Movie: Chappie (2015)
Spoiler warning: Low
I had a lot of reasons that I COULD have been skeptical about this movie... It seemed like it had a lot going against it... but weirdly, I was kind of optimistic going into it. I mean it's Neill Blomkamp, a guy who consistently produces great sci-fi action movies with incredibly ham-fisted social commentary. I knew it had a couple of well-known musicians appearing in it as well, playing characters whose names are the same as their real stage names, probably just promoting themselves... It didn't look like it had a lot going for it out the gate, but I was pleasantly surprised.
The biggest deviation this movie has from District 9 and Elysium is that it ISN'T completely ham-fisted. And to me, that alone is an enormous step in the right direction. I found myself wondering periodically during the movie if it was trying to make a certain moral statement or social commentary, but it kind of shuffles back and forth between a lot of possible extremes, never fully realizing any of them. I've heard this brought up as a point of complaint, saying that it makes the movie seem unfocused or otherwise just pointless, but I'm fine with that. It touches on several different thematic ideas, but doesn't speed toward anything like a bullet train the way Blomkamp's other two movies did. Even the characters shift around different levels of likability. To me, there's nothing wrong with any of this. It's just a nice sci-fi action comedy movie about a robot developing sentience, trying to figure out right and wrong. For once, Blomkamp is not trying to hammer in some clumsy message about how health care needs to be free or whatever, and I'm kind of disappointed that so many critics have negative things to say as a result. Sure, it's no District 9, but it's not a bad movie.
It didn't even occur to me until about halfway through the movie, but a lot of the special effects in this movie are really spectacular. I eventually found myself trying to figure out if Chappie was all CGI, or some kind of animatronic prop, or a puppet, or one of those weird green-screen-suit deals in any given scene, and it was really difficult to discern for a lot of the time. For that first half of the movie, I'd actually forgotten that Chappie had to be some kind of effects-heavy creation, and that there wasn't literally a robot on the screen.
As for the real-world musicians appearing in the movie, I was really wary of that bit of news. I knew that was something with the potential to be a disaster. I thought maybe they also do the whole soundtrack for the movie, and they play aspiring musicians, and have a performance sequence at least once. But really, their presence in the movie went about as well as anyone could expect. To any outside observer who knew nothing about this little piece of trivia, they would have looked like any other random actors. They just play criminals in the movie, with nothing at all connecting them to music or the music industry. Nothing to indicate self-promotion or break the fourth wall with their prior careers.
It might not be as much of an action movie as Blomkamp's last two, but I think it still deserves a place alongside them. I think he does comedy almost as well as action, and this movie strikes a balance between the two fairly well. While it might not be as groundbreaking or amazing as District 9, it's got its own respectable thing going. Rating: 8/10









