Chappie

Violent aggravating hierarchical threats competitively embark in Neill Blomkamp's volatile Chappie, as a success story attempts to enhance his marketability through the creation of something beautiful, through the rearing, of robotic young.

It's not happenin'.

His child is quickly hijacked and then alternatively reared by desperate criminals intent on paying off 20 million in debt.

Instead of delicately nurturing his nascent creativity, Ninja (Ninja) prefers to ignite a trial-by-fire, consequently introducing him to a band of troubled youths, who then proceed to throw rocks at him and actually light him on fire.

The youth think he's a police robot, because his creator, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), uploaded a humanesque consciousness into a broken down police robot, a part of a robotic police force he also created, young Chappie (Sharlto Copley), who remains unaware of these facts, and defencelessly terrified.

He does learn from his experiences though.

Which leads to a memorable science-fiction comedy.

The script's multifaceted (written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell), consisting of criminal and professional diversifications which populate the film with myriad characters at different socioeconomic levels, each of them given plenty of screen time to develop, as they pursue various goals before meeting for a ludicrous showdown in the end.

Solid science-fiction/action series are intertextually woven in, Robocop being the most obvious, but Chappie also acknowledges Die Hard, The Terminator, Predator, Alien, and Transcendence to name a few.

Ninja says, "Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!," at one point.

Chappie fires at the Moose in the same way Sarah Connor fires at the T-1000 in the final moments of Terminator 2.

When the hunt is on, movements are robotically tracked as if a Predator is stalking prey.

It's co-starring Sigourney Weaver (Michelle Bradley).

And human consciousnesses are uploaded to computers like in Transcendence. 

Transcendence wasn't so solid.

As Chappie comes of age in less than a week, a naive innocent caregiving sense of blossoming chaotic youth awkwardly contrasts the social horror show, the dynamics of which are simultaneously shocking and instructive.

The script has all of these elements but it still fails to impress on some fronts.

There are several characters given the chance to develop but they never really move past their first impressions, apart from Ninja, Chappie, and Yolandi (Yolandi Visser), who do change a bit.

And Deon buys a gun.

Ninja easily goes about acquiring the 20 million he needs to pay off Hippo (Brandon Auret), there's no sense that something could go wrong.

The thugs escape the police near the beginning even though it seems obvious they'll be captured.

Catch 'em. Let 'em break out. Make their escape seem plausible.

Cars are easily stolen and it seems like there's no possibility the thieves could be caught.

All this with a robotic police force patrolling the streets.

It's like hardwired explosive emancipated desperate largesse, highly structured to joyously refute the logical, with a thin layer of predictable rationality sensationally stitching things together.

It's campy.

So campy.

Sort of awful.

But still a must see.

You get the sense that there aren't a lot of public funds available to level things out a bit in Johannesburg, from Chappie.

The people on the bottom have no institutional means of moving up and earning a respectable living.

And the people on top have no means of preventing them from excelling at crime.

And are just as ruthless at pursuing their own respectable livings.

Nice to see fallible robot cops. I for one would prefer not to see robots in uniform.

It's possible that the lack of character development in the film directly relates to Blomkamp's brutal depiction of life in Johannesburg, meaning that there's only one dominating personality available, and if you don't embrace it, you won't survive.

Dog eat dog.

Unless you're brilliant like Deon.

Who ends up becoming a robot.

Because he disobeyed his weapons manufacturing boss.

Social safety net people. Public funds.

It's also possible that they partied way too hard while making this film.

Who knows!

Elysium

Universal healthcare, workplace health and safety initiatives, and true love are spatially vindicated in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium, wherein the unsympathetic inprickacies of a totalitarian state create an orderly robotic despotic exactitude whose overbearing calculations encourage widespread temporal discontent.

A colony for the wealthiest has been created in space on a station known as Elysium, whose cloistered citizens enjoy incomparable privilege and general legal impunity.

On Elysium, everything is relatively perfect, advanced technologies guaranteeing ideal health and well-being, pools, mansions, extravagance, for all.

For the 99.9% still living on an overpopulated underfunded desolate and impoverished planet Earth, in the year 2154, the law is applied authoritatively and immediately, statistical automatons having replaced the potentially understanding, the struggling worker left with no harmless option but to silently obey.

But even though Elysium possesses enormous technological and financial superiority, Earth's population is too large to ubiquitously suppress, and a group of freedom fighters, whose poverty and encumbering lack of resources necessitates a frugal expedient expensive quid pro quo, covertly flourish in the rubble, using their brilliant hands-on luminosities, to keep a faint degree of hope alive.

Extremes abound.

With characterless villains.

Their attempts to degrade the system even further accidentally nourish an individualistic inductively altruistic messianic thrust, whose attempts to reform were systematically rebuked.

Emphasizing an egalitarian redistribution of resources, and citizenship and advanced healthcare options, for all, Elysium is quite the blockbuster, medically administering a sensationally practical ethical solvency.

Myriad sociopolitical dynamics are built into the script.

Which welds the human factor to the heart of structural change.

District 9

What happens when a spaceship full of aliens possessing highly advanced military technology parks itself over a major city and waits for first contact? In Neill Blomkamp's District 9, those aliens are transferred from their ship to a segregated section of town, fenced off from the strictly human, and left to struggle while the military tries to find a way to harness their secrets. Seen as an economic burden, a foreign intrusion, and a quizzical curiosity, these aliens make ends meet with the limited resources left at their disposal, scraping by a meagre living while holding on to their coveted technologies. Enter Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a hapless, enthusiastic, South African citizen, who is accidentally sprayed by a clandestine fuel while serving a couple of aliens their eviction notice. This fuel transforms his body into a human/alien hybrid, extremely sick yet capable of firing extraterrestrial weaponry. None to happy regarding his life threatening transformations, Wikus escapes the authorities and flees to the only place he can hide, the alien's pseudo-encampment. There he reencounters the fuel's creator and the two launch a preposterously poignant plan to save both their lives.

District 9 examines racism, technological progress, media manipulation, militaristic modifications, and misfortunate messianic mollifications in a fictionally scientific fashion. The film's intellectually deep but solidly entertaining, bridging the gap between esoteric modes of artistic expression and smash-em up mass marketed 'action' flicks. Bit over-the-top, vicious, and sensationally subtle, District 9 still focuses on contemporary racio-cultural issues, productively pointing out that these problems persist. It's a shame that these narratives often boil down to who has the bigger gun, but, unfortunately, this is a cultural code that has been heuristically hard-wired, a potential fact, which, if I'm not mistaken, Blomkamp is ironically deconstructing (banging his head against the wall) by using de Merwe as his hero.