After District 9 and Elysium, Neill Blomkamp split opinion with Chappie – a sci-fi film that richly deserves a second look.
Aside from the fusion of biology and technology, Neill Blomkamp’s films are quite obsessed with parenthood. The bond between parent and child is clear with Christopher Johnson and his son in District 9, how Max cares for Frey’s girl in Elysium, is central to the supernatural problem within Demonic to come, and a key factor in the protagonist’s journey during Gran Turismo. Chappie, however, is the film where Blomkamp most significantly plays with such a bond.
In the piece on District 9, I mused as to whether Blomkamp, beneath the macho bluster of many characters he writes and the dystopian landscapes he presents, is secretly a bit in love with Amblin and the work of directors such as Steven Spielberg or Robert Zemeckis. Chappie is where this really becomes apparent to me. His film about a programmed robot police officer who ends up becoming the test subject for artificial consciousness by a plucky young scientist, only to be ‘raised’ by a group of punky, wannabe gangster thieves, has real shades of the distinctly American family films he potentially grew up watching in the 1980s.
The difference is that Chappie has an edge based on Blomkamp’s own character and personal history, growing up in a darker, morally ambiguous South Africa. After his sojourn into the Hollywood ecosystem with the relatively unsuccessful Elysium, he goes back to Johannesburg with Chappie, back to Sharlto Copley in the lead (albeit performance captured), back to his roots. Given the shady corporation at the heart of the film is called TetraVaal, Blomkamp even references one of his earlier short films and nods to District 9, where the name was used. Chappie feels like District9’s slightly softer little brother. They could be set in the same universe.
Chappie as a design was born from his short Tetra Vaal, and subsequently developed over other short films, Tempbot in 2005 and the advertisement Yellow in 2006, all before his proof of concept that led to District 9, which contained robotic designs and in Elysium, we see a version of robot cops in his 22nd century landscape. All roads, it seems, were leading ultimately to Chappie. Perhaps that is why it feels the most personal of Blomkamp’s films to date, maybe even the one he wanted to develop the most.
After how staid parts of Elysium were, as Blomkamp worked to fit within a Hollywood box, he feels a bit more off the leash with Chappie. More of that dark humour visible in District 9 exists here, as does the element of human connection with the ‘alien’, in this case the consciousness within Chappie which renders him as an impressionable child. This allows Blomkamp and wife Terri Tatchell’s script to tease out more humour, as Chappie learns life skills from ‘roadmen’; played by rap performers Die Antwoord (in a sense playing narrative versions of themselves), in direct contrast to his ‘maker’, Dev Patel’s Deon, who wants to instil in Chappie a sense of fair play and decorum.
Class is again involved here. Deon does initially look down his nose at Ninja (initially intended to play Max in Elysium) and Yolandi, who spray Chappie with graffiti, teach him gangster patois, and begin teaching him street language and robbery skills. They do manipulate him. Yet Yolandi in particular genuinely cares for him like a son. There is a Short Circuit-style sweetness to their dynamic as Blomkamp works to filter the traditional ‘nuclear family’ through the unusual prism of Die Antwoord. The result is offbeat, riven with punk attitude and deliberately unusual.
Interestingly, Blomkamp discusses how he still wanted the film to have an Americanised sensibility, stripping away more of the deliberate South African affectations of his first film. In that sense, Chappie is a hybrid of styles between District 9 and Elysium. He even borrows Jose Pablo Cantillo from the latter to be part of Ninja and Yolandi’s crew. He introduces Sigourney Weaver as the corporate face of TetraVaal, and Hugh Jackman as villain Vincent Moore, a weapons developer working on a neurally controlled robot platform the ‘Moose’, as opposed to Deon’s genuine AI consciousness. He seeks to ground Chappie in his own native quirks while making it accessible to a wider audience.
Jackman plays an interesting character, with Vincent representing a dying breed. He seeks to use advanced technology in weapons applications (he would have fit well in District 9’s MNU) but seeks human control. He believes Deon’s AI is a fool’s errand. It’s why Chappie becomes a direct threat to the success of his own program, as does Deon. “He’s the key to the revolution. A machine that can feel and think. He can outsmart the enemy and free us all.”
This isn’t how Vincent thinks. He sees danger. Jackman imbues him with a deliberate masculine toxicity (see how he ‘jovially’ bullies the nerdy Deon in the office) which tracks with a man who would want to yield weapons, rather than put his faith in one. “If we control the robots, we control the people,” he declares.
Of further interest is how Blomkamp initially establishes Chappie with a shelf-life. His battery, fused into his core, has only five days of life left to it. This allows the director to play with issues of death around Chappie’s zest for life, and whether artificial life can truly die. Given Deon’s ultimate choice to upload his consciousness to a machine (transforming intentionally much as Wikus in District 9 did unintentionally), Blomkamp’s film becomes something of an argument for transhumanism, before these ideas had been popularised by writers such as Yuval Noah Harari or Russell T Davies’ BBC series Years And Years.
Blomkamp had previously commented, in a 2015 interview with Collider, how he believed artificial intelligence would be key to humanity’s survival, but in making Chappie he seems to have experienced an epiphany:
I’m not actually completely sure that humans are going to be capable of giving birth to AI in the way that films fictionalize it. So, you have weak artificial intelligence, which is a robot or a computer system that follows a list of protocols and it’s like yes/no answers that can be as complex as you want, and then you have strong AI, which is basically like a human, like something that can think up a thought that’s never been thought up or paint a painting or write a poem. In the realm of strong AI or in the realm of human consciousness, I think that it’s been something that troubles humans or forces us to look at it over and over for millennia, or as long as we’ve really been conscious, because there is no answer. There is no explanation for us, even for a one percent grip to hold on to. So we just don’t know why we’re here, we don’t know how consciousness is created and we don’t know the nature of consciousness, whether it becomes a spiritual and philosophical discussion or whether it’s simply running electrical currents through synapses and it leads to consciousness. I think it isn’t that, by the way.
These conversations, for me, place Chappie a little ahead of its time. Back in the mid-2010s, conversations about AI simply weren’t as prevalent or pressing as they are now. It was a sci-fi concept, an ephemeral future possibility. Now, it’s becoming a daily fact of life, and Blomkamp suggests we have no concept of what that means, from a literal or ontological perspective. The sweetness of Chappie, his desire to learn and remain fixed to an ethical code, is where we see the hope always lurking under the filmmaker’s darker ideas. Chappie’s artificial consciousness has an innocence.
Compare this to depictions in recent years, be it Rehoboam mapping out humanity’s end in Westworld or the Entity’s machinations in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. People just didn’t get it. I’m not still not convinced they do.
Critical notices for Chappie remain way lower than is fair. Blomkamp remains personally wounded about Chappie to this day (he cut short a recent Uproxx interview after the interviewer attempted to discuss his past perceived failures). He intended Chappie as the beginning of a trilogy that never came to pass.
He spoke to Den of Geek after the fact about Chappie’s critical response:
We could go on for hours about Chappie and where it sits. But it definitely hurt several parts of my career, I think. Those are all secondary to just the repositioning myself as an artist and just thinking about that. I mean, Elysium, I didn’t feel that way. I feel like Elysium wasn’t actually that good. That’s the difference. I feel like I got it right with Chappie, and then when the audience turns on you, that puts you in a different place.
Chappie might be the film Blomkamp loves the most, even if it can’t quite best District 9, and it deserves reappreciation and rediscovery. It did, however, set him on a path back toward Hollywood, and in the direction of one of cinema’s most adored franchises. All in pursuit of a career-making project that would wound him even more than Chappie.
