Chappie was a curious film from a science fiction perspective. Again this is set in South Africa like other Blomkamp films like District 9 [imdb] and so has such great South African-English accents running through out.
Some of the characters did seem to be a bit vague and could have been fleshed out a little more.
An official poster for the movie.
Chappie is the name of the law enforcement robot and has a certain kind of charm though. This did remind me a bit of “number 5 is alive" from the 1986 movie Short Circuit [imdb] to some extent.
I was a bit disappointed with the way the AI was interpreted here as being just a kind of magical computer program done by a lone computer programmer on what seemed to be a home computer set up. The ability to transfer consciousness from human to machine also seemed a bit far fetched.
The antagonist robot (Moose) also seemed really unjustified , especially the apparent mind scanner needed to control was a a bit redundant given it’s limited capacity to begin with. I mean most people know remote drones run by the military just rely on joysticks and video systems. So why does it need a special brain reading helmet device?
But this film seems to be more about the concept of abandoned children, as represented by Chappie, and how they are treated by society.
The implication at the end of the movie is extraordinarily profound really and implies that if in the next movie in this film universe, there would be a world entirely occupied by robots with human consciousness.
Watched as an iTunes 1080p download via Apple TV . The sound and vision quality was surprisingly good.