Cheeky CHAPPiE does not cheer me

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.

Prisoners - of false expectations?

The 2013 film Prisoners almost escaped my notice, but the casting, which includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman, Viola Davis and Paul Dano, eventually caught my attention and I bought the DVD.

I didn’t know the previous work of the director Denis Velleneuve,  but Prisoners  was shot by the British cinematographer Roger Deakin, who is a long time favourite of mine.    (Mind you, I went to see Transcendence mainly because it was directed by Wally Pfister, who has shot Christopher Nolan’s films so brilliantly.  Big mistake.)   I can see why these gifted actors took their roles in Prisoners, seeing the opportunity to chew plenty of scenery, and not the ‘coarse acting’ type, but the chance to portray  almost unbearable anguish and rage.   And I imagine they are all pleased with their work.  I was more pleased with the acting than I was with the film as a whole.

Prisoners is an earnest film.    And an ambitious one.   It seems to want to build on  David Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac, with Gyllenhaal playing another dedicated pursuer of truth.   In Zodiac he was a journalist.   Here he is a cop, Detective Loki.    The zodiac appears, as tattoos, alongside mazes and other mystical symbols.   But these suggest a deeper depth than the film actually delivers.   This is not a David Fincher movie.  

Of course we can make connections between the wickedness of the abductor, who takes two young girls, one from  the Dover family (Jackman is the  father) and one from their friends, the Birches (Viola Davis is the mother), and the subsequent behaviour of members of the two families.  There are a number of prisoners here, some physically captive, some emotionally, some psychologically, some imprisoned mistakenly.     We see that people’s previous evil acts effect their children’s children.  We can see a savior, the detective who bears a half hidden eight-pointed star tattoo on his neck, a symbol that connects (in some arcana) with baptism and the role of Noah saving eight human beings in the ark.   But he also seems to wear a Masonic ring, which has nothing to contribute to his character, or to the film.  He is called Loki, presumably after the mischievous Nordic God.   Detective Loki maybe many things, but he is surely not a mischief maker.   So is this simply a red herring?     Maybe we  are tempted to become prisoners of our own expectations,  hoping for deep significance, but being ultimately disappointed.   

And what are we left with at the end?   Maybe simply the banal thought that murder can make monsters – of the bereaved – and the question; are such victims responsible for their  subsequent ‘fallen’ criminal actions?   Well, yes, of course we are.   We are all responsible for our actions and grief is not a divine madness that excuses criminality.     Our subsequent actions are not inevitably consequent.    We really ought to know by now that torture is always wrong, and vengeance is not, ever,  a moral impulse.

So; if you enjoy watching the stars of this movie doing their grim thing (and this is a grim movie)  it may be worth watching the DVD, but don’t build up your expectations too highly.   It seems that the  sound and fury signifies…. not a lot.