The Wandering Fox Reviews: Chappie
- mediarocks94
- Jul 9
- 10 min read
Written by The Wandering Fox
Oh look, it’s another film review. That means you better sit yourselves back as I, the Wandering Fox, and Freddy the Fox and Teddy the Cat have a chat about a film that turns ten years old this year. That film is Chappie.
Teddy: He looks cute. He is acting it as well.
Freddy: Yeah, not sure about that gun though.
Yeah, and that’s only the start of the complexity of emotions I have towards this film. I will tell you, ten years ago I was looking so forward to this movie, as being a fan of science fiction and of robots learning to be human, it was a no brainer I was looking forward to it, as well as having film stars Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman in it I thought I was in for a fun film. And at the time I did like it.
Freddy: But now not so much?
No, not so much sadly. And to be fair, I did start to see the cracks but I didn’t think much of it. I’m older now though and I rewatched it and I have a whole fresh lot of thoughts on the film.
Teddy: This will be worth it, readers.
Why bless you Teddy. Well, here we go then.
The Story
The film is set in South Africa Johannesburg a year later of the film’s release, with crime rates almost getting out of control until a scientist, Deon (played by Dev Patel), creates the Scouts, a police robot force that helps the human police subdue or kill criminals. The huge success of the Scouts sees the private army company, Tetravaal, gain a huge influence in South Africa and have set aside the production of the mech Moose in favour of the Scouts, only fuelling jealousy from the Moose’s creator Moore (played by Hugh Jackman). Deon is working on creating an A.I which will learn, think and feel like it’s a human and after being rejected by the CEO of Tetravaal (played by Sigourney Weaver) in testing it, he takes a damaged Scout robot to experiment the A.I on. But things get hard for Deon as he’s ambushed by gangsters Ninja and Yolandi (played by Die Artwoord) who want the robot to help them in a heist to pay off their debt. The robot, who goes by Chappie (played by Sharlto Copley), ends up living a hard life in the next few days as Deon, Ninja and Yolandi argue of how to teach Chappie to learn, while Moore starts to ruin Deon’s career to get what he wants. Chappie grows from a shy, kid like robot to becoming a bot with an attitude and often spouts profanities and stealing cars to becoming a super smart robot who comes to hate killing. The film comes to a climax when Moore finally gets the Moose out there and tries to kill Chappie and Deon upon framing them, resulting in Yolandi’s death and Deon fatally wounded. Chappie beats Moore to a bloody heap and transfers his consciousness and Deon’s into robots, then resurrects Yolandi having made a copy of her consciousness.
You guys can see that?
Teddy: Yeah, I’m noticing something here and it’s a shame.
It is. The story is at its strongest before Chappie even wakes up. I say this as we are introduced to the characters who have a good setup to their characters, Deon is the scientist who had good intentions but let his desires get the better of him and led to all this trouble. Moore is the jealous co-worker who wants to take Deon’s place as the man in Tetravaal. Ninja and Yolandi are gangsters living in the slums of South Africa who want a robot to pull off a bank heist. Sounds good. Even the slum settings, as tiring as it got by now with Blomkamp, did serve as a gritty background and a decent set piece for Chappie to learn of the real world. However, the film falls apart as soon as Deon is snatched by Ninja and Yolandi as it’s here where all the sense of logic and character starts to fall apart with Chappie and Deon and Moore at least still doing right by the characters they are.
Here’s the first of many problems.
Deon is a top scientist who invented the Scouts, hence yes Ninja and Yolandi go after him. What doesn’t make sense is how they even knew it was him in a Tetravaal van that was driving by. They could have been robbing a lower level employee of the company. The van belongs to a private army company so surely Tetravaal would have known of a property of theirs being damaged and would send out other Scouts or cops to go and help Deon. I guess it was to try and get the story going and not have Deon be found out he took Chappie but come on. I rewatched the scene and there is in no logical way they know it’s him, his van windows are dark so they can see it’s him driving it. It’s even weirder as when Deon is coming towards the end of the road, he doesn’t see a black sports car tearing through the little park beside him. How did this even get to be FILMED!?
Secondly, the film later tries to portray Ninja and Yolandi sympathetically but so far we’ve seen them cost the lives of a few of their gang and don’t care about it, then Ninja is wanting to shoot Deon who is trying his hardest to be reasonable with him. Uh, Ninja, I’m gonna have to tell you something: if you killed Deon, that would give you a big bullseye on the back of your head. That’s only the start of how bad Ninja and Yolandi are.
Thirdly, why didn’t Deon go to Tetravaal and say he was robbed and they’ve got a Scout with them? You can then say “But he shouldn’t have taken Chappie, he could have been found out about testing the A.I on him”. Deon could easily just say he was being blackmailed by Yolandi and Ninja and could have told Chappie to play dead and get him back home before Tetravaal could grab Chappie, they arrest or kill Ninja and Yolandi, Deon tricks Tetravaal in thinking they had broken Chappie. End.
Fourthly. Why hasn’t Deon got his own car? in fact, if he is the guy who invented the Scouts, which are a financial success for Tetravaal, why isn’t he living in a big house with his own car? Deon is living in a little house and drives in a Tetravaal van? It’d make it easier for Yolandi and Ninja to find him if he had his own car. Unless it’s a company instruction that all employees drive their vans so they can’t be followed, then that should have been said in the film.
Freddy: Flipping heck!
The film does at least do something with Chappie in which his infant like nature is adorable to watch and how Deon is brave enough to come back and trying to teach Chappie enough about morality and to not help Yolandi and Ninja, the painting scene is a great scene and just as relevant it is today about A.I and art, I, Robot did it as well, though the scene approaches it from a innocent childlike perspective. There’s no arguing of artistic morality, it’s a infantile like robot learning how to draw, like you’d watch your youngsters do. Even in the scenes where Chappie is stealing cars it comes with a funny childlike gob as he yells at the drivers “YOU TOOK DADDY’S CAR!”.
The film is still a mess though and it comes to Yolandi and Ninja the most. Ninja is a horrible man who doesn’t listen to anybody, he doesn’t listen to Deon of how Chappie or the A.I is functioning like a toddler, he goes behind Yolandi’s back in endangering Chappie, and the fact he’s endangering him by taking him out and letting others damage him does bugger up his plans of having a robot help him in a bank heist. It doesn’t help this leads to Chappie being captured by Moore, his his arm cut off and his CPU is taken, so well done Ninja. The film tries to then have Ninja be portrayed as a misunderstood man who hates living in the slums, but he’s so manipulative towards Chappie and hardy with Yolandi you just can’t find anything in him worth liking. He’s incredibly horrid towards Deon who is trying to develop Chappie, he’s the man who knows how Chappie works. This guy is dumb. Oh and his acting is bad.
Here’s a few things for you to see how bad Ninja is. Here’s him abandoning Chappie and therefore he could lose his own choice of getting money:
Here he is hardly controlling himself with Deon:
Yolandi herself isn’t exactly a character to like either. She was happy to kill Deon and only started to be nice to him cos he knows how to get Chappie working. We’re meant to think she has a caring side for Chappie when really she’s just trying to have him stay under her roof so he does the bank heist and scenes like her reading him a bedtime story is not at all sweet, it’s just controlling. The fact she hardly stands up to Ninja as he has Chappie leave with him and could not only damage him but risk having rival gangs or cops coming to their hideout to kill them doesn’t help, you either think she’s scared of angering Ninja or she flat out doesn’t care.
While Moore is a better villain, he himself is an idiot for trying to get the Moose out there on the streets without having done proper testing on it, which results in Moore being humiliated with the Moose being destroyed. Sure, he’s crafty enough to hack in the Scouts to stop them from serving the cops, which makes him favourable in the CEO’s eyes, but he could have framed Deon by exposing him of meeting up with Yolandi and helping Chappie draw.
Chappie is a good character in how he starts as a child and has the innocence of a kid with him watching He-Man, reading books, childlike vocabulary and then ends up as a foul mouthed robot, but sadly the film doesn’t do much to touch upon Chappie’s struggles with killing. Yes, he does find a dead dog and is saddened that it’s dead, but that’s not enough. Yes, he does end up being tricked by Ninja in thinking Deon is letting him die, hence he wants to save his consciousness by uploading it and transferring it to another body, but it’s still not enough to do with a robot understanding what death means. It’s why him sparing the copper and him angry at humanity is hollow. If the film hadn’t been so focussed on Die Artwoord’s characters hogging up the screen time then we could have gotten something good.
The film’s ending has you wanting more out of it, as though Chappie and Deon get new robotic bodies this doesn’t resolve the fact their batteries will die out so unless they find a charger while on the run, they’re doomed. The uploading of their consciousness to the digital realm could have been a way to expose Moore but they don’t do that. So instead, Deon is disgraced, Chappie is a fugitive, Yolandi is being resurrected in a factory we don’t know, Ninja is still alive, you feel like you wasted your whole experience with this film. I’m gonna compare this to Hellraiser’s reboot. In that film’s climax, the baddies Trevor and Roland are defeated with both taken to the Labyrinth by the Cenobites, Riley refuses to resurrect Matt as she knows it won’t be what she wants as he will be a fleshy bloody corpse, hence Riley is left to live with lamenting on how all this was her fault and and that her suffering has only begun. That’s a better way of ending a film in which Pinhead succeeds, she gets Trevor and Roland, and Riley suffers in spite of getting back at Trevor and Roland. You’re left with some delight at their defeats and you hope Riley can get back on her feet and try to go on with just living and letting Matt go.
Chappie is a fugitive, Deon could still die and is disgraced, Ninja the evil bastard is still alive, Moore hasn’t been exposed, what’s there to be happy about? I know Blomkamp’s previous movies had its heroes either sacrificing themselves or mutating into something less human but even then there was a sense of hope at the end of those films. It’s why this film is the weakest of Blomkamp’s movies and he failed himself as much as he failed moviegoers. His film here is following the same as his previous movies: gritty themes, foul mouthed humour, slum settings, science fiction, evil corporations of greedy rich people, epic guns, and Sharlto Copley all in a film. We had that with his District 9 and Elysium movies, he should have changed pace by now. The inclusion of Die Artwoord’s characters only makes it seem like he let them be in it after he didn’t let them be in Elysium, and they were a huge part of this film’s mediocre performance.
It’s a shame as Blomkamp could have made it work if he had simply had Yolandi and Ninja be secondary villains, they want Chappie so they can overthrow the company and cause riots in South Africa, Moore stays as the big baddie, while the film could have focussed on Chappie and Deon. Have Deon live in his own house that’s big enough for him to do all kinds of things to teach Chappie who does start out innocent and then ends up being foul mouth, have him learn what death means and what that means for him. Try and end the film with optimism as Deon and Chappie expose Moore and there is a great shift in the company which sees Deon as taking over it while Chappie thinks of what he has to do now that he is a celebrity.
Teddy: It could have worked.
Freddy: Yeah. It’s quite sad that you don’t like it as much.
I still think Chappie himself is a funny character, as you can see in the videos. I have to still credit the team on how they brought him to life through practical and motion capture effects. Though still the movie isn’t at all what I thought it was and that’s fine as I can let go of what I thought if it as a underrated film and just accept it wasn’t that good.
Thanks for coming here guys, and thank you all for reading it.
Comments