Neill Blomkamp was tapped by Peter Jackson to direct a
Halo movie, but when that fell through he was given money to produce his own pet project;
District 9. That film was a critical and financial success and we as an audience have been paying for it ever since.
Even M. Night Shyamalan managed to pop out a couple of good movies
before turning into one of the worst directors out there, while Blomkamp
is breaking speed records on his journey from critical darling to
walking punchline. So today we will look at his latest film
Chappie which deals with the heady subject of artificial intelligence but will not use any intelligence of its own.
*Spoilers Ahead*
In the year 2016 Johannesburg, South Africa has turned into the Old Detroit of
Robocop
fame, and with its crime rate soaring, the only option the government
has is to buy a shit ton of robot police with Peter Weller’s voice. The
wunderkind behind these robotic police officers is Deon Wilson (
Dev Patel)
who, though a brilliant engineer and programmer, is a moron in every
other respect. He works for Tetravaal, a weapons manufacturer run by CEO
Michelle Bradley (
Sigourney Weaver),
and though most of the world seems rather impressed by these
state-of-the-art armour-plated attack robots Deon believes there’s room
for improvement. You see, he’s been tinkering with a more advanced A.I.
in his spare time, and when he finally cracks it he goes to his boss and
explains how he can turn her army of killing machines into painters and
poets.
"I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree."
Strangely
enough the CEO of a weapons manufacturer doesn’t see the upside in
having robots with emotions, opinions and the ability to write poetry,
and she turns down his proposal to test it on a damaged robot. This
leaves him no option other than to steal a damaged bot and the “guard
key” that allows one to reprogram them. Now, a little bit about this
“guard key” thingamajig. The idea of someone hacking these lethal robots
is terrifying, so Tetravaal created a bulletproof system that only
allows them to update software on the robots. And only someone with top
security clearance has access to the “guard key” chip that allows
reprogramming, and of course Deon is one such lucky individual. Though
after stealing it all he gets is a call from security saying if he
doesn’t bring it back they’ll tell on him. Yep, that is some bulletproof
system.
“I’m a geek thus completely harmless, trust me on this.”
Not
everyone at Tetravaal loves Deon and his work, because before these
police robots called Scouts were designed there was a bigger, badder
brother in the works called MOOSE. This robot has no A.I. but relies on a
human interface which its designer, Vincent Moore (
Hugh Jackman),
believes is a more humane solution than having autonomous killing
machines running around. In most movies this guy would be the hero,
standing up against the company on the moral high ground, but that is
not this movie. Moore here is portrayed as an evil ex-military jackass
who is jealous of the Scout program and will do anything to take down
Deon and his Scouts. Though it will be a long two hours before we get
that final showdown.
MOOSE, the totally not ED-209 police enforcement machine.
Enter this movie's gang of lovable misfits;
Ninja,
Yolandi and Amerika (
Jose Pablo Cantillo), a trio of drug dealers that owe 20 million rand to a more powerful gangster called Hippo (
Brandon Auret).
To get this money they decide to pull off a major heist, but to do so
within a city full of these Scout robots is suicide. Thus they come up
with the brilliant plan of kidnapping Deon so that he can switch off the
Scouts.
Ninja and Yolandi, combined IQ of 55.
What
this group lacks in brains they make up in extreme luckiness. They
kidnap Deon just as he’s leaving Tetravaal with the stolen droid and
“guard key” and are able to force him to patch up the broken bot and
reprogram it with his new A.I. so that they can train it to be a
gangster. They then let Deon go but only after they promise to let him
come back and help teach the newly named Chappie. I’ll give you a second
to let your mind wrap around that one.
“Let him go, he seems like an honest nerd.”
So
this gang of drug dealers kidnap a man so they can pull of a heist
without robot interference, and then they let him go because there’s no
way he’d just immediately run to the authorities and bring a rain of
fiery death on them. Strangely enough he
doesn’t go to the
police and continues to return to this gang in the hopes of teaching
Chappie to not be a gangsta. The level of stupid this movie reaches at
this point is stratospheric. And yet that isn’t even the most annoying
thing about this scene, the birth of this new A.I. is one huge
storytelling WTF. For some reason Deon created an A.I. that when
switched on would know as much as a newborn baby. Chappie cannot even
understand English. Did that bit of coding cost extra? I can see no
logical reason for writing an A.I. that has no built in language
subroutines. It’s just moronic and all so we can have scenes of a
skittish robot hiding under a table where it has to be coaxed out by
three criminals and its idiot creator.
Targeting morons: Accessing kill sub routines.
The
bulk of the rest of the movie is the tug-of-war between Ninja’s need to
turn Chappie into a badass killing machine and Deon’s desire for the
exact opposite. Which once again begs the question, why hasn’t Ninja
shot Deon in the face? Well for some reason Yolandi’s maternal instincts
have gone into overdrive as she becomes Chappie’s mommy, so she’s cool
with Deon stopping by to teach her little robot boy to paint. Deon does
manage to get Chappie to promise not to commit crimes but that only
means we have to sit through painful scenes of Ninja tricking the idiot
robot into committing crimes. All of which could have been avoided if
they’d shot Deon in the face at the outset.
Ninja tries to teach Chappie to shoot gangsta style and fails.
Meanwhile,
Vincent is still pissed that his funding for MOOSE is getting cut and
starts to get suspicious of Deon when he notices him looking up on the
internet on how to teach babies to speak. (Note: The movie continues to
hit us over the head with how dumb it would be to create an A.I. with no
basic knowledge). Chappie doesn’t even have Asimov’s
Three Laws of Robotics.
If Deon had at least done that much he wouldn’t have had to worry about
Ninja turning his creation into a super criminal. This is the key
problem with the script for as each scene unfolds, the viewer is
constantly questioning the logic behind the characters actions but there
is none. The only reasoning behind anything that goes on in this movie
is because it was “in the script”. There is no other reason. Vincent’s
brilliant plan of stealing the “guard key” from Chappie so he can shut
down all of the Scout droids, thus throwing the city into chaos so that
his MOOSE robot can ride in and save the day is just plain stupid. Two
minutes of computer forensics would have landed him in jail. Worse is
that Deon discovers what Vincent has done and instead of informing the
authorities, or even his boss, he runs off to handle it himself.
We at least finally get a good action sequence out of this moment of dumb.
The
film tries for a little drama with the fact that Chappie’s battery life
is only good for five days, and for some reason his advanced A.I.
cannot be just swapped over into a new body, but because I have only
found Chappie to be a completely annoying and senseless character there
is no suspense there. The solution and surprise ending that Neill
Blomkamp comes up with isn’t just vastly insulting of the audience’s
intelligence but not even structurally satisfying.
“Nooooooo!”
I
will give the film credit for having some decent effects work here. The
opening sequences of the Scout droids taking out criminal after
criminal looks just great, and at least it’s not as dull as the
Robocop
remake, but unfortunately the treacly performance by Sharlto Copley as
Chappie makes one appreciate the motion capture work of Andy Serkis all
the more. This is a painfully bad movie and such a waste of resources
that should have been put towards a better script, instead we got a
rather lame
Short Circuit 3.
Johnny Five, is alive!
Note: The film's tagline is "Humanity's last hope isn't human."
Great line but makes no bloody sense in context with this film.
Humanity is not in danger at any point in this movie, unless street
gangs in Johannesburg are a bigger threat than I imagined.
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