Why Ideation Trumps Storytelling in Chappie

CHAPPiE moves beyond ignorance into an almost visible hatred on its audience, and then suddenly cloys for solidarity when the sub-sub-sub-villain Hugh Jackman (plugged into a VR headset combo with moving monitors that reads to even a novice as a hilariously incompatible system) activates an obvious and borderline familiar RoboCop nemesis to hunt CHAPPiE and his criminal cohorts down.

Five minutes before this, CHAPPiE bursts into the factory that created him and hunts Hugh Jackman for sport, only to maim him as a hilarious lesson. Once the, for lack of a better term, Mini-Boss robot activates, we enter a five minute period that hints at the manic future-violence of District 9’s third Act, and bails after one memorable death and two video game-y weapon variations. Hugh and (presumed) mega-Villain Sigourney Weaver are almost immediately forgotten, as the last fifteen minutes of the film concern an all-capital L Laughable exploration of both existentialism and, more explicitly, The Singularity. Without actually spoiling anything, except my overwhelming disgust, these last fifteen render all deaths, loss and sacrifice within the film’s structure COMPLETELY invalid, and at one point, even double down on the idea that magic technology can save more magic technology.

What the filmmaker almost certainly intended was to jumpstart some discussion over immortality, neural replication and the omnipresent threat of digitizing humanity against a backdrop that suggested, apolitically, that some parts of the world are either already fully invested in this transition or, more horrifically, bound to be the test subjects for a brave new world. Instead, the film that was so heavily layered in thematic relations bails at the very last moment, and never replaces its intellectual shortcoming with any sort of action blitz that would otherwise distract us from the unsolvable horror show presented.

By the time credits roll, more than half the remaining namable cast has been digitized into permanent robot form, with no questions or doubt or open-ended concern over this new interpretation of existence. This isn’t a complicated or even a bad way of handling the story/characters presented; it’s incomprehensible. It exists in direct opposition to every opportunity we spent seventy minutes orchestrating. It is a resolution that negates the fact you even watched a movie. It is, quite simply, unacceptable.

So this Blomkamp journey has led many to assume that the production art leak, and it’s inevitable social push leading to a gig, was a shrewdly designed marketing scheme to distract from the inevitable critical disappointment in CHAPPiE, and instead rally us behind the idea the mind behind the beloved District 9 would be not only continuing the spirit of a money-printing franchise, but also negating the existence of its lesser entries. In the wake of said coverage, there’s been a lot of quotes taken from Blomkamp that reveal him to be an “ideas first” man, who would almost prefer to not direct in the future. Having suffered the thinkpieces already written on the subject, in conjunction with a movie so bad I worried our entire theater would self-harm, I understand why the critical world is writing Blomkamp off. But I’m not.

Every part of this story looks like the traditional Hollywood Fear Model. An outsider made something honest and cool with no oversight, and everyone got in line to throw money at the next comparable idea. Elysium and CHAPPiE were those starting point ideas, but now that they’re burned through, Blomkamp has the opportunity to do both a wholly original IP which builds on all he’s learned in the last five years, but he’s also done the impossible and endeared the HATEFUL INTERNET toward seeing what he can inject into the Alien franchise. While this robot cop nonsense film is unbearably, unacceptably, undeniably awful, the potential to believe that this is the last shred of a studio system nightmare is also plausible. The deft mastery of tone, timing, and awe displayed in District 9 cannot be the product of sheer chance. Let’s all agree this robotic footnote never happened, and gauge the creator by his new flagship, instead of the take-home assignments.