this is what interests him, and that’s it. Chappie may learn a little from Deon, but Deon seemingly learns very little from Chappie. Hell, the idea of consciousness is not foreign or hard to grasp for Deon, so when Chappie shows that he has feelings and emotions and displays an actual consciousness, this doesn’t really do much for Deon except validate his experiment. It’s like Ninja and Yolandi, we have no idea why these characters are REALLY doing what they are doing, they are all just surface level wants and desires with nothing behind them.

And all of that is frustrating because Neill Blomkamp is so obviously a very skilled and talented filmmaker, if only he had someone else work on this story for him, maybe it would have been a more complete story, with more developed characters and plot points that fit together a little better than they do. And then with someone else working the story, he would have more time to develop the things he obviously loves the most, like the actual look of this movie, the atmosphere, the production design and world building. Just like in his breakout hit “District 9” and his follow up “Elysium” (another movie with great ideas and a somewhat threadbare script), a very real yet fantastic world is built and sustained in “Chappie.” This is why Blomkamp would have been perfect for a “Halo” movie, or could still make an excellent “Alien“movie, as he knows how to establish the worlds and the moods needed, the only thing he needs is some more help with the stories. Which admittedly is kind of a big part of movies, sort of the reason they exist.

If you checked other places like that Twitter or critic aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, you’ll see that this is Blomkamp’s worst reviewed film, and a lot of folks are really taking the knives to this thing, and I guess I am too much of a fan of Blomkamp’s aesthetic to jump on this anti-Blomkamp bandwagon. “Chappie” may not have blown me away like “District 9” did, but I was never bored and the movie was never incoherent to me, like I have seen a lot of people complain about this film. Chappie looks amazing, and I loved Copley’s work in bringing him to joyous life, very much in a Johnny Five sort of way. And the way the Ninja and Yolandi stuff is shot is pretty awesome and fun, with lots of energy, but also very distinct and individual and just cool.

So plenty of people are writing off Neill Blomkamp at this point and to them his future films will be seen through this prism, which would definitely color the way they view his art from this point forward. I, on the other hand, am glad to have seen this film and I am happy it exists, because even though it is not as strong as it could have been, it is still joyously odd and weird and definitively the work of an artist with a vision, and I am looking forward to what this guy does next.