Some years ago an advertising agency was
given the uneviable task of persuading people to drink Babycham again. For years this cheap and cheerful bubbly had
been a laughing stock, as fashionable as support stockings. Some desperate genius came up with the line
‘Babycham? it’s so far out, it’s in.’ I do
not know if Babycham sales improved.
If only Chappie was so far out
it’s in. If only it was bad enough to be a great bad
movie. I left the cinema in a state of aesthetic culture shock. I sensed that a small group of
other people who had left the same auditorium were also reeling, and joined
them. We were united in our
view. This is One Really Bad Movie.
I enjoyed Neill Blomkamps first
film, District 9. It was an original passionate political parable, an attack on
any kind of racism or xenophobia, made
by South Africans in Jo’burg, but making the oppressed race real off-planet aliens. The ‘xeno’ in xenophobia means ‘ different’
and these aliens were truly different.
Blomkamp’s second movie, Elysium, with Matt Damon and Jodie Forster
onboard, was also about oppression, and
I enjoyed its first two acts. The way
the third act degenerated into SFX and violence – and a singular lack of
narrative logic – could be put down to the usual effect that big bucks and crass
studio oversight can have on new directors.
See Gozilla. Or rather
don’t.
But can we blame the Columbia Studio for Blomkamp’s
Chappie? I do not think so. This is a poor thing, but it is his own. In fact it is based on a short, very short,
spoof ad. written by Blomkamp and his wife Terri Tatchell way back in 2004, before District 9 was made. Once more we are in Jo’burg, and some
reviewers have assumed that like District
9 this film it is about political oppression, this time inflicted on the local
population by a robot police force.
But no, those who face these super-cops are heavily armed criminals, not
subjugated citizens, and they have been brought in because of the heavy
casualties the human police are suffering.
Deon (Dev Patel) is the young
programmer who created the robot software,
but he has higher ambitions. He
wants to endow them with AI, the ability
to think and act not just independently, but with a real moral sense. More, he wants them to have an aesthetic sense
and be creative. When he tries to
sell this idea to his boss (the woefully wasted Sigourney Weaver) she laughs him to scorn. Have
you forgotten that you work for a corporation making Police Robots? she
asks. But Deon carries on his work all
night, telling his video blog at one stage that he has almost cracked the
programming problem, just a few more terabytes of code to write
he
says, and two hours later he has done it. He has written those ‘few more terabytes’ in
two hours? Ah, but of course he had a can of RedBull to help him,
delivered in one of the most outrageous examples of product placement I have ever seen in the movie.
Denied permission to install this software
in a working robot Deon steals a damaged and decommissioned one. Meanwhile a trio of ‘kooky’ crims decide
that the way to defeat the robocops is to find a remote to turn them off, and kidnap
Deon and his now robot. At this point
the movie has opened up some interesting themes, and I had hopes that it could join Her and Ex Machina as an intelligent exploration of AI. We do see Chappie, as he is soon called,
learning. He is like a baby Deon tells his kidnappers. I have to educate him. But this cognitive and development education
theme is badly fluffed. Already I was
wondering is this meant to be a parody of the films it clearly quotes? Is it a caper thriller/comedy? Has it any depth? I still do not know what it was meant
to be. It is not parodic enough, nor does it build
on any of the films it references in any interesting ways, and it is certainly not
thrilling or comedic enough.
We have seen so many robots and AI
computers before. The Copbots way back in
THX 1138, Sonny struggling with ethical and loyalty decisions
in IRobot. The chilling android David in Prometheus, Hal in 2001.
We have genuinely thoughtful movies such as AI, Her
and Ex Machina. But here even Chappie’s minimally
sketched education cannot be compared to
that of Frankenstein’s Creature, nor his
charm to that of WALL-E. I
noticed that the poster says CHAPPiE.
Was that meant ot have some significance?
However, when this creation turns on his maker, Deon, outraged by the discovery
that when his battery dies so will ‘he’, my hopes rose again. Maybe we would have a discussion around the Theodicy
question of how a ‘loving’ God can allow death and suffering in the world; but no.
No light is shed here. This is
not a philosophical movie.
The plot soon becomes random. Things happen simply because the Director needs them to happen, with no logical drive. At one stage our crims visit a supplier to
buy high the explosive they need for the
Big Heist. We never find out what this
heist will actually involve. But
while in the supplier’s stronghold they say Oh,
and we’ll take those too. ‘Those’ are Sony PS4.
Why do they want them? Simply
because in a later scene Chappie will need them (no doubt to match the Sony
laptops used throughout). But no
matter, when we have no real narrative sense of what is happening Hans Zimmer’s music is blatantly used to tell us what is
happening in dramatic terms, and what we should be feeling. The music is so explicit that it might stand
on its own without needing the rest of the film to illustrate it. That really could be an improvement.
Sigourney Weaver has little to do here,
save lend her iconic presence. She has
made many fine films, and she has been happy to work off Ripley in other sf
films in amusing ways, especially in the wonderful Galaxy Quest and the slightly less than wonderful burt amusing Paul. But sometimes seeing her name on the poster
can raise unfulfilled expectations. It
does here. Hugh Jackman plays the
villain, a rival engineer who wants to discredit Deon’s work in order to boost
sales of his own gigantic Robocop copy.
He plays his part well, and is game enough to display a mullet as he
does so. Dev Patel is fine, but he really isn’t asked to do to much with
his bland, naïve character. Sharlto
Copley, first revealed to us in District
9 , provides the motion capture and voice of Chappie. To see a robot moving like a three year
old, a teenager and then a ‘cool gansta’ is fun, and he does it well. The voice, however, becomes annoying after a
while. A couple of South African musicians, known
as Die Aantwon, are cast as the criminals who become Chappie’s ‘mother and
father’, and they also amuse, but their characters have no depth, and their
development from vicious criminals to a pair of caring – even heroic - people
has no foundations or emotional logic.
Blomkamp is a gifted, creative and
committed film maker. He is still
learning his trade, and I am sure he has a long
career ahead of him. It cannot be easy to listen to older and
wiser voices when you have made an impressive debut, but I think he needs to if he is going to
improve on Chappie.
