Chappie Review: No Strings

With a very impressive heritage that makes my Sci-Fi loving heart flitter with the unique and interesting District 9 and the down right awesome Elysium and now the upcoming promise of an actually good new entry into the Alien series, Neil Blomkamp had me instantly on board for his new movie. While I did go in with more tempered expectations than I did, or will do, for the afore mentioned movies I still had a very large amount of faith in the already proved brilliant talent involved. That may have been a mistake.

The story of Chappie takes place in the near future where the police forces are now filled with robots, each with a basic AI system that allows them to not need a human controller to operate them when in the battlefields. But now their creator, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), wants to push this amazing scientific achievement even further and creates the first authentic artificial intelligence, Chappie (a Blomkamp regular: Sharlto Copley), with a consciousness all of its own. And when Chappie is left in the hands of criminals we see just how this new facet of life adapts and in the most part how it can be taken advantage of.

While the story of Chappie does sound very interesting with the trademark Blomkamp stamp of social intrigue, overall, I’m sorry to say, this movie is a complete waste of potential. However there are seeds of promise littered throughout the film but they are never allowed to fully flourish into something interesting because they are trampled on by the disengaging and honestly annoying path the script of this movie sets it on. The greatest examples of these seeds of potential are in the police orientated aspects of the film. The opening action sequence is not only exciting and engaging (being my favourite part of the film) but it is also very compelling to see how the inclusion of these kick ass cybernetic tin men has affected the running of the police force and it would have been a much more entertaining movie if we got to explore and see just how they now orientate themselves to most effectively squash the crime of the city and just what Chappie thought and felt about all this and how he could fit into it. Another seed greatly lacking the growth it needed was Hugh Jackman’s character, Vincent Moore’s arch of the story, which if given more space and attention in the movie to grow could have produced a great villain whose plot, again if given more care, could have created a better and more hard hitting impact on the audience.

But instead of these grievously more engaging aspects of the movie we are left to endure the main over arching plot of Chappie adapting to a criminal’s lifestyle. Which could have been interesting if the characters weren’t so 2 dimensional and utterly dislikeable. Not only are the criminal characters of the film insultingly over the top but they aren’t even fun to be around, or in terms of this movie shackled to for the majority of the 2 hour runtime. Every time they would appear on screen I would find myself becoming angrier and angrier as they not only wasted my time but took the film painfully away from aspects that could have been a pleasure to watch and explore. This anger got to such a point that in the explosive climax of the film I was sitting fingers crossed in the hopes to finally see these wholly dislikeable characters to be wiped off the screen, which would have made Hugh Jackman another Wolverine level hero in my mind.

Sadly the stereotypical nature of the movies characters doesn’t end with the criminal sect of the film but extends throughout the film leaving only the titular character, Chappie, unscathed. Even though this film is packed with great actors, excluding the strange and mind boggling choice of the band members Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser that take up a criminal amount of the screen time, each character is a simple archetype of their category in humanity as they deliver some really uninspired dialogue. Worst of all squandering the talent that is on screen, creating yet another wasted opportunity for the movie as each tick every single box of the cliché list, never creating any compelling vocal points for the film aside from Chappie. Who while is the most diverse and well acted of the cast, personally, his character was taken into too much of an unlikeable and disengaging route throughout the film, leaving me to even want the wide eyed and loveable guy for the scrap heap.

While the bad route and how Chappie is propelled on to it, which makes him fall into the dislikeable line, tainting his innocence with each manipulated step he takes can be seen as a great theme and intriguing message on nurturing for the film to take and explore I found the whole execution of this idea to be too heavy handed and irritatingly obvious leaving me sighing with boredom instead of scratching my head with in deep thought of what the movie has just presented me.

Another aspect that really doesn’t help the film is that the world doesn’t feel fleshed out enough as it becomes more of a cardboard back ground for this AI concept to be explored instead of a fleshed out universe to heighten the concept and give it more life and believability. Outside of the expositional news clippings that open the movie you never really get any insight into how the world around this new creation works, making their reaction to the creation of Chappie as hollow and throw away as the plot and characters that fill it.

Thankfully one aspect of Blomkamp’s films that hasn’t also been deserted in this film is his awe inspiring visuals. Outside of the disappointingly unrealistic execution of the ‘threateningly’ named “Moose” bot in the final fight of the film the aesthetic of the robots and Chappie himself is amazing. Not only are they well designed and can create some incredibly cool dynamics in a fight, as shortly seen in the opening cops and robber sequence, they are strangely the most believable part of the film. They not only seamlessly integrate with the environment around them but their physicality is also very impressive, especially when seeing the juxtaposing controlled and calculated movements of the standard Robocops  to the more fluent and experimental physical style of Chappie that is expertly performed by Sharlto Copley.

Overall Chappie is the definition of wasted opportunity. This movie turns the intriguing idea of artificial intelligence and its growth into a disengaging and boring concept that is filled with 2 dimensional characters that deliver at points cringe worthy dialogue in a fittingly 2 dimensional world that bores instead of enthuses. While the actual performance of Chappie and the incredible CGI put into him is phenomenal he is never allowed to shine as the plot is disappointingly bland, which hurts even more as there are opportunities for much better avenues of story telling laid all around Chappie that are diabolically ignored.

Chappie = 3/10