Film / Reviews
Chappie
Chappie (15)
USA/South Africa 120 Mins Dir: Neill Blomkamp Starring: Dev Patel, Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver, Brandon Auret
District 9 director Neill Blomkamp suffered a minor critical and financial setback with his sophomore effort, Elysium (2014). Chappie, however, strikes a very astute balance between character, action and the large questions in life.
The film quickly establishes a near-future Johannesburg in which robots have been built to aid the police force in their efforts to keep crime down. This prompts designer and programmer Deon (Patel) to take it one step further and program true artificial intelligence – the eponymous Chappie. In addition to the main narrative strand, the Johannesburg shown here is clearly no advert, being a cruel, vicious environment, products of which are the struggling criminals. As a result of owing money to Jabba-The-Hutt-like crime boss Hippo (Auret), Ninja (Ninja), Yolandi (Visser) and Amerika (Cantillo) resort to kidnapping Deon, and subsequently Chappie, in an effort to pull off a heist to pay their debt. All the while, the company behind the police robots, Tetra Vaal, are attempting to stop Chappie at all costs.
With the concept of Deon as a creator and Ninja and Yolandi as parents, Chappie poses interesting questions about relationships, humanity and the afterlife. At its heart, Blomkamp uses sci-fi action to explore what it means to be human. While this isn’t necessarily a new discussion within science fiction, he manages to take it to a new level with ideas about consciousness that make his film extremely layered and textured.
This may be the ultimate shortcoming; on a narrative level there are a lot of strands, and occasionally the film can get bogged down in its complexities as Blomkamp attempts to walk the line between philosophical discussion and entertaining action. Annoyingly, it has clearly been screened to a test audience where somebody struggled to understand something said by Hippo, so he’s subtitled throughout. Given the strength of the South African accents on show, to single out one character for subtitles is jarring and infuriating. Visually, however, it’s stunning, with seamless special effects.
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