Chappie

Another long one. Also a movie I'm not overly fond of funnily enough.

Chappie is the third film from Neill Blomkamp, and frankly a worrying sign for his future efforts. To be fair, the film isn’t complete garbage like a lot of the shit I watch, but it’s also not very good and a marked step down from Blomkamp’s first two films. It does have a fair amount of good ideas going for it, which is I suspect part of the reason I dislike the film so much. Wasted potential just annoys me more than something that had no potential in the first place (Sharktopus, looking at you).

Let’s get the summary out of the way first. Chappie is set in Johannesburg, in the not too distant future. To help combat soaring gang crime, the police have turned to a corporation called Tetravaal to provide them with robotic assistance. The Scout program amusingly enough is not a series of ED-209 knockoffs (although the MOOSE is damned close, but that’s later) but a series of light, vaguely humanoid robots governed by a very sophisticated series of protocols that nonetheless do not have any actual human controllers. They also don’t have any inbuilt weapons systems, instead relying on armouries run by humans to load up. Actually a fairly decent setup. We have Deon Wilson, played by Dev Patel to thank for this program, but high-end protocols aren’t Deon’s end goal. He’s after true Artificial Intelligence, and about 15 minutes into the film he has it cracked.

During this time we also meet Vincent Moore, played by Hugh Jackman. He’s a complete arsehole of an ex-soldier turned weapons designer, very Australian, and doesn’t seem to understand appropriate force very well. See, the Scouts described above are a decent idea for police robots – lightweight, durable, relatively cheap and they rely on humans for armaments. Vincent has a bone to pick with the whole concept of autonomous robots though, so he’s designed the MOOSE to be controlled remotely by a human. He’s also designed it as a 3 story tall monstrosity with automatic grenade launchers, miniguns, close-combat armaments sufficient to wreck a light armoured vehicle, cluster missiles and a cut down SAM system. Strangely, the police don’t want a bar of it, but Vincent never seems able to understand why (hint – he’s nuts).

To round out our trio of actually decent actors who don’t do much in this film, we have Sigourney Weaver playing Michelle Bradley, the CEO of Tetravaal. She gets absolutely fuck all to do in this film and could have been replaced entirely with expository dialogue from Patel and Jackman, which is extremely disappointing. She denies Deon the usage of a broken droid to test his AI in, saying she’s not interested in a robot that can write poetry. No profit in AI apparently.

Finally we have Ninja, Yolandi and Amerika. A trio of wannabe gangsters who owe 20 million to a rather psychotic gangster, who are quite frankly the second worst element of this film. Ninja and Yolandi are played by the rap group Die Antwood (and yes, they’re using their own names on screen. Almost never a good sign), and even now I’m baffled as to why Blomkamp put these morons in the film. More on this later.

During our first fight scene involving the scouts and all of our gangers, one of the scouts gets critically damaged, fusing the power core into its’ own chest. This gives it a lifespan of days since it can’t be replaced now, and is in no way foreshadowing for future plot. Deon steals the broken scout to plug his AI program into, but gets kidnapped by Die Antwood, who have decided that having a scout or a way to turn them off would be very helpful for the massive heist they need to pull. And thus Chappie is born.

As a frightened, child-like robot. This I thought was done particularly well – Deon made a point of noting that his AI was a learning program but had nothing else programmed into it – he hadn’t done anything like load it up with textbooks or whatever. Chappie might be able to learn at a stupidly accelerated rate, but he still has to learn. And what he learns is how to be a shitty gangster, because Die Antwood want him for their own heist and threaten to kill Deon if he tries to stop them.

This learning routine forms the meat of the film, and contains both the best and worst elements of the film. Chappie’s learning is done really well, mainly because the film never forgets that he’s basically an impressionable child. So whilst he picks up everything Die Antwood teach him really fast, he doesn’t actually pick up anything more than that because how could he? It’s not like anyone’s teaching him to write poetry or giving him a physics textbook to absorb. Throw in Sharlto Copley’s rather brilliant voice work, and the development of Chappie as a character is great.

The problem is Die Antwood. Well, two problems. Firstly, they get the majority of the screentime, and therefore the majority of the films emotional weight hangs off them. And they can’t act. Dear god they can’t act. They wouldn’t look out of place in a movie involving whatever demented shark/not shark related crossover comes out next, but in a movie like this they’re a serious drag on the quality.

Of greater concern is their story arc. They’re horrible dickheads. Yolandi is kind of nice with Chappie but that’s about it. They’re manipulative, petty, violent thugs and they stay that way the entire film. They don’t have a character arc. I get that having horrible people for Chappie to try and impress first is an interesting idea. The problem is, until the last part of the last act of the film Chappie doesn’t really interact with anyone else, and then only briefly with Deon and Vincent. So there’s no contrast to the stupid shit they do, no alternate ideas for Chappie to really connect with. They just use Chappie to rob stuff, manipulate him into committing easy crimes for them (Chappie initially thinks he’s helping them reclaim stuff that belonged to Ninja) and generally appear to have no problems with what they’re doing.

So to close this summary off quickly, Die Antwood convince Chappie to help them rob an armoured car by lying to him about being able to buy a new body with the money. Chappie figures out how to map human consciousness to a machine after he decides to start downloading textbooks into his brain. Vincent uses Deon’s Scout-controlling tech to shut down every Scout in the city, and gets to unleash the MOOSE when things go completely to shit. As an added bonus, the news shows Chappie robbing an armoured car, although the reporters think it’s a symptom of whatever shut down the other scouts. Only Vincent, Deon and Michelle know Chappie is sentient, and two of them are terrified at the concept so Vincent gets ordered to blast everyone involved.

In a gigantic fight he fails to do so. The MOOSE gets destroyed, almost everyone (including the gang Die Antwood owe) except Ninja, Deon and Chappie die in the gang/MOOSE fight, Chappie beats the absolute shit out of Vincent and then uploads both his and the now dying Deon’s consciousness into new bodies. End movie with them creating a new body for Yolandi, and planning to imprint her consciousness into it.

That’s the gist of things. You might have noticed that despite being a film about the development of an AI, no one actually seems to care. It’s a huge deal that gets glossed over so Die Antwood can be shit for longer. And absolutely baffling given Blomkamps’ previous films. District 9 was a story about race and prejudice wrapped around sci-fi trappings. Elysium was a story about refugees and class wrapped around sci-fi trappings. Chappie is sci-fi trappings with a loose gangster plot to hold it together. At no point does it really deal with the implications of being able to create sentience, or the ability to map consciousness to a machine. That’s human uplift right there, and it’s just something done to advance plot. It feels like the movie cares less about the concept of AI and sentience, and more about dickheads being dickheads.

It isn’t all bad. As mentioned, Chappie itself is great. There’s this weird kind of childish energy to the animation which, when combined with Copley’s excellent and weirdly enthusiastic voice acting makes for a really interesting robot, especially when it learns about the concept of death and the fact that unless it gets a new body, it will die. Jackman and Patel are fantastic in the few scenes they have. The cinematography appears great as always with this crew. Regardless of what’s going on in writing, Blomkamp hasn’t lost the ability to craft a coherent, easy to follow scene.

The sad thing is, the fix for all the rubbish is obvious. Relegate the gangsters to background/second stringers. Return the focus to the implications of creating sentience, and hang the arguments in that story off of Jackman, Patel and Weaver. Jackman has his hatred of “godless” robots, Patel is just trying to create something new and Weaver only cares about profit. Focus back on those three, hang the action scenes off the gangsters (maybe have Chappie spend some time with them just to learn something new/run away from home), and we could have a movie about not just what it means to be sentient, but what sentience is worth to us as a species. This movie that exists solely in my head is way better than the shit we got.

If you want a movie that actually deals with sentience/AI well, go see Ex Machina instead. A much better film, much more intelligent. And it manages to never be boring despite being constructed mostly around 3 people talking to each other in a house. A vastly superior movie by far, and I cannot recommend it enough if you want a movie that actually deals with what it means to be sentient. Otherwise, give Chappie a miss until it appears in the bargain bin and you’re very bored.