Chappie

Chappie
Dir. Neill Blomkamp

2.5 out of 5

It takes a village to raise an automaton.  That's the most cogent takeaway from the sci-fi thriller Chappie, in which the architect (Dev Patel) of Johannesburg, South Africa's robotic police force uses a decommissioned machine to produce a sentient form of artificial intelligence.  But when the little guy, childlike and helpless, falls into the hands of some desperate street thugs, his development oscillates between the warm, compassionate wonderment supplied by his surrogate mother (who impulsively dubs him "Chappie") and his criminal exploitation at the hands of his father figure - played respectively by South African rappers Yolandi Visser and Ninja, better known as Die Antwoord.  Then there is the harsh, violent reality of Chappie's environment, where a stable urban society exists adjacent to a quasi-Mad Max wasteland, characteristic of director Neill Blomkamp's consistent predictions of a future starkly divided between the haves and have-nots.

Chappie, at its core, is not so different from Boyhood - if Boyhood also featured a beefed-up version of the ED-209 from RoboCop controlled by the thoughts of an ex-military hardass (Hugh Jackman).  The film's coming-of-age element maintains a critical emotional through-line within Blomkamp's loud, hyper-stimulated action aesthetic.  The tenderness and cute humor of Chappie himself - animated via the vocal and "poor man's motion capture" performance of Sharlto Copley - cuts through the static of an energetic but often hopelessly cluttered script.  Co-writers and real-life partners Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell have crammed enough ideas and subplots for multiple movies into Chappie, resulting in a film that feels disjointed for its first two-thirds, then hopelessly rushed once it's time to tie all the threads together.

But some of those threads, taken individually, can be quite intriguing.  Much like Ninja is obsessed with teaching Chappie all about the hard knocks of life in the slums - and the exaggerated macho hardness that's required to endure them - Blomkamp is preoccupied with the idea of authenticity expressed as coolness.  He's mashing up the worlds of Coachella and SXSW, alternating between the profanely-tagged abandoned rave site that is the criminals' hideout and the sleek, supermodern technocracy where Patel's and Jackman's characters are rivals jockeying for position in the pecking order of scientific and cultural innovation.  In the end, Chappie's own cinematic parentage is an amalgamation of Blomkamp's two previous films, Elysium and District 9; it's both a hopelessly confusing crackpot mess and a visually stunning work of ambitious social import.

Elysium

Elysium (2013)
Dir. Neill Blomkamp

2.5 out of 5

Elysium is the rare mainstream science fiction movie that actually has an agenda or three - not surprising, considering it's written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, whose excellent debut District 9 distilled decades' worth of racial politics into a gripping narrative about displaced E.T.s and the paternal abuse of the bureaucracy tasked with protecting them.  No, the most shocking thing about Elysium is that the bad guys score the most cogent points.  "I always wanted a wife" muses the film's most despicable baddie, a gleefully sadistic war criminal played by Sharlto Copley; it's the clearest statement of purpose in this admirable but jumbled sophomore thesis on social inequity and the benign neglect of the working classes.  Full of ham-fisted talking points delivered via clunky dialogue, it's a movie that often seems to be speaking at, not to, its audience.

Matt Damon stars as the questionably-named Max Da Costa, a resident of Los Angeles in the 22nd century, when the entire surface of the Earth is one big polluted, crime-ridden ghetto.  Those with means live on Elysium, an orbiting space station teeming with parks, robot servants, and magical MRI machines that can heal just about any physical aliment in the time it takes to order a coffee.  After Max is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation at work, he joins a group of criminals who use him as a vessel to steal valuable information from the brain of a one-dimensional corporate scalawag played by William Fitchner in exchange for a one-way ticket to the bourgeois paradise.  Unfortunately for Max’s travel plans, the mental download includes plans for a political coup headed by Elysium's scheming defense secretary (Jodie Foster), who will use any extralegal means to secure the data residing in his head.

Clearly, a lot of time and effort went into creating the world of Elysium.  From the literal distancing of the haves and the have-nots to the gradual merging of man and machine (Max's sacrifice to the cause includes having a powered exoskeleton fused onto his body), the forward-thinking Blomkamp attempts to unpack several movies’ worth of intriguing ideas - too many ideas, in fact, meaning that few of them receive a proper explanation.   The action - admittedly exciting in a janky, unpredictable way - overwhelms the message in the film’s second half, but by then the narrative itself has become so confused that a retreat to broad storytelling convention is a respite.  Despite its heady aspirations, Elysium is equal parts stentorian lecture and brainless summer blockbuster, a murky approximation of a trenchant allegory that at least speaks powerfully through its visuals, if not its lackluster drama.