CHAPPIE Is B-Movie Silliness Disguised as High-Concept Blockbuster

CHAPPIE Review:

- Please don't suck. Please don't suck. Please don't suck. That is the rallying cry and internal monologue of film geeks as a much-anticipated movie begins - especially one in which the quality of the movie is far from guaranteed going in. CHAPPIE was a movie that I really wanted to be good. Really wanted to be *great*. I still will go to bat any day of the week for District 9. That movie blew me away back in 2009, and it seemed to send a strong message that its co-writer and director, Neill Blomkamp, was a major new voice in blockbuster filmmaking - here was a guy who was here to stay. Suffice it to say, the expectations for Blomkamp's follow-up, Elysium, were sky high. And the movie was ... meh. Blomkamp's visual flair was still evident, but the story felt flat and uninspired. With that in mind, CHAPPIE had a (possibly unfair) feeling of make-or-break for Blomkamp. Would it be a return to form, or another stumble? The stakes felt even higher with the news that Blomkamp would be directing the upcoming Alien sequel. Fans (myself included) wanted reassurance that that beloved franchise was in good hands. So ... here's the thing: I'm still pretty confident that Blomkamp can and will deliver the goods when it comes to badass sci-fi visuals and hard-hitting action scenes. At the same time, Chappie *really* makes me want to see Blomkamp teamed with some great writers on Alien and whatever other projects he tackles subsequently. CHAPPIE has some really cool visuals, but overall it's the weakest film Blomkamp has done to date. It's got script problems - big ones. And the result is a movie that ends up being jaw-dropping, but in all the wrong ways.

There are a lot of things in CHAPPIE that I admire in theory. I dig the basic concept - that of a police robot destined for the scrap-heap, salvaged by his creator and implanted with an upgrade that allows him true sentience. I like the visual aesthetic of the film, and the design of Chappie. In general, I'm a big fan of Blomkamp's gritty, 80's sci-fi-inspired design sense. I even like, in theory, the concept of casting the punked-out members of South African rap-rave band Die Antwoord as principle characters. I mean, why not? The whole film has an 80's sci-fi aesthetic, and a lot of beloved 80's genre movies have memorable appearances from musicians trying their hands at acting, from Bowie in Labyrinth to Isaac Hayes in Escape From New York. In theory, it's a bold, sorta cool movie. In theory.

But in practice, in the execution, so much of CHAPPIE ends up eliciting eye-rolls rather than fist-pumps. The story has numerous beats that feel off. Sometimes the film feels like it's straight-up ripping off Robocop. Witness Hugh Jackman as Vincent Moore - a loose-cannon engineer whose war-machine robot is pretty much just the ED-209. Sometimes, the movie seems tone-def about its characters. Die Antwoord's Ninja and Yo-Landi (playing odd alternate-universe versions of themselves) essentially go from being the movie's villains to its heroes without any real narrative arc driving that turn. And sometimes, as with the film's bat$%#&-crazy ending, the plot twists feel less like the work of a visionary and more like the fevered fan-fic of an overstimulated ten year old.

The underlying problem here is that Blomkamp seems to constantly be thinking about how best to deliver big, ain't-that-cool moments while also trying to infuse his films with legit social commentary and meaning. But the two halves do not form a cohesive whole. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that, for example, I get how the movie's ending perhaps seemed cool - could have been cool - on paper. But in practice it's laughable, because there's no semblance of human emotion driving it. Stuff happens, and we - and the characters - are asked to just go with it without the slightest hint of dramatic weight or emotional resonance. It's the same reason why Ninja sort of sucks as an antihero. There's no depth to his character - nothing to make us find it in our hearts to root for him when all we know of him is that he seems like a relatively heartless tool. But he's punk and named Ninja, so I guess we're supposed to embrace him? Yo-Landi is at least a little more sympathetic - she seems to genuinely care for Chappie. But that's all there is to her. How did she end up with Ninja? Are they supposed to be a band in the movie? Why does she stay with him despite him seeming to be an abusive maniac? The characters here all feel like cardboard cut-outs. Hugh Jackman's Vincent is similarly confounding. I'm all for having a crazy, over-the-top badguy in this sort of film. But Vincent just does stuff without any discernible motivation. He wants his ED-209-esque war-bot to get approved for mass-production and deployment, and he tries to accomplish that - and quell fears that it's dangerous - by taking it on a joyride of mass-destruction? This is a movie largely devoid of recognizable human behavior. At one point, an enraged Vincent pulls a gun on his office-mate in the middle of a crowded cubicle farm -- and everyone seems pretty unfazed.

The office-mate who has the gun pulled on him is Dev Patel's Deon - who is initially set up to be the movie's main hero. But it shows how structurally broken the film is that Deon ends up disappearing for long stretches of the movie - letting the increasingly aimless Ninja and Yo-Landi take center stage. Deon is the young robotics rock star who created the line of police-bots that spawned Chappie. And a movie primarily about Deon teaching a newly-sentient Chappie about morals and humanity in order to fight off a soulless robotic force guided by Vincent could have been a fun sci-fi premise. But the movie gets so bogged down in everything else - in the Die Antwoord stuff, in endless scenes of Chappie learning to be gangsta (which often come off as just silly) - that by the third act we're not really sure *what* this movie is or what it's trying to be.

The one thing that CHAPPIE really has going for it is Chappie. The visual f/x around Chappie are honestly some of the best and most seamless motion-capture CGI I've ever seen in a film. At most points in the film, you'd be hard-pressed to say with certainty that what we're seeing is CG and not some sort of practical f/x work. Chappie looks fantastic, and a lot of that also has to do with the amazing mo-cap work done by Blomkamp regular Sharlto Copley - who voices and gives life to Chappie. Copley kills it. He not only makes Chappie feel real and alive, but he makes him likable despite a script that does him no favors, and that makes him grow from simple and child-like to omniscient super-being in a span of minutes.

CHAPPIE has some pretty solid action, but nothing in the same league as District 9. The big difference, of course, is that District 9 had a ton of emotional weight behind its big action set pieces. CHAPPIE - tone deaf as it is - more often than not fails to get the ol' adrenaline pumping. The basic building blocks of good action are there - Blomkamp knows how to stage some kick-ass asskickery. But the plot and emotional arcing of the movie is so all-over-the-map that it's often difficult to discern a.) character motivations, and b.) filmmaker intentions. Is a scene meant to be disturbing or fun? Are these characters supposed to be kewl or off-putting? And, oh ... couldn't the film have found a better use for the great Sigourney Weaver than just having her play a generic hard-ass CEO?

The more I think about CHAPPIE, the more I begrudgingly admire some of its weirdness. I mean, the fact that Blomkamp gives so much screentime to the (admittedly sort of fascinating) Yo-Landi and Ninja, the fact that Hugh Jackman's villain is a complete nutcase whose actions make no sense, the fact that the ending is so completely bugnuts insane - all of it sort of endears me to this movie. And if CHAPPIE were some weird midnight-movie oddity, then it might be easier to enjoy as just a strange B-movie in the vein of so many nutty sci-fi B-movies from the 80's-era golden age that Blomkamp clearly has an affection for. But this film clearly aspires to more than B-movie novelty. Like each of Blomkamp's movies to date, it wants to say things about society and class, and to have deeper thematic texture than your average sci-fi shoot-'em-up. And CHAPPIE - even more so than Elysium - just sort of falls apart as anything other than B-movie action. It goes to show that you can have the best f/x in the world - and the biggest of ambitions - but without a smart script and great characters, you're left with a dud. CHAPPIE, sadly, is a dud. You've got to give it credit for daring to be weird in certain ways, but you've also got to dock it points for being generic and brain-dead in too many other ways. Robocop this ain't. I've not yet given up on Blomkamp, and I remain hopeful that he can evolve into a visual stylist who helps breathe life into great scripts from other writers. But CHAPPIE is seemingly damning evidence that the guy can't do it all on his own.

My Grade: C

ELYSIUM Is Good, But Not In District 9's League

ELYSIUM Review:

- Neill Blomkamp's first feature film was the monumental District 9 - and, man, that's a tough first act to follow. District 9 was like a sci-fi thunderbolt a few years back - a movie that seemed to come out of nowhere, leapfrogging over the more-hyped, bigger-budgeted summer movie competition and becoming not just *the* movie of that summer, but an Oscar-nominated instant classic. Hate if you will, but District 9 mixed social satire science fiction with adrenaline-pumping, balls-to-the-wall action like few other genre films ever have. Suffice it to say, as soon as the film was over, I was primed and ready for whatever it was that Blomkamp had up his sleeve for his next trick.

Now, after a seemingly interminable wait, we finally have the director's sophomore effort, ELYSIUM. And yes, going in, expectations were high. Blomkamp's debut was so stellar and meteoric that you had to question what he could possibly do to top it. And you had to wonder if this movie would cement him as the next great blockbuster director, or if it would relegate him to one-hit-wonder status.

The semi-frustrating fact is that, post-Elysium, it's still hard to say. Elysium has moments that call to mind the visual electricity and high-concept shock-and-awe of District 9. But it also is not in the same league, overall, as that film. I remain confident that Blomkamp has it in him to make many more great films. But I also think that, to do so, he'll have to learn from the mistakes of what has to be considered a bit of a sophomore slump.

It's funny, because District 9 managed to amaze by starting small and then pulling back the lens to reveal a much larger scope and scale than was originally anticipated. Elysium, on the other hand, starts big, but becomes increasingly insular as it goes. But I will say: the opening scenes of the film paint a breathtaking picture of a future-world dystopia. In a well-done bit of world-building, we're introduced to an earth that is now an ugly, rubble-filled wasteland in which money, resources, and hope are scarce. All of the planet's well-off citizens have fled to Elysium, a utopian space station that hovers above earth's orbit. Those stuck on earth work in poor conditions in giant factories, manufacturing goods and tech used by the Elysians, but hoarded and kept away from earth. The factory that our main character, Max, works in produces robots that are used as police on earth, and as servants and guards on Elysium. Meanwhile, the most precious piece of tech on Elysium are the medical bays that, almost magically, can heal nearly all wounds and sickness. Frequently, bands of desperate, ailing earth denizens try to smuggle themselves to Elysium in order to make a mad border dash for the healing bays. Most find themselves greeted with deadly force by an unsympathetic government.

And so, Elysium positions itself as one hell of a 1% vs. 99% sci-fi parable. I was on the edge of my seat for the movie's opening scenes, totally caught up in this world - both the striking dystopian/utopian visuals, and the possibilities for social commentary that such a world allowed for. I'll talk more about the visuals for a second, and just say that Blomkamp is clearly one of the best there is at sci-fi world-building from a visual standpoint. The budget upgrade from District 9 allows him to give us the big, wide shots that show top-down views of these two contrasting places: the ruined buildings, slums, and poverty of earth, and the sleek, green, ultra-modern eden that is Elysium. Blomkamp has a way of casually shooting sci-fi: i.e. giving these worlds a lived-in quality, showing us the far-out as mundane, that is unique. Like the way that police robots patrol earth and deal with citizen misconduct. There's a thrilling, Star Wars-esque quality to the way that Blomkamp shoots stuff like this.

But where Blomkamp falters in ELYSIUM is, shockingly, the big action scenes. Pick any still frame of the big set pieces, and they'll probably look awesome. But somehow, for his second film, Blomkampf has largely abandoned the cleaner, more old-school action style of District 9, in favor of a whole lot of shaky cam and Michael Bay-style rapid-fire cuts. It's funny, because District 9 felt like such an antithesis to movies like Transformers when it came out. But here, Blomkamp undermines his own action scenes by cutting them all to hell. It's a shame, because if nothing else, the guy has a sense for putting stuff into his movies that's just inherently cool. In District 9, we got the mech. In Elysium, it's the laser-shield that Sharlto Copley's character wields. And it's the aforementioned police robots going robo-crazy and kicking ass. There are action sequences in Elysium that are pretty damn badass on a conceptual level. But for some reason, a lot of them are shot close-in and rapid-fire - taking away some of the awe and wonder and fun.

The action scenes aren't the only thing that feel more bland and generic as opposed to District 9. Even more importantly, the characters of the film just don't pop, for the most part, like they should. Chiefly, Matt Damon's Max is pretty vanilla. Max is a worker on earth who was once a low-level criminal, but who is now trying to go straight by making an honest living in a robot factory. However, when Max's pushy boss forces him to make a potentially dangerous repair to fix a system malfunction, Max gets trapped in a hazardous area and is doused with deadly radiation. Max finds out that he's now only got five days to live. Desperate and angry, he tracks down his old criminal buddies, and convinces them to help him get to Elysium. His hope is to get to a healing chamber and cure his condition. The gang agrees to help, if Max agrees to help them rob a top-level Elysium fat cat. They outfit Max with a souped-up exoskeleton armor suit, and away they go.

Here's the thing: Max's arc is supposed to be that he's initially just trying to live and survive, but, eventually, he takes on a deeper sense of purpose and becomes a sort of messianic figure. Okay, good in theory - but it's touched on in only the most fleeting ways in the film. What should have been an epic character arc ends up feeling limp and by-the-numbers. For most of the film, Max just feels like Matt Damon playing an everyman, and there's never any real doubt as to where this is all heading. Everything about Max feels half-baked and not-that-interesting. The flashbacks to his childhood raised by nuns? Just sort of there. His relationship with Frey, a childhood friend and potential love interest? No real spark. I really had no feeling one way or the other as to whether or not they should end up together. Max in this movie is, frankly, just sort of a boring dude. The script doesn't particularly serve the character well or make him all that interesting, and Damon also doesn't really provide enough gravitas or emotion to make him all that epic or awesome (for some reason, I kept thinking of a 70's version of this film starring Charlton Heston, and how badass that might have been).

Overall, there is a sense of Elysium being a movie that isn't fully sketched in. Max as a character feels loosely-drawn and sort of vague. And the same is true for the whole movie. That feeling starts with the characters. Jodie Foster's Delacourt - Elysium's unfeeling Secretary of Defense - is okay as a sinister corporate villain type, but we never *really* get into the psychology of why she is the way she is. Elysium as a whole, for that matter. How did it evolve to be the way it is? How did this segregation start? Why is tech like the healing chambers kept from those on earth? And how did Elysium's uncaring, totalitarian-esque government come to be? I'm not saying I need all the details. But I want to feel like all of those details have been fully thought through. I wanted to feel like this world fully makes sense, even if we aren't explicitly told all the details.

And that's where the holes in ELYSIUM begin to show. Because on some level, this feels like a movie with a great premise, but like a movie in which the premise ultimately gives way to Blomkamp's desire for cool action scenes and videogame-esque pyrotechnics. I think about Sharlto Copley's role as Kruger, a wild-man hired gun who does Delacourt's bidding on earth. Copley is incredibly fun here. He goes for broke, and turns in a totally off-the-rails, unhinged performance. It's a great, memorably villainous turn. The problem is that Kruger is cool and badass in and of himself, but it really makes no sense that he gets so much screentime given the story that the movie sets out to tell. It's like if Bobba Fett ended up becoming the big bad of Star Wars just by virtue of his coolness. Someone needed to remind Blomkamp that like Star Wars, Elysium is a story about rebels vs. the evil empire. And as such, the movie should build to a confrontation with said empire. But Blomkamp seems to fall in love with Kruger and his kewl laser-shield, at the expense of his own story. It also feels like there was a missed opportunity with William Fichtner's awesomely sinister corporate overlord character, John Carlyle. Carlyle feels like the natural villain of the film, and Fichtner is great in the part, as always. But Carlyle is taken off the board pretty early, even though he's the one who seems to represent all that is wrong with Elysium and who, other than Delacourt, is most interested in protecting its exclusive way of life. By the time the movie reaches its climax, it's more about a bunch of guys fighting *just because*, and not much more. That's the inherent problem with Elysium as it goes on - for a movie that is purportedly *about* stuff, many scenes feel sort of devoid of thematic resonance or relevance.

To the movie's credit and to its detriment, it seriously seems to emulate the structure of a videogame. The plot progression feels less about organic character arcs and well-timed twists, and more about Max simply progressing from one "level" to the next. What this means is that there's an inevitability to the plot and how it unfolds that zaps the movie of a lot of tension. The ending feels like a foregone conclusion long before it happens. Rather than toy with our expectations, the movie pretty much just follows them from Point A to Point B. This means that the film - though action-packed - feels oddly slow at times.

And yet, there are still those moments where we are reminded that Blomkamp knows how to crank things up a notch and just bring the awesome. His knack for character and creature design is pretty amazing. The robots in this movie look phenomenal. The vehicles and landscapes as well. And what I like about Blomkamp is that he never seems to tone things down for the mass audience. In Elysium, the scene where Damon gets the exoskeleton grafted to him is just absolutely, awesomely brutal. Later on, a scene in which a mutilated Kruger attempts to use a healing bay to stay alive - it's just classic, old-school gore (the f/x used even look practical - right out of an old John Carpenter flick). Speaking of which, the movie uses a lot of practical sets and f/x, and it really shows. It helps add to that feeling of lived-in grittiness.

Other than Fichtner's Carlyle, my favorite character in the film was Wagner Moura's Spider - the leader of the band of criminals/rebels who give support to Max. Moura cranks things up to eleven, and is just totally over-the-top in the role. But it's a kind of over-the-top that fits, because unlike Damon, Moura conveys the rage and frustration of the earth people, and that rage gives the movie a spark that Max alone does not. On the flip side of things, Diego Luna is pretty meh as Julio, Spider's associate and Max's best friend. Same goes for Alice Braga as Frey. A weak character that Braga is unable to elevate.

ELYSIUM maintains some of District 9's edginess. The R-rating allows for a level of grittiness that you don't always associate with big-budget genre fare. At the same time, there is that sort of sense that mo' money created mo' problems for Blomkamp and team. District 9 was so scrappy and rock n' roll ... some of that is still evident in Elysium, but there's also a sense that there was pressure on Blomkamp to go back to the same well he'd had success with once, even if he'd already said what he needed to say about segregation and discrimination with his first film. Maybe he needs to work with some other writers. Maybe he just needs to tackle a wholly different genre or theme. But whatever the case may be, you can't help but feel like Elysium is the warmed-over leftovers to District 9's main course. It's sleeker and filled with bigger stars, but the heart and soul and wow-factor just isn't there. Look, Blomkamp can do kick-ass sci-fi in his sleep, and I am still firmly onboard the Blomkamp bandwagon. But Elysium is a bump in the road on the path to legendary status. Let's see what the guy can do with his next film.

My Grade: B