Thus
far, director Neil Blomkamp’s directing career has followed a predictable
pattern.
He
had his break-out, wildly imaginative first picture: District 9 (2009).
Then
he experienced a sophomore slump, the two-dimensional Elysium (2012).
Now
he comes roaring back with another imaginative and brawny science fiction vision, Chappie
(2015), but critics and audiences still aren’t sold on him, or his
world view, and the film has earned mixed reviews.
Next
up for Blomkamp is Alien 5, wherein, presumably, he will re-connect with more
mainstream tastes. Blomkamp will thus be
afforded the opportunity -- like Colin Trevorrow with Jurassic World -- to
revive a once-beloved but dormant franchise, and thereby showcase his ability
to send it in fresh and challenging directions.
But
Chappie
seems the most undeserving of victims in this paradigm because it features more
imagination, energy, and heart than most genre films produced during the Age of
Superheroes and CGI, excepting, perhaps, the rebooted Planet of the Apes
pictures (Rise [2011] and Dawn [2014]).
Even
when Chappie
was released earlier this year, virtually all talk of it in the genre and
mainstream press was centered on Sigourney Weaver and Alien 5, not the merits
or virtues of the film itself.
Yet
much like District 9, Chappie is wildly unfettered and anarchic in terms
of its visual action. And unlike Elysium, it doesn’t preach about its
world view. That world view is substantive and valuable, of course, but you can
watch and enjoy the film without it feeling like a lecture on social justice.
Chappie
commences,
actually, as a metaphor for child-rearing, or parenting, but then, in an
ambitious and unexpected turn detour, transforms into a meditation on the very nature
of consciousness, of life itself.
In
meaningful ways, the narrative concerns the ways that a child who knows love
cannot only save or redeem his parents, but change the world too.
Despite
the film’s violence and dystopian imagery, there’s a strong element of hope
underlining the often-violent Chappie. Too many science fiction films these days mindlessly
accept the status quo, or cynically imagine that nothing will ever change,
except for the worse.
By
contrast, Blomkamp’s Chappie reminds us that our everyday
actions -- as parents and people -- can alter the shape of destiny, and make
the world a better place for future generations.
Perhaps
that description sounds cheesy, or broad, but Chappie moves with such
dynamic, determined energy that the audience doesn’t feel talked down to but
rather invested -- emotionally and viscerally -- in the details of the story
and character.
“He’s
not stupid. He’s just a kid.”
In
near-future Johannesburg, the tech company Tetravaal has created a robot police
force to combat out-of-control crime.
That robot police force is safe from third-party hacking because it
takes a special “guard key” to update robot programming. That guard key is zealously guarded,
available to a select few.
Inside
the company, two designers report to Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver).
One, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) wishes to update
the robot police, known as Scouts, with a form of artificial intelligence. She denies him permission.
The
other man, Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman), desires to push his own civil control program,
giant remote-controlled gun platforms called MOOSE.
Both
men violate orders and proceed with their own agendas. Deon takes the guard key
and a broken robot, Scout 22, giving it artificial intelligence, and therefore
consciousness.
Moore
hatches a plan to sabotage the scouts, and get MOOSE on the city streets.
But
Deon’s robot, 22, is captured by a trio of small-time criminals, Ninja
(Himself), Yolandi (Yolandi Visser), and Amerika (Jose Pablo Cantillo). These crooks intend to use the machine,
renamed Chappie, in a heist. They have
no choice, really. They owe a local
warlord, Hippo (Brandon Auret) 20 million dollars, and he will kill them if
they don’t pay up.
But
something unusual happens between Chappie and the criminals. Yolandi begins to
see -- as Deon does -- that Chappie is a child, and one who needs nurturing and
teaching. She teaches him about death
and the soul, even as Ninja seeks to make him a “cool” gun-slinging force for destruction.
Chappie
must chart his own path, and that path is affected by a terrible
discovery. He is mortal, and will only
live for a few more days…
“Anything
you want to do in your life, you can do.”
It’s
easy to gaze at Chappie and judge it the bastard child of several genre movie
influences.
The
giant MOOSE assault weapon looks uncomfortably like RoboCop’s (1987) ED-209,
and Chappie’s child-like nature and human “soul” may recall, for some, elements
of Short
Circuit (1985). Chappie’s discovery of impending mortality might be
seen, in a way, as an allusion to the replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner (1982). Beyond those surface values, however, the film charts
its own compelling and unique course, much like Chappie himself.
For
instance, consider the development of the human characters. The movie essentially positions two criminals,
Ninja and Volandi, as parents, but instead of diagramming these characters in
predictable, cookie-cutter ways, the movie actually allows them to grow, just
as real parents would in the same situation. Yolandi takes to motherhood quicker and more successfully than Ninja
takes to fatherhood, but even he gets there…after a fashion.
Some
of their arguments about their unusual child, Chappie, eerily echo real life
conversations I’ve witnessed and participated in.
“How could you do this? He’s just a child!” Yolandi complains at one
point, when Ninja pushes Chappie too far.
“I didn’t
know what would happen,” Ninja answers, defensively.
Ninja
keeps making fathering mistakes, and there’s one scene, even, when he scolds
his mechanical son for playing with dolls instead of guns. The idea is that
Yolandi accepts Chappie without question, looking to nurture and care for
him. Ninja, by contrast, wants the robot
to grow up in his image: “cool” and a BMF.
At one point, he even gives him bling and spray-paint tats.
But,
finally, after lies and set-backs, Ninja also accepts who Chappie is, and comes
to love him on those terms. Yolandi helps him get there, but the capacity is
inside him, as it is within all of us. Indeed, Ninja makes a valorous last act
attempt to sacrifice himself for his family, though it goes terribly
wrong.
In
that moment of selflessness, however, Ninja thinks of his own family and its
well-being first, not about himself, what he wants, or how Chappie should “be.”
A
more typical Hollywood film would not showcase such sympathy and humanity in
the development of Ninja, a character who is, after all, also a bloody
criminal. The point, nicely left
oblique, is that criminals love their children too, and want the best for them.
That’s a universal human trait, isn't it? The same
idea comes through, as well, in Chappie’s relationship to his actual maker,
Deon.
Deon
tries to be a good father as well. He gives
Chappie a book and a painting easel, and tells him he can be whatever he
chooses to be. But Deon also wants to
impose roles (don’t commit crimes; don’t hurt anybody), but yet doesn’t provide
Chappie the underlying moral reasons for obeying those rules. Chappie discovers
those for himself after he wounds a police officer during the heist, and sees
the blood and injuries.
One
of the most touching scenes in the film involves the growing relationship
between Chappie and Deon. Chappie learns
that he is fated to die, the victim of a low battery that can’t be replaced. He
asks Deon why he made him “just to die,”
and Deon replies “How was I supposed to
know that you would become you?”
He
also shares with Chappie a fundamental fact of existence: we’re all born to
die, essentially.
We can’t move our
consciousness from one body to another.
When our body fails, our consciousness dies with it.
For
Chappie this is a terrible fact, but powered by the love of Yolandi -- who
explains the soul to him -- he changes the world.
He determines to understand consciousness, not just for him, but for
human beings too.
Although
it’s a mighty big leap moving human consciousness into robots, I admired the
underlying point of Chappie’s discovery.
His love of his parents -- Deon and Ninja included -- and the utter
unacceptability of mortality enable him to think in a new, innovative way.
I
believe in my heart that this is the story of human generations.
Each one is a little more evolved, a little
better than the last. Our responsibility to the next generation is to start it
off right, with love and respect, with safety and understanding. Then, as that younger grows and matures,
those gifts will be returned tenfold as the children we love push the human
race another step forward in terms of technological and moral progress.
The
fact that Chappie’s consciousness, and human consciousness as well, can both be
moved around, in the film’s final act, suggests something else.
The
soul, or consciousness, isn’t limited to human life. We should know this, already, but somehow we
don’t. Look into the eyes of your cat, or dog, and tell me it doesn’t possess a
soul.
By
extension, the same will be true of inorganic life. Chappie discovers that he has a
consciousness, and by implication, a soul.
Watching the film, I felt -- for perhaps the first time, perhaps -- that we will
see a discovery like this in our life-times.
If
so, how we treat that artificial life, or consciousness, will prove one of the
most important tests of human nature, and human decency.
Will we treat
artificial life like children that we must nurture and teach? Or will we, like Vincent Moore, double-down
on outdated religious dogma about life, and dismiss the new life in our midst as somehow being second class?
Moore’s
character, actually, reflect the hypocritical nature of many prominent religious
men. He claims to be of deep faith, and
yet what he really wants to do is to kill people. He’s psychotic, and that’s
why he wants the MOOSE operational; so he can commit murder from a safe
distance.
When
you see so many professed “faithful” people, either in the Middle East, or here
in the States arguing for bloody pre-emptive violence against others, you
realize that Chappie isn’t far off the mark in its depiction of spiritual
hypocrisy. Vincent Moore lives by a
fallacy that too many people live by; the appeal to tradition. Just because something has always been one
way -- man is the believed to be the only creature with a soul, for instance --
that doesn’t mean that belief is good, or accurate.
In
two hours, Chappie takes viewers through the whole "human" process of growing
up...with a robot. Chappie is born, is loved, and
matures into an individual who will make his stamp on the world. The film’s amazing virtue, however, is that
it shows us how a person with the right start in life can overcome fallacies,
defeat hatred, and make things better.
“How
was I supposed to know that you would become you?”
Well, when you get right down to it, isn’t
that what all parents are supposed to know, or hope for?
