Movie Review: CHAPPiE

As it turns out, I'm pretty sure 2015 may end up being the year of "Robots doing what they shouldn't" on film - with movies like Ex Machina and Avengers: Age of Ultron around the corner, I started my year of robot films (not actually a planned thing, just sort of turned out that way) with Neill Blomkamp's CHAPPiE.

To be fair, let's begin by saying that a story about a robot gaining sentience is something I'm pretty familiar with: with all of your Short Circuits, Not Quite Humans, WALL-E's and let's not forget Star Trek: The Next Generation touching on fairly similar ground.

So going into the film, I'm looking for something new, perhaps a little different, and something that gets me caring about the characters.

CHAPPiE actually does a pretty good job at this: the robot is one of the neatest visuals I've seen in a long time and actually had me questioning "how did they do that?" more than once.  As CHAPPiE begins his story at a small child's level of intelligence and awareness, the film allows the viewer to quickly connect with the character, and finally the movie did something I wasn't quite expecting.

It focused an awful lot on how people (regular joes likes you and me) may react if suddenly something genuinely new showed up, like say, artificial intelligence.  

The picture may not necessarily be the most flattering to us, but it did make for an intriguing film.

Although some of the plot points seemed a little strange to me, I did find the film was well worth seeing and for the effects alone a big screen viewing may be the best way.

Genre Character of the Week: David 8

Last weekend I went to check out the new film Prometheus with my mother, brother, youngest daughter and BFF.  The movie is a prequel to the 1979 Horror/Science Fiction classic, Alien. In structure it was not unlike last years The Thing, in that it wanted to be a frightening film on its own, as well as a set up for the events of the earlier film (Sorry to get a little film-nerdy here, but there’s an interested connection between the two films – The Thing (1982) director John Carpenter and Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon went to film school together and both dreamed of remaking the classic Howard Hawkes 1951 film The Thing from Another Worldand although they went their separate ways before they could do it together, both Alien andThe Thing are very heavily influenced by the earlier film).  Although Prometheus was not a perfect film, it did introduce me to this week’s genre character, David 8.

Played by actor Michael Fassbender, David 8 is an android created by Weyland Industries, which (mild spoiler of Alien, Aliens, Alien3, and Alien Resurrection) means that he should be carefully watched, as androids in these films tend to range from strangely helpful to brutally homicidal.  What I liked best about the character was his very near-human status.  By this I mean that he came across as almost a perfect human being, but sat on just the other side of creepy the whole way through.  Some of this I comes from the script and direction, but honestly it was the acting that blew me away.  For a character that seems very helpful, he’s just got this strange undercurrent of “other” that gave me a serious case of the creeps.

This Is why I’m not a big fan of robots in film– from The Terminator to Data (and no, I haven’t seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I did see the end of one where he KILLS HIS OWN BROTHER!!! – whoops – mild spoiler again - right after the brother says “I love you”), I mean sure, there are some nice robots in film (Terminator 2, WALL-E, That busted up thing from The Black Hole), but generally if you’ve introduced robots into your SF story it’s to have them programmed to kill, or to break their kind programming and kill (I don’t know about you, but for me the military was totally in the right in trying to track down and destroy the laser-armed killbot known as Johnny 5 in Short Circuit).

Wait a second, where was I?  Right – David 8, creepy performance, and also the reason I won’t be buying a Roomba anytime soon.