A Disappointing Continuation

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Very, very good movie. Only saw it in theaters because i saw promise in the trailers and liked Bloomkamp's District 9. I actually gave it a chance and it was great. Lots of other people just acted like sheep and came in hating it, coupled with the emphasis on South African culture, people didn't give it a chance.Seeing movies like this fail shows that change is coming to the movie industry. Plenty of great projects are just being trashed undeservingly because audiences never get a chance to make opinions for themselves.

The basic storyline should have been OK - gangsters steal a police robot that happens to be an AI prototype, and reprograms/trains it to act for them - helped by the AI expert. However it is nonsense that the AI expert having been kidnapped, beaten up and then released by the gangsters, keeps returning to them and his robot again and again, effectively assisting the gangsters. He does this out of of love for his AI prototype (which has a ridulously cute personality) and his wish to teach it art and poetry. It does not occur to him to inform the police of the theft and the gangsters whereabouts, nor to the gangsters that he might do so. SInce the stolen robot is physically a standard model, and the AI program looks like it is on an SD card, you wonder why the AI expert could not have continued his experiments with another robot another time. Did he fail to keep a copy of the AI software?

Neill Blomkamp created a masterpiece; a film that perfectly balanced visually stunning effects with a compelling plot and characters, and that film was District 9. Then came the shallow mess that was Elysium that while lacking a likeable protragonist still managed to be a treat to the eyes at the very least.Then came Chappie. I really wanted to like Chappie, a lot. Some of the best ideas are the simplest, and in spite of the negative reception I could see much potential in a twisted comedy action film about a good-willed robot being trained by scumbags. This isn't the case with this film. Many of the elements I had expected were in play, however the tone was relentlessly sinister and dour where a more levitous approach would have been vastly more interesting. The film feels too mean-spirited to be enjoyable.The gangsters Chappie finds himself involved with are beyond trashy in the worst kind of way, and upon realization that they would be a large portion of the next 2 hours of my life, I was filled with dread. Chappie isn't flawless himself - his benevolence going against any notion I have of "realistic" robots. Chappie is quite simply a human character placed in the husk of a robot, and once I got past that I soon found myself annoyed with the repetitive scenes of Chappie in peril and confusion, always responding with squawking and sulking, giving me that feeling I have when I'm being beaten over the head with a message, only it seems the message is missing.Hugh Jackman plays a one-dimensional baddie not unlike what you'd get in a Saturday morning cartoon. His only motivation is that his weapons were shafted in favor of the crime-fighting robots, so then he turns to terrorism I guess. I guess this is where that missing message is; mean people are bad, and you should just be a good person, and robots are people too.Everything in this film is simply surface level, when the only way it could have had a chance is by being deep - higher highs, lower lows, and stronger motivations.The worst part is I feel like the film ended right when the story was just getting started. There's a chance for something here, but this trilogy is otherwise dead on arrival.

'Chappie' is Blomkamp's third film, after 'District 9' and 'Elysium' and easily sits between them in terms of quality. It's a near-future tale of artificial intelligence and how this could play out on a small and large scale. It's nothing new ('Terminator', 'Short Circuit'), but it is done in an interesting way. Deon (Patel) develops "scouts" (basically literal robocops), which Vincent (Jackman) wants to supersede with his mech-warriors. When Deon creates an AI "conscious", Chappie is "born".Unfortunately for Chappie, his "parents" are Ninja & Yo-Landi from 'Die Antwoord', a South African rap-rave "band" (thanks Wikipedia. If you haven't heard them before, don't bother!) I can only assume Blomkamp loves their music (god knows how) and asked them to be in this as a favour. Their faux-gangster act forces Chappie into doing things he doesn't want to and disaster ensues. Jackman is adequately douchey as the Aussie-redneck, Sigourney Weaver is massively underutilised, Patel is solid and Copley is great as the South African-accented voice of Chappie, providing most of the laughs due to his interpretation of sayings.The visual effects - particularly of Chappie and the other scouts - is superb. There's not too much philosophising on the impacts AI could have on humans/the world. The ending was a little drawn-out and obvious - not necessarily good or bad.