Chappie

Chappie is not the best sci-fi film either this year or ever. But it's still a story with admirable intentions. Let's see what it's all about.

In the not so distant future, Johannesburg has its own robot police force. Engineer Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), who designed the robots, wants to do more. His ultimate goal is to create an artificially-intelligent robot on par with humans. His test subject is a broken-down droid.

Deon finds himself carjacked by desperate criminals. The criminals Ninja, Yolandi (played by the same-named members of the rap group Die Antwoord) and Yankie (Jose Pablo Cantillo) have one big heist in mind. They need Deon to shut down the robots to make it work. Once they see the robo parts in his van, they decide to have him build their own. That robot is Chappie (Sharlto Copley via motion-capture).

The rest of the movie is about Chappie's life-education. All the while, Chappie has to avoid scheming designer Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman) and his ED-209 lookalike, the MOOSE.

Director Neil Blomkamp expanded an earlier short of his, Tetra Vaal, to feature length. The end result makes good use of its $50 million budget. The CGI work blended well with the real footage. The cinematography and production design made good use of Joburg. One of the locations, a round high-rise, reminded me of the central location of Dredd, which was also filmed in Joburg.

Chappie is a likable android. His naive attempts to act cool provided the film's best laughs. Meanwhile, the character Ninja spends most of the movie completely unlikable. He wants to shoot either Chappie or Deon for annoying him. He takes advantage of Chappie's gullibility to make him do carjackings. It takes too long before he goes hero. A minor complaint is the minor villain Hippo (Brandon Auret). The film subtitles his dialogue even though most of it is intelligible English.

It would've helped Chappie if its main characters were better developed. I understand what they were trying to do, though. Let's hope this year produces much better blockbusters down the line.