Review of Chappie (2015) by Stefano L — 02 Dec 2015

Neil Blomkamp returns, as already done with District 9, on a short movie he directed 10 years ago and builds a 2h sci-fi film with some feature very similar to D9 (part mockumentary, human entity vs other kinds of entities, "nowadays" sci-fi instead of futuristic sci-fi), that at the beginning made me think that everything was going to be as extraordinary as its predecessors.

But if you have a great base-idea (like how far can go artificial intelligence before reaching the point of no return) and you base the entire story on the characters and not on the idea, and the characters are totally poor, well, you can't go too far.

Especially when it's not event clear who are the good people or the bad people, and the director at one point "kills" one of the people you think are bad urgeing you to grief for it, we surely have a problem.

So, that's the main problem with "Chappie". Could have been great, but it's a soul-less movie. Has a magnificent background but a terrible development. Surely a wasted chance for Blomkamp to increase his fame as one of the young most interesting sci-fi makers in the world.