Chappie
Dir. Neill Blomkamp
Following his innovative, action-packed sci-fi apartheid-metaphor movie District 9, Neill Blomkamp disappointed many of us last summer with the lackluster Elysium, a film with an amazing premise, that the rich had fled the planet for a Halo-like spacecraft while the poor stayed on Earth, but was a mess on execution. Chappie marks yet another return to this kind of heavy sci-fi, "slum world" of Blomkamp's, and to be honest I was more expecting a repeat disappointment like Elysium. But despite its status among other critics, I actually ended up loving this movie. It's overloaded with themes (ideas about consciousness, the soul, survival, ego, business, etc), has a number of scenes that stretch believability, and some might be turned off by its close relation to other films (namely Robocop), but none of those things took away from the heart of story for me - the actual titular robot, Chappie.
