Video review: "Chappie"

It’s fairly common for a young filmmaker to have an incredible debut film and then stumble in subsequent outings. Perhaps there’s a lot of pressure on them to replicate their early success. Often they recover with better movies.

But then there are others who keep cranking out underwhelming films, one after another. How long does it go before you ask, “Did they only have one good movie in them?”

I’m starting to ask that about Neill Blomkamp, the writer/director of the terrific “District 9,” in which alien refugees settle on Earth and become second-class citizens. He followed that up with the confusing “Elysium,” and now the tonally all-over-the-place “Chappie.” It’s the story of a robot that develops sentience, and gets ill-used by the humans around him.

Sharlto Copley provides the voice and motion capture for Chappie, a police robot in a future South Africa where society is divided between the haves and the have-less. It’s a wonderful creation, lacking traditional eyes but with insect-like antennae. Chappie is child-like and hesitant, but quickly begins to emulate the personalities he encounters -- for ill or good.

Dev Patel plays the benevolent scientist who creates Chappie and mentors him. Hugh Jackman is a hot-tempered rival who wants to see him turned into junk and replaced with his own lumbering war machine.

Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser -- a real-life rap music duo whose names and identities overlap with those of their characters -- are a pair of low-life criminals who sort of adopt Chappie in to their little outlaw family. Soon the robot is wearing gold chains, carrying a gun and strutting around like a gangsta.

Weird, occasionally touching, “Chappie” may represent Blomkamp’s last chance.

He seems to have intriguing ideas about how technology tends to alienate humans from one another. But he needs a coherent story to build around those themes, and the last two times out of the gate he’s lacked that.

The bonus features are pretty good, though you’ll have to splurge for the Blu-ray edition to get them. The DVD comes only with a single featurette, an interview with the three main actors.

The blu-ray contains eight more featurettes covering various aspects of the production, including casting, visual effects, real-life robotics and so on. There’s also an alternate ending, one extended scene and a photo gallery.

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Review: "Chappie"

I'm not going to write a full "Chappie" review, because I don't have time and the Yap duties are in Nick Rogers's capable hands. But a few thoughts.

It's a movie of profound inventiveness and profound silliness. The Chappie character, a childlike robot voiced and motion-captured by Sharlto Copley, is a tremendous creation. But just as he gets ill-used by the humans around him, so too does writer/director Neill Blomkamp take Chappie's journey to places that are ridiculous, with some where-does-the-soul-reside type of musings near the end that are laugh-out-loud awful.

Some weird secondary characters that distract and discombobulate the story. Start with Hugh Jackman as a robotics engineer who, for some reason, wears shorts, a mullet and a gun amidst his suited, nerdy colleagues. He's jealous because his ED-209 ripoff got overlooked in favor of the Chappie-style police droids.

Then there's the bizarre duo of Ninja and Yolandi, a real South African rap duo who got cast in the the movie as themselves. With their weird haircuts, tats and chirpy Afrikaans accents, they're like a pair of replicants who wandered in from "Blade Runner" after a stop in the white ghetto to pick up some cultural swag.

Bizarre, occasionally touching, a humanist story that gets hijacked by an action flick. After the brilliant debut of "District 9," Blomkamp is 0-for-2.

Video review: "Elysium"

“Elysium” was one of my personal biggest disappointments of 2013. Along with “Pacific Rim,” it was one of the two summer films I had alighted upon as holding the most potential for thrills. Alas, while “Rim” soared as high as expectations, “Elysium” was a clanky, clunky mess.

Set in the year 2154, “Elysium” imagines a world in which all the rich people have departed the planet to float serenely in a grand space station where they make their home. There everyone is happy and healthy, due in large part to the amazing medical beds everyone has in their houses that can instantly cure any sickness or heal every wound.

Down on Earth it’s a different story: it’s overcrowded, environmentally fouled, crime is rampant and healthcare elusive. Needless to say, the downtrodden are very eager to get up to Elysium to make use of these magic cure boxes, so illegal immigration is a big problem for the richies.

Matt Damon is a worker drone who accidentally gets irradiated and only has five days to live. Outfitted with a powerful exo-skeleton by some criminal types, he agrees to do a dirty job in exchange for a trip to Elysium. But things grow more complicated when he gets caught up in a political plot involving the conniving defense minister (Jodie Foster). She sics her fearsome pet mercenary (Sharlto Copley) on him, and the latter half of the film essentially becomes one long chase scene.

The action sequences are engaging enough in their own right, but the attempt to continually draw parallels with our own time are rather blatant, not to mention inept. If those privileged folks have so many of the miraculous medical devices, why wouldn’t they install a few planet-side – if for no other reason, to address their problem with infiltrators?

Writer/director Neill Blomkamp (“District 9”) comes up with some terrifically original ideas. But “Elysium” bogs down in boneheaded plotting and political posturing.

Bonus features are aren’t bad, though they tend to focus more on the nuts-and-bolts of filming a big-budget science fiction film than the creative process.

The DVD contains just two featurettes, one focusing on assembling the cast and crew, and the other on designing the utopian space station. Go for the Blu-ray set and you get three more featurettes on the technology and visual effects to depict the distant future. You also get an extended scene and “The Journey to Elysium,” a video diary covering the pre-production, film shoot and post-production processes.

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Review: "Elysium"

"Elysium" isn't an awful movie, but it could've been a really good one. Its high potential only seems to underscore its failings.

It's a politically-themed science fiction drama about a dystopian future where the divide between the haves and the have-nots has quite literally grown into an impenetrable chasm between two worlds, with the elite floating serenely above the Earth's surface in a massive eponymous space station. The political stuff is obvious but effective, and seen as a straight-ahead chase picture it's quite engaging for stretches.

Its problems arise from a combination of heavy-handedness and bone-headedness. Writer/director Neill Blomkamp, who made the wildly original "District 9" a few years ago, asks us to invest in a story premise that makes absolutely no sense, no matter how you turn it around to peer at it. He would have us believe that the world's rich and powerful have lost every trace of humanity, even to the point of condemning billions of people to die when they could easily save them with little effort.

Furthermore, they would stubbornly hold onto this life-saving technology even if sharing it could solve all of the problems on their little slice of utopia, too. So they're both selfish and stupid.

In the year 2154, the planet has become one big garbage dump filled with disease, violence and overcrowding. Max DeCosta is a born troublemaker, a legendary car thief now trying to go straight as a factory worker that builds the robots that brutally enforce law and order. We get to see just how brutal in the opening minutes, when Max has his arm viciously broken by a robot cop for no reason while he's on his way to work.

With his boyish, wholesome looks, Matt Damon is a bit unconvincing as a sarcastic badass. Even with a shaved head and multitude of tattoos and scars, he still looks like a choir boy wearing his Halloween get-up. As near as we can determine through flashbacks to his childhood, Max's only dream in life has been to get to Elysium, since it represents something more than his squalid little life.

After an industrial accident at his plant leaves him irradiated with only five days to live, Max's urgency to reach Elysium grows urgent. That's because there they have these miraculous medical beds that can instantly heal all injuries and cure all wounds. Unless Max gets to one of these Magic Cure Boxes, he'll die.

But the rich and haughty do not like the downtrodden to use their Magic Cure Boxes because ... well, we're not really sure what their objection is. They're so common on Elysium that every house and public building has one. The residents use them constantly, not only to heal themselves but to keep their (almost entirely Caucasian) flesh looking young -- even cosmetic alterations like hair and eye color, and little scar designs they seem to favor.

Meanwhile down on Earth, deadly disease and injury still reign, so it doesn't take a whole lot of guessing to deduce the people would like to get themselves up to Elysium and hop inside one of the Magic Cure Boxes for what ails them. The steely Secretary of Defense Delacourt (Jodie Foster) shoots down as many incoming shuttles as she can, but still many "illegal immigrants" get through. (Subtle enough for you?)

Max strikes a deal with Spider (Wagner Moura), a hacker/crime boss, to do a job for him in exchange for a trip to Elysium. To help him survive his radiation sickness and be more effective in combat, he's outfitted with a clunky exoskeleton that's literally screwed into his body, making him fearsomely strong. He's even got a little TV screen and computer on the back of his head for mining "brain data."

They're supposed to kidnap a highly-placed Elysium executive (William Fichtner) who's on Earth for business, and tap his brain for financial data. Little do they know he and Delacourt have hatched a plan to stage a coup of Elysium by rebooting their entire computer system, and that rebel code gets zapped into Max's brain, too.

The rest of the movie plays out as one big long chase, as Max attempts to get a ride to Elysium while being hunted by Delacourt's hand-picked operative, a cackling bad guy named Kruger (Sharlto Copley). We're told that Kruger is mentally deranged and responsible for a bunch of war crimes. He's supposed to be maniacally evil and bombastic, but with Copley letting his South African accent unfurl at full speed, it's hard to even understand much of what he says.

(It's the "Bane" problem all over again: It's difficult to be really scared of someone when you can't comprehend their nefarious mutterings.)

Movies like this often have a totally unnecessary romantic interest, and here it's supplied by Alica Braga as Grey, a childhood friend of Max's who is now a nurse and mother of a little girl who -- wait for it -- is dying of end-stage leukemia. Soon their destinies are linked.

These characters never really seem to mesh together. Delacourt in particular is an impenetrable puzzle, with Foster supplying her own odd accent and mannerisms. She regards the Elysium leadership as spineless mamby-pambies who won't do what's necessary to fight the illegal infiltrator scourge.

Here's the thing, though: If the only problem they have on Elysium is the unwanted immigrants, and the only reason the Earth residents want to get to Elysium is so they can use the Magic Cure Boxes, why in the world wouldn't they just install a few planetside? Forget the idea that Elysium-ites are completely selfish and self-serving -- what do they lose by sharing their technology if it keeps out the riff-raff?

As he showed with "District 9," Blomkamp is a talented and original director who comes up with great ideas -- it just seems like he didn't think this one through very well. He's also one of those filmmakers who's good at staging action scenes from a distance, but when it gets down to hand-to-hand combat everything becomes a blurred mess. (Hand! Foot! Elbow! Fist! Knee! Knee! Knee!)

I think "Elysium" wants to be an allegorical tale about how the problems of the future mirror our own today. But it's trapped inside the body of a summer action movie, setting up characters and plot paces that are momentarily engaging but don't make a lick of sense when you take two steps back.

Review: "District 9"

One of the most thrilling movie experiences one can have is walking into a film you know next to nothing about, and being completely transported away to a wholly unexpected destination.

"District 9" is a South African film about an incursion of aliens coming to live on Earth, and being rounded up into a ghetto that gives the movie its name. That's pretty much all I knew about it beforehand.

It sounded like a knockoff of "Alien Nation," a 1988 James Caan flick with a similar theme. "District 9" starts out on an off-kilter, almost humorous note, but keeps layering in surprises and deeper subtexts.

The film unfolds in a documentary style. Our first encounter is with a buffoonish character named Wikus Van De Merwe, who sits in an office and talks in a bouncy sing-song pattern. It turns out he's a bureaucrat with MNU Alien Affairs, the public/private association tasked with overseeing nearly 2 million aliens housed in a shantytown outside Johannesburg.

Through archival footage we learn that the aliens' ship appeared one day over the city, sitting motionless and uncommunicative. Humans eventually cut into the craft and found a horde of starving aliens. Bug-like and chitinous, the aliens -- dubbed "prawns" in the same derogatory way people use terms like "gooks" -- did not seem to have much knowledge of the technology they carried with them.

It was theorized that these creatures were the worker drones of an insect-like alien race, and they certainly didn't seem very smart. They mostly scavenged bits of junk, and seemed to have a particular jones for cat food. So they were hoarded together and put into District 9 more than 20 years ago.

Now the human locals want the aliens moved to a concentration camp out in the countryside, and Wikus has been put in charge of the eviction and relocation. He was chosen solely because he is the son-in-low of the MNU chief, and because he's too out of his depth to oppose the heavy-handed tactics employed by the company's mercenaries. (The head merc is played by David James, who manages to be scary even when he's not doing anything.)

I don't want to say anything more about the plot, other than the relocation mission goes horribly awry, and Wikus finds himself forced to share the aliens' perspective.

Wikus is played by Sharlto Copley, who I was astonished to find is a first-time actor. Copley transforms his character over the course of the film from an inept corporate flunky into a sympathetic figure that the audience roots for. What a debut.

The aliens themselves are entirely computer-generated. Even their voices are not done by actors, but employ a series of clicks and scritches.

Director Neill Blomkamp, who co-write the script with Terri Tatchell, initially keeps his camera far away from the aliens, allowing them to be seen as scary and (literally) inhuman. As the story progresses, he moves in closer and closer on their faces, and picks out one in particular, who uses the human-given name Christopher Johnson. Christopher has a young son and seems craftier than his fellows; the walls of his shack are lined with bits of computers that he's evidently not using just for decoration.

"District 9" was based on a 6-minute short film by Blomkamp, which was discovered by Peter Jackson of "Lord of the Rings" fame, who then scraped together $30 million to make a feature version. I'd say Blomkamp hit the lottery, except it's audiences who are the real winners.

3.5 stars