Chappie Characters- a critique by Jeremy Jahns

Full-text transcript of the Chappie review:

[00:00:01] This is Neill Blomkamp stepping up his game last time he tackled health care. This time he tackles humanity, maybe. Sheppey, so chappies written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, this guy to District nine, he did Elysium, now he does Jappy he’s going to do Alia’s, which I’m still excited about despite Chappy. So the world of Chapuis. Ultimately the police force are a bunch of robots. Think like I robot, but instead of robots you like do your house chores and shit the cops and Dev Patel is the one who made these robots. So he’s like, oh, I’m going to make one with actual artificial intelligence. So he makes chapping and if they like, yeah. He’s going to hang out with Patel and then he’s going to become more human. And he saw the scene in the trailer where chappies watching him. And, you know, when he’s miming raising the sword, you’re like, oh, he’s going to get all of his moral structure from cartoons like we did. And I get that. It’s awesome he’s going to save humanity somehow. Mm. I’m sorry to say, guys, the trailer left out one very important thing, chappies, actually, about this artificial intelligence robot that gets created and then hangs out with these criminal drug dealers and gets manipulated to be a criminal. And then that happens for about an hour and a half.

[00:01:10] And Hugh Jackman gets his day in the Sun in the movie. And it was really a bummer. Ultimately, Chappy gets dropped off with this crew that you don’t give a shit about, played by bad actors from a band just watching them. You’re like, I want all of you to die because you’re all dicks. You never side with these people because these are criminals who are corrupting a youth. They beat it over your head like chappies, like a kid, Japanese like a kid. All right. Well, let’s just try to be an asshole and chappies, never an asshole. He just thinks that it’s normal to do some of this shit. And in that the movie does a really good job at making you see that this robot is sentient, being is actually being manipulated. And you feel for him. You’re like, oh, man, get out of that situation. Doesn’t change the fact that chappies sees this dude as his dad and the woman as his mom. And you’re, like, not happy, just leave them. I don’t like them. I don’t like them in the movie. I don’t like what they’re doing. I just the movie just feels worse with them in it. And even by the end of this movie, these shitheads are unrepentant for corrupting this child mine.

[00:02:05] That is the sentient being that is chapping. But you’re supposed to feel for them like, oh, man, I feel bad for you guys and all the trials you’re having right now. No, they’re just the lesser of two evils out there. It’s like a rival gang war. And these just happen to be shitheads that aren’t quite as bad as the other shitheads. The movie would have been better if Chappie was hanging out with his maker and he was getting his moral fiber from his maker and, you know, watching him and cartoons. But his maker would be like, Chappie, we have to be good. We have to not use violence because we have to be good people. You have to show us what it is to be human. It would have been a great message about humanity. Then things out there get worse and chappies like things are bad. But you got to fight it. You got to fight fire with fire. Sometimes it would have been like that scene in Man of Steel when swords like, you know, like the laser, the heat vision’s going towards the family. And Superman’s like either kill this guy or that family gets wiped out. And that was a moral dilemma. He was in. Chappie could have been in these moral dilemmas. It never really hit you because he’s never really conflicted.

[00:02:59] You just manipulate it until he was like, wait, that’s stupid. There’s not a lot of friction there because he wasn’t taught to be this good. And then he wants to protect people who are this good. But to do that, he kind of has to be less than what he was taught to be. He was taught to be an asshole. And he was like, well, no brainer. You can be better. All right, done. I mean, the last half hour of this movie was pretty exciting in the sense that Hugh Jackman gets his huge machine. That’s from Robocop one. He comes down, he has to fight chappie. That was cool. And all that doesn’t make up for the rest of the movie. You need everything to lead up to that, to bring relevance to that. You can’t just, like, have a boring ass movie that’s really choppy. There’s no real message and all the wasted potential in the world and have one action scene, have everyone be like, oh, it’s cool. Yeah. And I’m questioning it all. It’s it’s perfectly fine. Now, I love Sharlto Copley as Chappy. He’s the thing I loved. If Chappie could save this movie, he would. He’s lovable. You feel for him when he’s getting hurt. You want to slap him in the head and be like, dude, they’re playing you stop.

[00:03:50] You want to protect him. If the movie was going for that, that’s great. I’m just saying that should have been one element of the movie. This movie should have had more structure to it. I walked out of the movie just feeling like a movie about an artificial intelligence by Neill Blomkamp about this computer nerd with a huge heart who creates a robot with a huge heart in a shitty world who had a lot more to it. It could have had much more of those iron giant fields. So when chappies hanging out with characters, not only do you not like, but you just don’t care about for most of the movie, that’s a problem. In the end, Shappi, as a movie, you’re not going to remember it in T minus a couple of days. It already forgot. I got to update that picture. Pictures like four years old. I just don’t ever watch anymore. I need to get a watch or some chappie. Have you seen it? What did you think about it? I’m really interested to know this one where every comment below let me know. And as always, if you like what you see in here and you want to see more, click right here to see more.