It Came From The Cineplex: Chappie

Chappie was written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, and directed by Blomkamp. It's based on Blomkamp's 2004 short film Tetra Vaal.

Blomkamp and Tachell co-wrote 2009's District 9, which Blomkamp also directed. He also wrote and directed 2013's Elysium.

I enjoyed District 9 quite a bit, even though its "persecuted aliens as a metaphor for Apartheid" angle was pretty blatant. Elysium I liked much less, as it was a jumbled mess that used the same heavy-handed metaphor structure, this time for health care. Chappie falls somewhere in between.

Chappie is a very derivative film, blatantly lifting elements from Short Circuit, Robocop (both versions!) and even Blomkamp's own District 9. Not surprisingly, it does little or nothing original with these cribbed elements.

I liked the Chappie character a lot, especially as he learns and goes from an infant to the equivalent of a confused teenager over the course of the movie. Too bad that's about the only competent part of the film. The script is absolutely riddled with more maddening plot holes than I've seen outside a Transformers movie. Fatal plot holes too— the kind that completely torpedo the story once you see them. It's almost like they filmed a treatment rather than an actual script. It definitely could have used a polish or twelve.

The film throws a ton of concepts at the screen— things such as morality and innocence, nature vs. nurture, the essence of consciousness, etc.— hoping at least one of them will stick. Unfortunately none of these lofty and complex notions is ever properly developed or given adequate screen time. Blomkamp seems much more interested in explosions and action set pieces than in examining the various concepts he brings up.

Finally, Blomkamp recently announced he's planning to film a sequel to ALIENS, which will ignore ALIEN3 and ALIEN: Resurrection. Given the ever-diminishing quality of the movies he's made since District 9, I'm not exactly excited by this news.

SPOILERS!

The Plot:

In the near future, the crime rate in Johannesburg is out of control, prompting the police department to utilize armored Scout droids. The Scouts, manufactured by the Tetravaal corporation, are a resounding success and dramatically reduce crime.

Meanwhile a trio of thugs named Ninja (played by Ninja), Yolandi (played by Yolandi Vi$$er) and Amerika need to quickly raise a large sum of cash to pay off a debt to a crime lord. They come up with the bright idea to invent a "remote" that could turn off the Scouts. That's actually a pretty good idea, but they don't have the know-how to make such a thing themselves.

Deon Wilson (played by Dev Patel) works for Tetravaal and is the head of the Scout program. He's such a genius that he creates a full-fledged artificial intelligence on his home computer in his spare time. For some reason he feels the need to upload this AI into a Scout instead of testing it on his computer in a controlled environment. He asks his boss Michelle Bradley (played by Sigourney Weaver) for a test droid, but she inexplicably says no. This unassuming nerd then steals a Scout from the factory's scrap heap and heads home with it for testing. 

Along the way Deon's kidnapped by Ninja and his gang, who want him to build a droid turner-offer. When he says that's impossible, they naturally threaten to kill him. He then uploads his AI into the scrap droid, causing it to instantly come to life. Deon warns them that the droid, now nicknamed "Chappie," is just a baby and needs to be taught. He also warns Ninja that Chappie's battery is fused to his torso and can't be removed, which gives him just five days of "life."

Ninja astonishingly sends Deon home (!) so he can train Chappie himself. Yolandi's motherly instincts kick in and she wants to nurture Chappie, while Ninja is impatient to use him for crime. Due to Deon's moral teachings, Chappie refuses to kill, so Ninja trains him to use knives and throwing stars. He takes him out on a couple of jobs, where Chappie becomes an effective criminal.

Back at Tetravaal, sullen bully, er, robotics engineer Vincent Moore (played by Hugh Jackman) is working on a human-controlled urban assault droid called Moose. When Bradley cuts his program in favor of the Scouts, he grows resentful and violent. He follows Deon and learns of Chappie and his AI. 

Determined to make his Moose program a success, Moore uploads a virus into all Scout droids, which shuts them down. Without the droid force, Johannesburg is plunged into chaos. Moore then goes to Bradly and urges her to let him go activate his Moose prototype. She reluctantly agrees.

After robbing an armored car, Ninja and his gang return to their hideout. Moore remotely pilots the Moose there and attacks. Yolandi is killed, and Deon is injured. Ninja heroically (?) distracts the Moose so that Chappie can destroy it. Chappie then drives the injured Deon to the Tetravaal factory. Once there, Chappie uploads Deon's entire consciousness (!) into a test droid. Deon awakes in his new mechanical body, and seems to take it much better than I would. Chappie's battery is about to die, so he uploads him consciousness into another Scout droid at the last second.

Back at Ninja's hideout, we see he survived the attack. As he's dogging through Yolandi's things, he finds a flash drive labeled "Mommy's Consciousness Test Backup" and realizes Chappie made a copy of her mind before she died. 

In the final scene, Chappie hacks into the Tetravaal factory, builds a robot that somewhat resembles Yolandi, and uploads her consciousness into it.

Thoughts:

• The film starts out with a series of news reports (exactly like District 9 did) and then flashes back to "18 months earlier." I have no idea why this flashback framing structure was necessary, as it's never addressed again.

The movie ends exactly the same way as District 9 as well, with Chappie and Deon on the run, scavenging a living in a Johannesburg slum.

• In case you're wondering, "Chappie" is South African slang for "chap."

• Chappie was amazingly brought to life by actor Sharlto Copley and the WETA DIgital effects team. He looked absolutely real and was seamlessly integrated into the live action, never once looking like a cgi effect.

That said, it's too bad his appearance is so derivative. He looks a LOT like Briareos from the Appleseed manga and anime, complete with the same "bunny ears" and mechanical non-face.

Also, Chappie's "face" features a metal bar above his eyes that raises or lowers according to his mood. Obviously this was done to help give his immobile features a bit of expression. I'm having trouble figuring out what the real world explanation for this movable bar would be though.

• Moore's Moose robot looks familiar as well. Most fans think it looks like the ED-209 from Robocop, and it does, but it kept reminding me of something else, like a toy I used to have. I finally realized it looks amazingly like the Zentraedi Officer's Battle Pod from Robotech.

• Kudos to Blomkamp for not mentioning the year in which the film's set. By not placing it in 2018, the film won't be dated in a couple of years. It's the near future. That's all we need to know.

• Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er star in the film as Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er, the thugs who kidnap Deon and act as surrogate parents to Chappie. In reality they're two thirds of the South African rave-rap group Die Antwoord, and are apparently playing themselves here. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of them.

By the way, Die Antwoord (pronounced "dee antwort") means "The Answer" in Afrikaans. I have no idea how you pronounce "Vi$$er." Is it "Visser?" "Vi cha-ching cha-ching er?"

• Ninja and Yolandi— the characters, that is— are apparently big fans of the 1966 Batman series. Their hideout is decorated with day-glow graffiti, much like the lairs of the Joker or the Riddler. All that's missing are the slanted floors!

• Ninja and his gang owe a large sum of money to a terrifying-looking crime lord named "Hippo." I don't know why, but I found it funny that all through the film Hippo speaks in English, but his dialog had to be subtitled due to his heavy Afrikaans accent.

• Yolandi says if they had a "remote," they could shut off the Scout droids and then plunder and rob to their hearts' content. That's actually not a bad idea (for a crook). They kidnap Deon to force him to build them such a remote. He tells them it's impossible, as there's no way to shut off the droids remotely. He risks getting shot by admitting this, so I'm assuming he's telling the truth.

Later Moore needs to eliminate the Scouts in order to give his Moose robot a chance to shine. So what does he do? He builds a device (OK, a computer virus) that shuts down the Scouts from a distance! You know, that sounds amazingly like a remote. So I guess it wasn't so impossible after all, eh?

• There are plot holes and there are plot holes, and then there are the frustrating, epically jaw-dropping plot holes of Chappie. Plot holes so large you could not only drive a semi truck through them, but probably a 747 as well.

Case in point: As mentioned above, Ninja and his gang kidnap Deon so he'll build them a robot remote, and threaten to kill him if he doesn't. Instead he gives them Chappie, the world's first artificially intelligent robot. Once he hands over Chappie, Ninja actually lets Deon go! Are you fraking kidding me? How the hell does he know that Deon wouldn't drive straight to the police, tell them where the hideout is and turn them all in? 

I was with the film up to this point, but once this massive plot hole blossomed I was done. I couldn't take it seriously after that.

If that wasn't enough, after Deon barely escapes Ninja's hideout with his life, he actually comes back the next day in order to check up on Chappie and start teaching him! Who the hell would do that? Yes, he was excited about Chappie and his burgeoning intelligence, but why would anyone in their right mind willingly return to the lair of their psychotic and unbalanced kidnappers?

Later Ninja wants to teach Chappie about the real world, so he drives him to a dangerous part of Johannesburg (which would be just about anywhere, from the looks of the place) and actually leaves him there. That's right— Ninja is the only thug in all of South Africa with his own personal super-strong, nearly indestructible robot, and he tosses him in front of a street gang. 

Chappie's then brutalized and mutilated and barely escapes with his "life," making his way back to Ninja's hideout the next day. He's even missing a goddamned arm when he returns! When Ninja sees Chappie's dire state he says, "Golly, I didn't know all that would happen!" Well what the frak was he expecting? For Chappie to come back with a perm and a manicure? Lucky for him the police or Tetravaal didn't pick him up and trace him back to their hideout.

Lastly, Moore wants a chance for his Moose prototype to prove itself. To that end, he sabotages the entire Scout program, shutting them down and plunging the city into chaos. How many lives were lost due to Moore's idiocy? How much property damage did he cause? And all because he wanted to look good for his next performance review.

The only way this story can work is if EVERYONE in it acts like a complete and utter idiot at all times. It's hard to take a film seriously when it has this many flaws. It torpedoes any sense of realism the movie might have had, as it ventures firmly into satirical or even farcical territory.

• Chappie is supposedly the first robot in this world with artificial intelligence. Yet before he's "born," we see a squad of Scouts as they're raiding Hippo's hideout. The Scouts are able to assess the situation and come up with an effective attack strategy on the fly. They have no trouble differentiating between targets and innocents. They even have enough awareness to use their own bodies to shield the human officers. Doesn't all this behavior sound kind of... intelligent?

I suppose we're meant to think that while the normal Scouts may have some rudimentary intelligence, none of them has a "soul" like Chappie.

• Of all the many concepts Blomkamp brings up, the only concept that's given halfway adequate screen time is Nature vs. Nurture. We see that despite Ninja's' best efforts to corrupt Chappie and teach him to rob and kill, he refuses to do so and retains his morality and innocence.

• Everyone's motivations are extremely fluid in this film, and can literally turn on a dime. Ninja and Yolandi start out as psychotic murderers and lowlifes, but once they meet Chappie that all flies out the window as they turn into surrogate parents. Yolandi becomes a caring and nurturing mother and the unbalanced Ninja even becomes a father figure to the robot. Ninja even becomes a selfless hero at the end, sacrificing himself to save Deon and Chappie! 

Even Deon's not immune to these radical character shifts. He starts out as a typical straight-laced nerd, but by the end of the film he's practically one of the thugs, going so far as to buy a gun and threaten Ninja with it. 

Moore is ostensibly a gifted robotics engineer, but ends up acting more like a psychotic mercenary.

I suppose these changes in behavior are possible, but it seems unlikely. I assume these flexible motivations were an attempt at creating three dimensional characters, but it just made them seem ill-defined. It's hard to identify with a character when they can literally react in any way.

• Sigourney Weaver gets a free trip to South Africa as she puts in a day's work as Michelle Bradley, the head of Tetravaal. This is an old filmmaking trick, as her appearances are spaced out over the run time to give the impression she's in the film much more than she really is.

• Hilariously, the two main Tetravaal scientists— Deon and Moore— are presented as the sole innovators and staff on their respective projects. In a real high tech corporation they'd be just one of a veritable army of scientists, engineers and programmers working on each project.

• At one point Moore threatens Deon by pinning his head to his desk and pressing his handgun against his face. He even goes so far as to actually pull the trigger on his (thankfuly) empty pistol! Even more amazing, he does this in Deon's cubicle, in full view of the entire office and their dozens of coworkers. Once the fracas is over, Moore claims he was just joking and everyone goes back to checking their Facebook pages as if nothing happened.

I'm guessing Tetravaal must not have a HR department. I let a lot of crap slide where I work, but I draw the line at a coworker pulling a gun on me.

• In order to prevent hackers from taking over the Scout droids, they can only be reprogrammed if a security chip is inserted into their brains. Sounds like a good idea.

One would think this highly important chip would be heavily guarded, probably housed inside a giant vault surrounded by lasers, moats and guards, right? Nope! Thanks to Tetravaal's ridiculously lax security, the chip's sitting in a metal cage, much like the one a high school gym teacher would use to store the school's volleyballs. Deon is able to access the memory card— so he can install his AI into Chappie— wayyyyy too easily.

• Michelle Bradley is one hell of a CEO. Deon comes to her and breathlessly says he's invented honest to goodness artificial intelligence (on his home computer, yet!). Her reaction? A big fat "meh." She says the Scout program is a success without it, and Tetravaal isn't interested in AI. I bet the shareholders would loooove to hear she just turned that down. Such a program would be worth billions, if not more!

In a similar vein, she's ready to scrap Moore's Moose droid because it's overkill for an urban setting. OK, she probably has a point there. But what about the military? I'm sure they wouldn't be interested in an indestructible walking tank, would they Michelle?

• All through the film there's much hand wringing over the fact that Chappie's battery is fused to his body and can't be removed, giving him only about five days of "life" before it runs down.

Deon says the Scout droids are "plug and play," meaning their limbs and components can be easily swapped out. In fact after Chappie loses an arm, psycho thug Amerika is able to easily install another one with ease. 

So why couldn't Deon just remove Chappie's head and stick it on another body? Why all this "downloading his consciousness" bushwah?

• It's pretty amazing that you can store a person's entire consciousness— all their memories, experiences and even their very soul— on what appears to be a standard flash drive. And you can also upload said consciousness in about five seconds. Meanwhile it takes me a several minutes to save one 200 megabyte Photoshop drawing to a disk.

• As Moore is trying to convince Bradley to OK the Moose prototype, he assures her the giant robot is indestructible. For something that's supposedly invulnerable, Chappie's able to destroy it pretty easily.

• In the final minutes of the film, Chappie uploads the dying Deon's mind into a spare Scout body. The implications of that action alone would have been enough to fill an entire movie, but by that point there's no time left and the film blurs right past it, scarcely touching on it.

• After the police regain control of the city and the chaos subsides, a news report tells us that the Scout program has been scrapped. The police department is hiring several hundred human officers to take their place. Why the hell would they do that? Based on everything we were shown, the Scout program was a huge success. The only reason it failed was because of Moore's boneheaded machinations.

Plus the Scouts never actually killed or ran amok, they simply stopped working. All Tetravaal would have to do is up the security a bit to prevent another takeover and they'd be good to go. Seems like the public would want them back on the beat.

Chappie could have been a deep and thought provoking sci-fi film, but it doesn't have the patience or skill to examine the concepts it presents. Add to that the fact that everyone in the film has to act like a complete and utter idiot in order for the story to work, and you end up with a muddled, half-baked mess. I give it a B-.

It Came From The Cineplex: Elysium

Elysium is a new sci-fi action film written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.

It's pretty much impossible to discuss this film without comparing it to Blomkamp's previous film, 2009's District 9. Both films have a similar look and gritty feel, and both feature similar technology. Both attempt to use sci-fi to focus on a contemporary topic, ala Star Trek's more heavy handed "message" episodes. 

Of the two I think District 9 is slightly better. It had a singular point to make, using aliens to broach the subject of racism and apartheid. Elysium tries to juggle several messages (the right to medical care, immigration and the class divide) but this split focus just muddies the waters.

Elysium feels like it desperately wants to be a thinking man's sci-fi epic, but it's a bit too heavy-handed and simplistic. Blomkamp brings up important questions, but either doesn't have the patience or the skill to provide any answers. The first two thirds of the film are somewhat thought provoking, but the last act devolves into your standard "unstoppable superhuman hunts down the hero" thriller. I suppose we should thank the movie gods that at the very least the Elysium station doesn't blow up real good at the end.

It also suffers from an oversimplified "rich people bad, poor people good" mentality. Every resident of Elysium is written as a greedy, corrupt cartoonish asshole of a villain. Surely there had to be one or two sympathetic people living there?

Blomkamp needs to be careful or he's going to beome pigeonholed as the guy who writes heavy handed sci-fi message films. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I suppose. Making the same movie over and over hasn't exactly hurt Michael Bay's bank account.

Incredibly, Blomkamp originally wanted rapper and actor Eminem to star in the film (!). Mr. Eminem said he'd agree only if the film was shot in his beloved Detroit. Blomkamp had already planned to shoot the bulk of the movie in Mexico and passed, hiring Matt Damon instead. I think that was a wise choice, although come to think of it, Detroit could probably have filled in for the dying Earth.

Futuristic Spoilers Ahead!

The Plot:
It's the year 2154 and the human race is divided into two blatantly distinct classes. The poor are forced to scratch out an existence on the overpopulated, disease-ridden Earth, while the rich live lives of luxury and perfect health on a deluxe orbiting space station called Elysium.

Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) lives and works on Earth, saving every penny in the futile hope of someday buying a ticket to the station. Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster) is the head of security of Elysium, who does whatever it takes to keep the orbiting paradise free of immigrants and other undesirables.

Max receives a fatal dose of radiation during a work place accident, forcing his boss to fire him and change their "Days Without An Accident" sign back to 0. With Earth's substandard medical care he'll die in five days unless he can somehow make it to Elysium and heal himself in one of their magical Med-Pods.

Meanwhile, in a completely superfluous subplot, Delacourt is scheming with an unscrupulous CEO and a mercenary named Kruger (Sharlto Copley) to stage a coup and become President Of The Earth, or maybe just of the U.S.

Pros:
• Kudos to the producers for setting the film in 2154. It's long been a pet peeve of mine when a sci-fi film features super-advanced technology or a wildly different society but is set only twenty or thirty years from now. It's nice to finally see a futuristic film that actually takes place in, you know, the future.

• The film features some excellent special effects that look absolutely real. The droids, the spaceships, the Earth and Elysium environments-- all looked totally believable to me.

• In a similar vein, all the technology in the movie seemed believable and possible as well. OK, maybe not the magic Med-Pods that can diagnose and somehow repair any disease or injury in thirty seconds, but everything else seemed doable.

• All the residents of Elysium have little words or symbols burned into the skin on their faces, like keloidal scars but more subtle. I assume this is meant to be some kind of futuristic fad or fashion going around the station, which was a nice little touch.

Cons:
• Even though I praised Blomkamp for setting his futuristic film in the future, I don't think we could build something like Elysium by 2154 even if we started today.

I mean look at it-- it's a huge spinning ring whose inner living surface is landscaped with soil and water. How many million shuttle trips did it take to bring all those materials up from the Earth's surface?

• The acting is all over the place in this film. Matt Damon does a decent job as Max, giving him an understated dignity. Jodie Foster, however, seems to be in a completely different movie. She's about as subtle as the average comic book villain and speaks her lines in a weird "maybe British, might be French" accent. If she had a mustache she'd no doubt be twirling it while telling her crew to shoot down shuttles full of immigrants.

Sharlto Copley goes way, way over the top as the cartoonish mercenary Kruger. His performance makes William Shatner looks subtle and nuanced. He struts, snarls and leers as he not only chews the scenery, but the studio walls behind it as well.

He also speaks all his lines in his native South African accent, which at times makes it nearly impossible to understand what he's saying. Ehh, no need for a second take, Blomkamp. I doubt Kruger was saying anything the audience needed to know about anyway.

• Why the hell doesn't Elysium have its own defense system? At one point three unauthorized shuttles, chock full of immigrants, blast off toward Elysium. Secretary Delacourt tells them to turn around and when they refuse, she gives the order to shoot 'em out of the sky. Instead of a gun emplacement on Elysium opening fire, Delacourt instead has to rely on a batsh*t insane undercover agent named Kruger, who's located on Earth. 

Kruger gets her signal, pulls out a big-ass gun (lucky he just happened to be near his weapons stash!) and fires off several ground to space missiles which take out the offending shuttles. 

This is totally unbelievable. There's no way anyone would ever build a quadrillion dollar space station that couldn't protect itself. What about meteors? Do they have to rely on Kruger to shoot those down too before they crash into the station?  And what if he'd been on the other side of the planet when he got the call, and couldn't see the station? Or is Elysium in synchronous orbit with Earth?

• After Max is irradiated he becomes weakened, his former partner in crime Spider has him fitted with an exoskeleton to give him strength and keep him on his feet. In a harrowing sequence, the exoskeleton is screwed right onto his body. Can you really screw a thick, three inch long bolt right into a person's shoulder blades? Wouldn't the bones split or shatter like cheap particle board?

Also, Max suffers from what's known as "movie radiation sickness," in which you're given five days to live but instead of progressively getting worse and worse until you die, you function more or less normally until your final minutes.

• I'm growing very, very weary of Shaky Cam™ fight scenes. Such scenes have run rampant in nearly all of this summer's blockbusters, but Elysium takes them to a whole new level. During the fight scenes I had no idea who the hell I was watching or what the hell they were doing to one another. I shouldn't have to wait until a fight's over to see who won.

I have to assume directors do this to hide their sub-par fight choreography.

• Not necessarily a con, but an observation. Every scene set on Elysium shows part of the station's ring or the support pylons stretching up into the sky. It's an awesome visual, but isn't it funny how every camera angle is pointed along the north/south axis so you can see the ring? I guess no one on Elysium ever looks east to west. 

Kind of like how every movie apartment in Paris has a view of the Eiffel Tower.

• Do the people on Elysium have jobs? Every time we see them they're lounging in the sun or splashing around in pools. I suppose they're all so rich they don't need to ever work.

• When Kruger is searching for Max, he releases a flock of automated drones to hunt for him. The drones look exactly like flying Roombas. In fact they look so much like them it was distracting. I kept thinking, "Hey look, Matt Damon's being chased by a flying Roomba. I need to find out how much those cost and maybe get one for my carpet." Surely there was some other design they could have gone with.

• At least twice in the film immigrants from Earth make it to Elysium for the express purpose of using one of their miraculous Med-Pods. Both times they approach mansions on the surface and have to break a window in order to get inside. If Elysium is such a paradise, why do people keep their doors locked? Habit?

• Speaking of Med-Pods, for some reason they only work on official citizens of Elysium who have their I.D. burned into their skin. But why? We've already seen that it's virtually impossible for someone from Earth to get there in the first place. Why add that extra level of security, other than as a big F-U to any unauthorized person who tries to use them?

• During a scuffle, Kruger gets his face blown off by a grenade. Ouch! Fortunately for him this grievous injury doesn't kill him and somehow leaves his brain intact. His henchmen stick him in a Med-Pod and in just a few seconds it miraculously reconstructs his face, including his teeth and eyes. Even more miraculously, the nanites or whatever the hell is doing the reconstructing recreate his beard as well. Every single hair of it! Now that's attention to detail!

• After finally reaching Elysium, Max and Spider reprogram the main computer so that all the people of Earth are now official citizens of the station. Two things here:

First, if the system can be so easily changed to accept anyone, I see no reason why it can't just as easily be changed back to the way it was. Does Spider really think the government is going to throw up its hands and just let this stand?

Second, I imagine that Elysium is a closed system and can only feed and support a certain amount of people. If the billions of people on Earth all try to go up there they're going to overload the system. There's no way it could support everyone. If they all try to live there then in a very short time it's gonna end up looking just like Earth.

• At the end of the film several shuttles containing Med-Pods land on Earth, providing much needed medical care to the inhabitants. 

Couldn't the people of Elysium have set up a few free clinics like this all along? Why hoard all the medical care for themselves, other than because the script says so? I suppose it's possible they cost too much to provide them free to all who need them, but it seems like some sort of arrangement could have been worked out.

Also each of the three shuttles that land appear to hold twenty or so Med-Pods, for a total of sixty. Sixty Med-Pods to provide medical care to a city of millions, possibly even billions. Seems a bit paltry to me. How long do you think it would take before the people at the back of the line start a riot and turn the shuttles over? Or before some ambitious gang leader seizes the Med-Pods for himself and starts charging an arm and a leg (literally!) to use 'em? Hopefully Elysium sent down more than the few we saw.

A decent sci-fi film that desperately wants to be about something, but doesn't seem to know how to go about it. I give it a B.