Chappie

In the future, everything is shit. We know this. In this particular future, South Africa has deployed a robotic police force with cute antenna ears to curb rampant crime, but the designer of these 'Scouts' is more interested in perfecting their artificial intelligence than in the combat applications which bankroll their development. Perfecting his artificial consciousness program he steals a damaged robot to install it in, but is kidnapped by a particularly inept gang who quickly adapt from wanting a means to deactivate the robots while they commit crimes to having a robot of their own.

These guys are Yolandi and Ninja, aka rave-rap band
Die Antwoord. Their screen characters share their names, or at
least in Ninja's case his stage name. His real name is Watkin
Tudor Jones, which is fucking awesome, 

The robot (Sharlto Coopley) - soon named 'Chappie' - is effectively a child, and learns rapidly under the conflicting influences of programmer Deon (Dev Patel), surrogate mother Yolandi (Yolandi Visser) and her partner, gang leader Ninja (Watkin Tudor Jones). Unfortunately, Deon's rival at the company, Vincent (Hugh Jackman in an uncharacteristic jerk role) is out to destroy the Scout program to advance his own ED-209... I mean MOOSE combat drone, and the damage to his original body means that Chappie only has days to live anyway.

Taken on its own, Chappie is a decent enough film, but it suffers a little from comparison with Director Neil Blomkamp's earlier District 9, not because it isn't as good, but because it's kind of the same in a lot of ways, with its lost protagonist, urban warzone setting, a powerful gangster figure, and most notably a gung-ho militaristic antagonist. It is a distinct film, and in all honesty it would be easier to overlook the parallels if not for the great similarity in the landscape.

The film is built on solid performances, but suffers from a shortage of very likable characters. Yolandi and Ninja, and their cohort Amerika, are pitched somewhere between adorably eccentric and vicious killers, while Chappie himself walks the line between loveable Johnny 5 in Short Circuit and the hatefully overplayed Johnny 5 in Short Circuit 2. Actually, there's a lot of Short Circuit in here as well. In the case of the human characters, there is a deliberateness to this, as the film is less concerned with the nature of consciousness than with the impact that nurturing a being like Chappie has on the humans - even the apparently irredeemable jerkass Ninja - the process essentially being like teaching a child, but with the transformative steps writ large instead of almost invisible.

Chappie is a long way from being a perfect film, but it has a lot going for it, and compares well to the newer Robocop, of which it is a kind of mirror image. Man, this film is full of... parallels? Homages?