Movie Review: Chappie

Chappie
Directed by: Neill Blomkamp.
Written by: Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell.
Starrimg: Sharlto Copley (Chappie), Dev Patel (Deon Wilson), Ninja (Ninja), Yo-Landi Visser (Yolandi), Jose Pablo Cantillo (Yankie - Amerika), Hugh Jackman (Vincent Moore), Sigourney Weaver (Michelle Bradley), Brandon Auret (Hippo), Johnny Selema (Pitbull).

There are quite a few interesting ideas running through Chappie – the latest sci-fi action film from Neill Blomkamp. His debut film, District 9, was an ingenious sci-fi allegory with a simple aliens/Apartheid metaphor that worked surprisingly well. Yes, it may have been a little disappointing that Blomkamp had no way to end his film other than in an explosive of action sequences – but I enjoyed those sequences, that felt a little dirtier, grittier and more low-tech than most films of its kind – so overall, I pretty much loved District 9. His follow-up film, Elysium, may not have reached the same level – Blomkamp upped the political content in the film, but was also more ham fisted and obvious in marrying it with his sci-fi plot. Still, I admired the film because it really was trying for something more – it had ambition, and if it didn’t live up those ambitions, it’s better than not having them at all. You could say the same thing about Chappie – the film doesn’t lack for ideas, many of them interesting. And Blomkamp seems to have learned not to force his allegory on the film in such obvious fashion this time around. Unfortunately, Blomkamp fills Chappie with too many useless subplots and characters, too many ideas borrowed from other films, that the entire film feels muddled – as it’s spending a lot of time, saying nothing new. The final act is a genuine confused mess – that quite simply doesn’t work at all. Like last month’s Jupiter Ascending from the Wachowskis, I wanted to like Chappie – they are both genuinely strange movies, original, big budget sci-fi films instead of more franchise, that are both obviously their talented makers films. But both film are complete messes – so as much as I wanted to like them, I really couldn’t.

The film opens in 2016 – where in a news montage, we learn that the city of Johannesburg, South Africa have purchased a number of robot police officers to assist their human counterparts. These robot cops have had an almost positive immediate impact on the crime rate – and the weapons company who makes the robots is drawing interest from around the world. The designer, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), is proud of his achievement – but has his goals set much higher. He wants to make a truly sentient artificially intelligent robot – and thinks he has finally cracked it. He goes to the CEO (Sigourney Weaver) to get permission to try out his new software on an old robot – that is about to be destroyed anyway. She, of course, says no. He, of course, steals the robot and does it anyway. But he has two problems – the first being that on his way home, he is carjacked by Ninja (Ninja), Yolandi (Yo-Landi Visser) and Amerika (Jose Pablo Cantillo) – three low rent thugs who need to make a lot of money quickly, and think the designer of the police robots can help them. They are the three that end up with the robot who will become the title character. The second problem Deon has is that his biggest rival in his company – Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman) suspects something is up, and tries to prove it. He has his own police robot – but it’s a huge, monstrosity (that looks very much like Robocop’s ED 209), but is controlled by a human being. Vincent is a little bit of a religious nut – who thinks robots with a soul are dangerous – and although that’s not a bad point, Vincent is portrayed as so violent and insane, you cannot possibly agree with him.

Chappie, the character, starts with the mentality of a baby – and although gets extremely smart, extremely fast, he never loses that childhood innocence throughout the movie. He is torn between two different viewpoints of the world – Deon, who he refers to as his maker, has loftier, idealistic goals for him, but Ninja, who he calls Daddy, shows him the cruelty of the world – and how he must fight. Somewhere in between is Yolandi – Mommy, who he truly loves. Chappie is performed by Blomkamp’s favorite actor, Sharlto Copley – and it’s an interesting performance, which allows Copley a lot of opportunities to be funny, and only slightly annoying. The design of the character is a little too bland and generic – to be truly sympathetic. Sadly though, he is the only character with any sort of complexity. Everyone else is one note – and not very interesting at that. Jackman fairs the best of the human actors, ripping into his villain role – but it’s an ill-conceived character. Still, it’s better than Weaver, who is supposed to be a typical, short sighted, not overly bright CEO – and while Weaver is a great actress, she doesn’t play dumb well – she exudes too much intelligence. Ninja and Yo-Landi, members of a South African rap group, at least seem to be having fun. The worst, and most unnecessary, character is named Hippo (Brandon Auret), a psychopathic gangster, with stupid hair, who basically shouts his every line (and requires subtitles), even though he’s speaking English.

For the first hour or so, Chappie keeps hinting that perhaps it is going to go in some sort of interesting direction. There are a lot of good ideas running through Chappie – including a scene where Chappie asks his maker why he made him just so he could die – a question many people would ask of God – but like all the other interesting ideas in Chappie, the movie pretty much abandons it as soon as it’s brought up. It doesn’t have time for such things – it needs to spend a lot of time blowing crap up. That is a pattern that repeats itself throughout Chappie. Blomkamp abandons any of the original, or thought provoking ideas in the film so it can get to the blander, generic stuff you’ve seen in many other robot movies in the past – everything from the Terminator movies to Robocop, and everything in between. In many ways, Chappie is a modern day Pinocchio story – but again, Blomkamp doesn’t fully explore that idea either.

The ending of the movie is really when things fly wildly off the rails. The film rushes through a lot of plot in almost no time, and then spends a lot of time on a ridiculously ill-conceived (and illogical) action sequence involving Jackman’s killing machine. It then has a copout, emotionally manipulative ending that makes even less sense that what came before it.

I still think Blomkamp is a talented and promising director. His first film got the balance between his ideas and the action he clearly wants to merge. In Elysium, the balance skewed too far towards his ideas that were too obvious. In Chappie, he pretty much abandons his ideas to make a lot of action sequences. Hopefully he gets the balance right again. After all, there aren’t a lot of people who are even trying to balance the two. I wanted to like Chappie – but the reality is, the film simply doesn’t work.

Movie Review: Elysium

Elysium
Directed by: Neill Blomkamp.
Written by: Neill Blomkamp.
Starring: Matt Damon (Max), Jodie Foster (Delacourt), Sharlto Copley (Kruger), Alice Braga (Frey), Diego Luna (Julio), Wagner Moura (Spider), William Fichtner (John Carlyle), Brandon Auret (Drake), Josh Blacker (Crowe), Emma Tremblay (Matilda), Jose Pablo Cantillo (Sandro).

Unlike particularly every other big blockbuster of this summer, Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium left me wanting more, not less. This is a more ambitious film than Blomkamp’s debut – District 9 – but doesn’t have the same overall impact of the previous film. The biggest reason for that is because Blomkamp has so many ideas that he wanted to get onscreen, and the run time of 109 minutes just isn’t quite enough to fit them all in. I wanted to spend more time in the dystopia of Los Angeles in 2154, more time in the utopia of the Elysium itself – the orbiting space station populated by the rich – and I wanted all of the characters to be a little more fleshed out. One of the things District 9 did so well is that it never let either its political allegory or the special effects get in the way of the very human story of its protagonist – something Elysium doesn’t quite manage. Still, in a summer that has had mostly disappointing or uninspired or simplistic blockbusters, Elysium joins Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim as my favorites of the season. And if I was left wanting a little more, it’s because Blomkamp’s film is that rare blockbuster that I feel could have sustained a more substantial running time.

The year is 2154. We are told that the world essentially collapsed late in the 21^st Century (why, the movie doesn’t say – which will bug some, but didn’t really bug me – could the movie have given a really satisfactory answer anyway? And why would the characters spend their time talking about something that happened decades ago anyway?). The rich (or 1% if you will) built a giant space station known as Elysium, where they continue their lives just as before. In what we see of Elysium, everything if golf course green and perfect. The rest of humanity is stuck on Earth – which, if what we see of L.A. in this movie is representative of the planet as whole, is about one step away of what Wall-E had to deal with. They work menial jobs to support the lifestyle of the Elysium residents, and are policed by robots. On Elysium, everyone has machines that will cure virtually every disease known to mankind – so they have become pretty more immortal. On Earth, healthcare is an even more hellish nightmare than it is now. And just to add another level of allegory to the movie, almost everyone in L.A. is Hispanic – and speak Spanish as much as English – whereas almost everyone on Elysium is white, and if they speak something other than English, it’s French.

The protagonist of the movie is Max – and the performance by Matt Damon is one of the film’s chief strengths. Because Blomkamp spends so much time on the plot mechanics, character development isn’t something he has much time for. Casting Damon is a stroke of genius, because he’s one of those actors audiences instantly identify with – you don’t have to spend time setting Matt Damon up as a good guy – we already known he is (Hitchcock often did the same thing with actors like Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant). He’s an orphan, who has spent time in jail for car theft – but is trying to turn his life around. He has a job in a factory building the very robots who abuse him – and its here where he has an accident that exposes him to radiation that will kill him in 5 days. Not wanting to die, he’s determined to get to Elysium to be cured. First though, he has the steal secrets directly from the head of his old boss (a slimily perfect William Fichtner) for a cyber punk coyote (Wagner Moura – delivering the movie’s best supporting performance) to pay for his passage. Oh – and he also runs into his childhood flame Frey (Alice Braga) who has a daughter with leukemia.

The movie will be written off by some as a liberal fantasy – and it’s easy to see why. The folks on Elysium are clearly the 1%, exploiting the earth bound 99% to make as much money as possible. When you add in the advanced healthcare they get, while the people below have next to nothing, and the implicit commentary about U.S. and Mexico, you do in fact have liberal’s nightmare – a worst case scenario of where everything is going if the conservatives get their way. The villains of the movie are represented by Jodie Foster’s Delacourt, Elysium’s defense minister, who would rather shoot down and kill Earth refugees trying to get to Elysium than capture and deport them – and justifies everything by talking about the “children”. Foster makes a strange vocal choice for Delacourt, which I would be annoyed with, except I often like it when actors make strange vocal choices with their characters for no other reason than to amuse themselves – and to help disguise an underwritten role, which Foster’s certainly is. The other bad guy is Kruger (District 9‘s Sharlto Copley), a “sleeper” agent on Earth, who is essentially an insane Minuteman, patrolling the border, and exterminating everything with extreme prejudice – but of course thinks that if everyone would just listen to him, things would be much, much better.

Looking back over what I’ve written so far, I seem to be harder on Elysium than my true feelings on the movie itself. There is no doubt that Elysium would have benefitted from either trimming down some of its political overtones to focus more on the details of the characters and the plot, or from a more expansive running time that would have allowed Blomkamp to more fully explore everything. Perhaps there is a longer cut of the film that we will get to see one day (I hope so). So while Elysium is far from a perfect film, there is also so much in the film to admire. Blomkamp once again proves himself to be a great visual director – the slums of Los Angeles is one of the most distinctive physical environments in any movie this year, and they are contrasted nicely with what we see of Elysium (even though I wanted to see more). There are a lot of nice touches – like the parole officer – that makes the world feel lived in. The special effects in the movie are excellent – and you never get the sense that Blomkamp is using them in place of his story, but to add to it. Blomkamp doesn’t feel the need to pump up the action – and at times, even takes a long view of the action (as in the shooting down of the ships trying to get to Elysium). While the movie does devolve into a typical action movie climax – it’s handled much better than most action movies, without an over reliance on rapid fire editing or shaky camera work to artificially goose the action. And while I may have wanted a little more character development in pretty much every character in the movie, I cannot find much fault in any of the performances – all the actors are quite good.

I mentioned Pacific Rim off the top of this review, and said that Del Toro’s film from July and Elysium are my two favorites in terms of the big budget blockbusters this summer. That’s true. Pacific Rim may destroy as much, or more, of the world as the rest of the blockbusters this summer, but also didn’t forget about the characters, and had visual flourishes worthy of Spielberg in top blockbuster mode (the little girl in particular is haunting). Elysium on the other hand is the one blockbuster this season that seems to have something more on its mind rather than just mindless destruction and special effects. Those can be entertaining – and often were in the big movies this summer – but it also gets tiring. Elysium at least attempts to do something more in the blockbuster format, and I admire the film for doing so. If I'm still a little disappointed in the film, it’s because District 9 proved how great Blomkamp can be – and Elysium is no District 9.

Movie Review: District 9

District 9 *** ½
Directed By: Neil Blomkamp.

Written By: Neil Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell.

Starring: Sharlto Copley (Wikus Van De Merwe), William Allen Young (Dirk Michaels), Nick Blake Louis Minnaar (Piet Smit), Vanessa Haywood (Tania Van De Merwe), Mandla Gaduka (Fundiswa Mhlanga), David James (Koobus Venter), Kenneth Nkosi (Thomas).

District 9 is one of those few genre films that understands that if they want to be remembered after opening weekend that it has to be about more than just special effects, explosions and gunfights. Sure, District 9 has all of those things in abundance - I doubt you will see this year with more exploding heads, vaporizing bodies and gun battles than this one. They are done with high style and are rather brilliant in their way that they throw every thing and the kitchen sink (not to mention a flying pig) into the action sequences. But the reason that we except the fight sequences in the films final act is because the films first two acts brilliantly set everything up.

The film is a fake documentary about a visiting race of aliens, who for some reason get stranded on earth. Their spaceship dies above Johannesburg, South Africa and they are immediately brought down in put in a shanty town, which becomes a slum and a ghetto, infested with crime and poverty, where the aliens are treated not as second class citizens, but not as citizens at all. They have a wide array of weaponry that the humans try to figure out, but cannot. It appears that the weapons are linked biologically to the aliens themselves. Only they can use them at all.

The people in Johannesburg get tired of having these aliens around for two decades, and so the government decides to move them to an even worse settlement 200 miles away. In charge of the operation is Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), whose job is to go from house to house in the shanty town and give out eviction notices to everyone. To make it all legal, they need the aliens to sign waivers agreeing to the movie, which they get through either intimidation or bribery.

If you do see not the parallels between the plot of this movie and the South African legacy of Apartheid, then that’s probably because you’ve never heard of Apartheid, and I suggest that you need to pick up a book once in a while. The slums where the aliens are kept have been so meticulously modeled after the slums in South Africa during Apartheid, the methods used by the government almost exactly the same. The aliens are looked down upon, spat upon and derogatorily referred to as prawns - which admittedly they do kind of look like. When the movie opens up the idea of doing experiments on the aliens themselves, testing their pain thresh holds, testing the effects on weapons on them, and the medical experiments they conduct on them, it is also impossible not to have flashes to the Nazi camps during WWII and the experiments of Joseph Mengele - after all the doctor in charge has the last name Mhlanga. The movie is not so much of an allegory, because the purpose really is not buried - it’s right up front from the beginning of the movie and never lets up.

But do not get the idea that District 9 is a movie that rams its message down your throat. If you wanted to ignore the political implications of the film, and simply sit back and take the film at face value, it also works wonderfully on that level as well. The film centers on two unconventional heroes. When we are first introduced to Wikus, you would be forgiven in thinking that this was nothing more than a minor supporting character - a gutless government bureaucrat who gets promoted due to family connections, not because he is very good at this job. No one respects him, and he is scared of the army soldiers he is supposed to be in charge of. This is not how you typically introduce your hero. But Sharlto Copley gives a remarkable performance as Wikus. He effortlessly blends into the movie ensemble cast, creating a sympathetic character out of what could be a one conventional role. When he gets sprayed with some alien juice, he slowly starts to change into a prawn himself, much to his horror. They want to use him for experiments, cut up his body and analyze the parts, to see if there is anything they can use for further advances. When he escapes, he has no one to turn to. He ends up hiding in District 9, when an unlikely and uneasy friendship forms between him and the other “hero” of the movie - a prawn with the strange name of Thomas Johnson. He has a young son, and he just wants to go home. The liquid that sprayed Wikus that started his transformation is the liquid he needs to get the huge ship moving again - and is Wikus’ only hope to be turned back to normal. Now that it is in a government lab, the two of them have to go in and get it - this the shooting begins.

Once the shooting begins, it never lets up. Thousands of rounds on ammunition are fired in the films final act. Countless people have their heads explode, or just plain ripped off of their bodies, their bodies vaporized by advanced weaponry. At one point Wikus gets into a high powered alien suit, which allows him to take on all comers at one time. Nearly everyone dies in one creative way or another. Director Neil Blomkamp stages the action brilliantly - way better than recent movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or G.I. Joe or pretty much everything else out this summer. Yes, I do kind of wish that a movie that started out as intelligent as District 9 had found a more intelligent way to end its story, I really cannot complain too hard, since it is so damn entertaining. Besides, the final shot of the film is quietly brilliant, and tragic in its own way.

One of the things that makes the film so original, and enjoyable, could also be its biggest flaw however and that is the format of the fake documentary being made. When the film opens, with talking heads, and footage shot by newscasters followed Wikus on his rounds, everything works brilliantly well. But the film never does explain how they got such in depth, behind the scenes footage of the aliens, or of Wikus plight. The characters never seem to acknowledge that the camera is there. Considering how many times brains splatter on the camera, we never see anyone clean it off either. In order to get the footage, they must have had a team following every movement at all times.

But once you figure this out, you have two choices - you can either let it ruin the movie for you, or you can simply role with the punches. I obviously, choose the second option. The movie is so uncommonly intelligent for movies of this sort, so much more interested in its character, its storyline and its action, that you hardly seem to notice unless you care to. If you accept this one flaw in the movie, than it is very possible that your opinion will match mine - that District 9 is one of the most entertaining, well crafted films of the summer.