Oh, the promise of a new Neill Blombcamp movie. After flooring everyone with District 9, his follow up, Elysium, didn’t come together nearly as well.  Now Chappie is here and it must be said that it fails to completely deliver as well.

Blombcamp comes up with terrific sci-fi ideas and concepts. He’s a great director and his movies look absolutely amazing. Every dollar is seen on screen, the creature and special effects often look like they had to cost two or three times more than what they do. District 9 is currently the pinnacle of his movies because the story and concepts perfectly match. I’d go as far to say that it’s a perfect movie.

When you see the ads, Chappie looks like Robocop and Short Circuit came together. That’s a pretty true statement after watching it. Chappie is mainly about human consciousness. The thing that makes people, people. I think therefor I am, empathy, decision making.

In the not too distant future, a tech company makes security robots that are proving to be very successful in Johannesburg, South Africa. Just 100 units in the field have made massive reduction in crime and helped reduce the deaths of human officers. One of the lead scientists, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) wants to take it to the next level. Make true Artificial Intelligence. A robot that can think on its own and make decisions like a responsible adult human. Deon gets denied by his boss to test his new software on a damaged unit (scout #22) and steals the body to work on it alone. He gets hijacked by three desperate criminals and is forced to bring the unit online so they can use the robot for a major heist.

Wilson’s software works. The robot comes to life, the criminals and Wilson teach it. They name it Chappie and it learns at an incredible rate.

A lot of what works in Chappie is due to the amazing special effects. There’s very few instances where you don’t believe that this robot isn’t real. The illusion of a learning entity with a soul (?) walks and talks on screen with amazing detail. I liked a lot of the concepts of the movie. What it means to be human, the ethics of burgeoning technology. The never ending war on crime and the militarization of law enforcement. There’s a lot of really great character growth and interaction between Chappie and the main cast. Plus, the few action scenes are really good and that always makes me happy.

Now the problems. Much like Elysium, Chappie asks you to suspend your disbelief a lot. The movie takes place just a few years from present day so it’s basically happening right now and the tech capabilities on display is way beyond what we will see anytime soon. With a movie trying to be so grounded, this was hard to get over. I think this odd schism could have easily been solved by pushing the time of the movie a few decades into the future. I wondered why there was a massive Sony logo at the start of the movie and it becomes readily apparent when you see all the Sony hardware at use (it’s a Columbia Pictures flick too). A stack of Playstation 4’s are used in a pivotal scene (which drives the rest of the movie) that’s pretty hard to swallow. Oh, and Hugh Jackman’s hair is atrocious to the point of distraction.

Then there are the goofy convenience moments that let the movie progress. The scouts are given firmware updates with a “guardian key.” This USB stick is integral to the safety protocols of the robot police force and Deon just takes it without anyone noticing or caring for a shocking amount of time (he’s only warned that he’ll be tattled on to his boss at about day 4). When things go crazy and it looks like Deon has gone rogue, his credentials to the office and labs is never revoked so he’s free to move about easily. He steals all sorts of stuff time after time and no one notices. I don’t think it’s possible for a weapons manufacturer to have less security than what we see at Tetravaal.

Plus the movie is rated R for cursing and violence. I think the cursing is rather necessary (and think it’s dumb for a movie to be rated R for the F word), but the violence/gore goes needlessly over the top. One guy gets ripped apart for no good reason. Rather limits who could see this movie (problem still is that if the gore was taken out, the cursing would still earn a R rating).

At the end, I liked Chappie quite a bit (I really like the heart it has), but I’m disappointed it doesn’t get near the quality and joy of District 9. There’s just too many “really?” moments that hold the movie back. I’d put it over Elysium without hesitation, but I think a few more passes on the script could have made Chappie a sci-fi classic.