After breaking out with 2009’s District 9 – which garnered a Best Picture nomination – and disappointing with 2013’s Elysium, South African sci-fi auteur Neill Blomkamp goes back to his Johannesburg roots for Chappie, a story about artificial intelligence that’s brimming with ideas, sometimes to its detriment.
Set in a near future Jo’burg, the amount of violence levelled at police officers has led to human law enforcement being replaced by droids. When one of these droids is damaged in a shootout with some local gangsters, it is stolen by Deon (Dev Patel), the creator of the droid programme, to act as a body for the artificial intelligence programme he has developed.
While escorting his new hardware home, Deon is intercepted by wannabe gangsters Ninja (Ninja), Yolandi (Yolandi Visser) and Amerika (Jose Pablo Cantillo) who want to use the droid to help them pull off a few big heists and clear their debt to maniacal mobster Hippo (Brandon Auret).
Deon fires up his AI programme and the robot comes to life, initially childlike but intelligent enough to develop rapidly. Yolandi names him Chappie and mothers him, while Ninja and Amerika want to train him to fight. Deon wants to help Chappie explore the boundaries of his intelligence and creativity, but more as an experiment than any real affection for the ‘bot.
Thrown into the mix is Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman), an Aussie ex-soldier who’s bitter that weapons company Tetravaal has developed Deon’s droids but not his own creation, a hulking behemoth known as the Moose, kitted out with some extreme artillery and controlled by a human via a neural link.
Chappie sounds plot-heavy and it is, but it also heavy on ideas; thematically the film is a bit of a mish-mash, touching on nature-vs-nurture, the idea of a soul, being created just to die, the ethics of artificial intelligence and, in its final 15 minutes, finding an idea that’s perhaps more interesting and worth exploring than everything that’s proceeded it. Much like Elysium, a more ambitious but less enjoyable film, Blomkamp has a pile of good ideas but perhaps lacks the refinement – as a writer or as a director – to piece them together into something truly great.
That absence of refinement is part of the appeal of Blomkamp’s films though and he creates films that look, sound and behave like nothing else coming out of major studios right now. He may have lifted ideas from other sources and thrown them into the mix here – Robocop being the most obvious one – but there’s no mistaking the dusty, grubby dystopian aesthetic of a Blomkamp film and the worlds he builds are alive and vibrant. This is a flawed film for sure but it thrums with an offbeat energy that doesn’t exist in most studio tent poles.
Part of Chappie’s energy comes from the casting of Ninja and Yolandi Visser, who comprise the South African rap group Die Antwoord. Anyone familiar with the group will know the characters they play here aren’t far removed from their ‘real life’ personas. But Blomkamp isn’t afraid to give them major roles and the decision pays off with Ninja giving an electric, wild-eyed tough guy performance as he tries to induct Chappie into a life of crime. Yolandi is the heart of the film, acting as Chappie’s mother and taking care of him, and the scene in which she teaches Chappie about the soul is probably the most moving scene of Blomkamp’s career to date.
The straight-laced foil to the wild energy of Ninja and Yolandi is Dev Patel’s Deon, a far less interesting and more generic character who is never particularly compelling. More enjoyable is Jackman’s performance, with the erstwhile Wolverine clearly relishing a rare bad guy role, hamming it up with a ludicrous mullet and a never ending supply of shorts.
But Jackman’s character is one of the film’s weakest elements. He has a bee in his bonnet about his tech being ignored, as well as severe concerns about the implications of AI, but the script doesn’t do anything interesting with that viewpoint. Instead he just seems to exist to provide an explosive action finale.
Similarly, there are weird gaps in logic surrounding Tetravaal. Deon and Vincent have both created incredible technology but are still sitting in cubicles and being rejected when they pitch world-changing ideas involving AI and neural links. And if Deon and Vincent both have such golden ideas, why would they settle for Tetravaal’s rejection and not take their inventions elsewhere?
At the centre of all the brouhaha is the titular robot, who evokes memories of loveable movie creatures like Wall-E or ET and is voiced by Blomkamp’s muse Sharlto Copley with a high-pitched, vaguely-digitised South African accent. He is curious and naïve like a child, with Ninja and Deon’s battle for his soul providing the film’s main conflict: will he become a tool for crime or will he be allowed to flourish as his own robot/person?
By far the film’s most interesting idea really comes into play in the film’s finale, with the idea of someone’s soul or consciousness being something that can be replicated, transferred, uploaded or deleted. It’s something that isn’t explored enough throughout the bulk of the film and there’s definitely potential for another journey into this world to examine the repercussions of this film’s ending. Chappie isn’t a perfect film – far from it – but the ideas at its core make it a worthwhile experience, not to mention the unique visuals and pounding action sequences that make it a blisteringly entertaining watch.
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