Michael C here. The more coarse and petty the level of online discourse becomes the more determined I am to elevate things when I add my own voice to the mix. And yet, here I am sitting down to write about Chappie, a film that announces itself as being full of Big Ideas, and all I really want to say is, “God, how I hated that robot.”
I could couch that in more academic terms. I could say Chappie’s grating personality exemplifies the many drastic miscalculations Neill Blomkamp made in crafting his latest sci-fi parable. But let’s cut to the heart of the matter. Chappie is the worst. Not Chappie the movie, which is bad, but not as Earth-shatteringly terrible as its buzz suggests. Chappie the character, the first robot to be programmed with a soul. I hated Chappie’s cloying, chirpy voice (courtesy of District 9's Sharlto Copley). I hated the supposedly cutesy-poo way Chappie refers to himself in the third person. I hated the attempts to make me go “Awww” by having Chappie relate to the children’s book The Black Sheep. And Sweet Jesus did I hate it when a gang of thugs teaches Chappie to mimic all their irritating mannerisms. [More...]
I say all this not to be gratuitously mean, but to zero on the reason Blomkamp has slid from the promising director of District 9 to the guy with back-to-back flops. Blomkamp is notorious for applying his symbolism with a heavy hand, but I don’t think this a disqualifying flaw. If a director can make us care, then the use of broad allegory can work in the way classic episodes of The Twilight Zone used to work, where 'we get it Rod Serling, the aliens represent more than aliens.' No, the deeper problem is that Blomkamp’s internal taste barometer appears to be busted. So much of Chappie is just plain off-putting, and not in compelling or interesting ways. Chappie the Robot is like a walking, talking version of Jodie Foster’s accent in Elysium – a choice so inexplicable that it's a surprise that at no point did the film’s crew stage a creative intervention.
Not that I’m anti-weirdness. On the contrary, weirdness is a reason to root for Blomkamp to succeed. With their Johannesburg locales and their urgent desire to address deep ideas, Blomkamp’s movies are defiantly idiosyncratic. The problem is that Chappie’s screenplay is such a slipshod mess that it’s impossible to emotionally engage. District 9 wasn’t exactly poetry but its structure was sound as a pound with one scene flowing logically into to the next until damned if I didn’t care if those prawn aliens got their space ship working.
With Chappie, however, there is a scarcely a scene that doesn’t make the audience go, “Huh? What?” Things are off right from the start when robotics scientist Dev Patel tells his boss (a wasted Sigourney Weaver) that he has successfully developed artificial life, one of the most important advances in scientific history, and her response is an indifferent “Eh, who cares. Our cop robots are already profitable.” Then there are the scenes where a competing engineer, played by a mulleted Hugh Jackman, is openly psychotic, brandishing a gun around the office, yet nobody seems to care. I don’t know where to begin on the oddball gang of thugs (bizarrely played by hip hop group Die Antwoord) who essentially adopt Chappie after they kidnap Patel to force him to help them with their heist and he responds by giving them Chappie, a damaged police robot imbued with artificial intelligence. I could go on listing nonsensical plot points until I’ve recapped the whole film. It’s as if the film’s internal logic reboots after every scene.
The crux of the film develops into a battle for Chappie’s soul with the hard-bitten gangstas offering a tough outlook on the world and the dreamy scientist encouraging Chappie to follow his nobler instincts. If Blomkamp is lucky the audience will be so preoccupied trying to make heads or tails of the plot that they will miss the fact that Chappie never finds any answers, or really anything much to say, about all the deep questions it raises about mortality, consciousness, nature vs. nurture, etc...
“Why did you make me so I can die?”
...Chappie asks his creator when he realizes his faulty battery gives him a lifespan of about five days. It’s meant to be one of the film’s epiphanies, but the question just sits there and it's on to the robot vs. robot action (which, for what it's worth, is very well executed).
Unlike a lot of other critics, I am not yet ready to abandon Blomkamp as a lost cause. If the lingering glow of District 9 is enough to get Blomkamp another crack at something original after he does his time on the Alien franchise, my prescription for regaining his former glory is simple: screenplay, screenplay, screenplay. And if there’s time left over, maybe take a glance at the material to see if the lead character’s company is something the audience can tolerate for two hours.
Grade: C-
previous reviews from Michael. Follow him on Twitter.