These movies should be adored and liked by everyone, the creativity to make these films is absolutely ingenious. The person praiseworthy is the director, Neill Blomkamp who previously created an Oscar nominated movie, District 9 just like this one. Those who loved District 9 would also love this.
Finding faults and making harsh judgements about this movie is not OK, the director, producer , the whole team did their best in bringing out a great action film based on robot cops with Artificial Intelligence inspired by one of the short films, Tetra Vaal(2004) also directed by Neill Blomkamp. If this movie was not good then how the audience across the world liked it and made it gross a whooping $100 million worldwide against a $49 million budget.
Who doesn’t love to see robots in action! Movies like Real Steel, Transformers series, Pacific Rim, Robocop etc. received mixed reviews, praise, social satires when released internationally, for some the critic response was worse but later what happened, these movies made their way to the top at the box office and now are remembered as great movies, epics.
Nevertheless, Chappie deserves much more than the reviews and ratings it has already received. I think this whole misconception of not agreeing with the plot of the movie based on a robot given A.I. to think and take decisions and further programmed to feel emotions and behave like humans is nonsensical, we are evolving and in future we will be having robots like these programmed with A.I. in every working environment including homes doing domestic works and protecting us from unforeseen incidents. This is another reason why I love the movie I, Robot starring Will Smith. Technologically the only thing now and many years later we will continue to experience is how to build a robot that is actually self aware.
Some masterpieces which make these kind of movies legendary are Terminator series, Universal Soldier series, Cyborg starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and more. In fact Chappie is the first movie in the trilogy, rumours are Neill Blomkamp is looking forward to direct the other two remaining sequels of this franchise. We can only wait and hope for the other parts to be box office hits and perform better than the prequel. Keep up the good work, Neill Blomkamp and we hope to see more of your amazing work on the big screen.
Now coming back to the movie, Chappie is about a robot cop who is one of the robots operated and controlled by the weapons manufacturing company, Tetra Vaal. The engineer who designed these robots is Deon Wilson(Dev Patel known for his role in 8 Oscar awards winning movie, Slumdog Millionaire). He is disliked by his colleague, Vincent Moore(Hugh Jackman) who is also a design engineer building a heavy weapon robot, Moose which uses the human brain’s consciousness to operate remotely via a control helmet. But his design isn’t approved by the boss of the company, Michelle Bradley(Sigourney Weaver) because the government finds his robot to be heavy, expensive and ugly.
The government likes the design of Deon and it invests in Tetra Vaal for the production of more robocops. At the factory a batch of damaged and broken robocops arrive, the technicians get into action and repairing starts fixing the one robocop, unit 22. Soon this robot is feeded new information to go crackdown a drug deal along with some police officials and other robocops. The deal goes out of control and the dealers open fired with a rocket launcher shutting down the unit 22 and killing the cops. Some of the assailants manage to escape the raid and settle themselves in an unknown place, a hideout for things to calm down. These escapists were Watkin Tudor Jones (Ninja) and Yolandi Visser(Yolandi) and Jose Pablo Cantillo(Amerika).
They have their own problems, they were supposed to deliver some goods to a crime boss Hippo(Brandon Auret) where the deal was taking place. But due to the surprise attack by police they were unable to do so. The crime boss also escapes and calls Ninja and tells him that he is not in jail and he will come for his money they owe him.
On the other hand, Yolandi after watching a news on the TV about robocops and its designer, Deon comes up with a plan that if they get hold of this Deon guy then they can shut down the robots for good.
Next we see Deon working on something strange at his home, creating artificial consciousness in robocops which will give them ability to feel things, understand emotions and behave like a human. After long trial and errors he succeeds. Now he wants to test this in a robocop but he needs a guard key, a property of Tetra Vaal which is used by the company to update the robot’s software.
He approaches the boss Michelle, intimates her about his newest creation but sadly she disapproves him.
Feeling utterly confused and restrained by the company’s way of working he decides to do it alone. He steals the guard key and the broken robot, unit 22 and as he was on his way home the gang, Ninja, Yolandi and Amerika kidnaps him and takes him to their hideout. After threatening him and searching his car they find the damaged robocop. To let Deon live, they want him to shut down all the robots like the one found in his car but Deon scared for his life but more curious to test his new creation, he manages to convince the gang that if they let him live he will make the robot their own which can do whatever they want.
The gang approves and Deon inserts the guard key in the slot on robot’s head and uses his laptop to do some modifications and voila…the dead robot powers on…(Now the fun part starts and excitement and thrill takes over)
Telling the whole story will ruin the best moments the movie is acclaimed for. Please see the movie from this instance onwards. The behaviour, feelings, emotions, rage, anger and revenge are all shown and portrayed beautifully through the robot. This has been achieved by the fantastic work by the visual effect supervisor of Chappie, Chris Harvey who used CGI(Computer Generated Imagery) in many films including this. Chris also tells us that the motion capturing of Chappie the robot is absent , they have done its motion capturing on their own from the scratch. Also how to convey emotions and the continuous struggle to associate emotions with the artificial intelligence to make it become sentient is fabulous and extremely well executed by the visual effects team.
I feel that if this movie was more story driven and little less in showing violent brutal ripping apart scenes making it a family entertaining movie instead of a rated-R movie then children would have also watched and loved this Chappie, the robot more than that grown ups have. Through this Sony pictures would have escalated their sales and promotion strategy to new heights by introducing various merchandise opportunities in the market.
Overall, a great movie, entertaining and Chappie, loved the robot and its voice(by Sharlto Copley)…my rating 8 out of 10
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Photo29, Photo31 and Photo32 by Jorge Figueroa is licensed under 