Marval Movie

Whenever there is a robot in a movie it is not a weapon or a tool, it is a toy that the filmmaker, regardless of their intentions, cannot help but play with.

Lets just address the elephant in the room now, this movie is a lot like the eighties movie Short Circuit. The similarities are too much to ignore, but this is still its own movie. But this is more insightful and engaging and will live longer than that movie.

The movie takes place in the same place as all of Neill Bloomkampf movies do, in South-Africa (this is Johannesberg) and the undisclosed future. This is a world where a majority of the police are robots driven by an A.I. they are effective with crime at a low and efficiency up. Still though, their creator, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) wants more than build fighters, he wants to make creators. He decideds to write a creative A.I. where a robot will be able to learn and think for itself.

The other characters are, Yolandi (Yolandi Visser) an albino that takes the role of the mother to Chappie, her weird, spaced-out approached did not work for me. Ninja (a rapper that also goes by Ninja) a local criminal that sees Chappie as a means to an end. Our villain is Vincent Moore, Hugh Jackman, that sports a mullet and his Australian accent. He feels uneasy around the A.I. robots and wants approval for his giant, solider-controlled tank. The other baddy in the movie is Hippo (Brandon Auret) a raging beast if there ever was one, whose accent is so thick and yells everything that even though he is speaking english, he requires subtitles. This is not a character, this is a thin, not very well thought-out personification of the ultimate thug.

Yolandi and Ninja need more muscle to pull of a heist, so they get Deon to put his A.I. jadwal into a blank police robot. The jadwal works, but he is a baby at this stage so there needs to be a learning period. It is in these scenes where the movie suddenly morphs into a comedy. These are the funnest parts of the movie, seeing this robot interact with the other characters and come to grips with pop-culture and social interactions.

Chappie (Sharlton Copley) is charming creation in terms of movie robots, his design is clever with movable bars on his face to double as eyebrows and a mouth. Also two entenas that flap up and down that work like bunny ears.

The real test for having a robot as a character within your movie is if we care about it. Though it is only metal do you care if it is hit and dented, the answer is yes. Chappie, though being a computer generated robot does gather sympathy. The movie asks the same question that pretty much all other robot movies ask, What is consciousness? Can a seemingly inanimate object have humanity? At the end of the movie I don't think I really had a new perception on those questions but thats not so bad being that I got to spend time with a fun robot.

This movie comes with a few more splashes of paint than other Bloomkamp movies. Just a few guns paint yellow or pink, it invokes Spring Breakers to me.

As I wrote in my Elysium review Bloomkamp needs that watch out for repeating himself. Well it was in this movie that I was getting wise to how he works. His movies are all in South-Africa, shows the difference in the classes and the colours and ultimately have a deadline for the characters to work for.

Bloomkamp usually has really engaging and gripping climaxes. Not here though, the big action climax is more overblown and takes itself more seriously than the audience will be able to. This is not a terrible, or incoherent action scene, but I expect more from movies and especially this director. In-fact this climax has a few similarities to Robocop 2, which is never a good thing. It also ends on a rather disturbing unsettling note for me.

As a filmaker Bloomkamp is showing repetition, he is showing growth and trying different things, but also the familiar shape of his story structure is starting to become obvious. Still an entertaining movie is an entertaining movie.

Rating: 3 stars out of 4