Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie wants to be a fable about a machine that learns to feel. What it delivers is a Johannesburg crime story with a robot in the middle and no clear idea what to do with him.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A Scout Robot Named Chappie
The setup comes fast. A skyrocketing crime rate pushes Johannesburg to buy a squadron of scouts — armor-plated attack robots — from weapons manufacturer Tetravaal. British scientist Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) built them. They largely supplant the overwhelmed human police force.
Deon also builds a prototype artificial intelligence that mimics a human mind, feeling emotions and having opinions. Tetravaal CEO Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver) refuses to let him test it on a police robot. So he takes a damaged one, loads it in his van with the guard key, and gets kidnapped by gang members Ninja, Yolandi and Amerika.
They order him to reprogram the robot. He installs the software. It powers up with childlike trepidation, learns words, and gets a name: Chappie.
Ninja, Yolandi and a 20 Million Rand Debt
Here is the engine of the film, and it is a strange one. Ninja’s gang has only days to pay a debt of 20 million rand to a gangster named Hippo. Yolandi wants to mother Chappie. Ninja wants to use him. Chappie’s irreplaceable battery is running out, giving him days to live.
- Sharlto Copley as Chappie
- Dev Patel as Deon Wilson
- Hugh Jackman as Vincent Moore
- Ninja and Yolandi Visser as metafictional versions of themselves
- Sigourney Weaver as Michelle Bradley
Jackman plays Vincent Moore, a former soldier turned Tetravaal engineer. He built MOOSE, a remote-controlled heavy weapons platform, and the police will not give his project equal attention while Deon’s scouts get the praise. That envy is the film’s whole villain engine, and it never gets a scene that makes it land.
The Tagline Does the Work the Script Skips
I am consciousness. I am alive. I am Chappie.
That line is the film’s argument, and it is asserted rather than earned. Copley acted the scenes on camera with the rest of the cast and lent his voice, but visual effects supervisor Chris Harvey said the production did not use motion capture — Copley’s performance was a reference the animators replaced with CGI. What survives is a voice and a set of tics, not a presence.
Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell wrote the script. Blomkamp directs. The film is set and shot in Johannesburg, and the city is the one thing here with weight.
What Chappie Gets Right, and What It Wastes
The premise is good. A machine that wakes up as a child, raised by criminals on a deadline, is a story about nurture and about who gets to own a mind. Chappie keeps gesturing at that and keeps dropping it for shootouts.
The gang material is thin. The villains are thin. The ending is thin. At 120 minutes, the film has room to develop Deon’s refusal to accept Bradley’s answer, or Vincent’s envy, and spends it instead on chases.
Chappie premiered in New York City on March 4, 2015, and opened in U.S. cinemas two days later. It grossed $102 million worldwide against a $49 million budget. That is a real return on a modest bet, and it explains why the film got made. It does not explain why it is this shapeless.
The Verdict on Chappie
Chappie is a 2015 dystopian science fiction action film with a strong central idea and no discipline. The robot is the most interesting character and the least written. The humans around him are sketches with names.
It is not a failure of ambition. It is a failure of focus, and those are different things. Blomkamp has made a film about a new kind of mind that never lets that mind think for more than a scene at a time.
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