A couple of premieres takes on all comers at the box office this weekend, including interesting holdovers and a couple of notable anniversary re-releases.
Challengers
Zendaya stars as Tashi Duncan, a teenage tennis whiz who must rebuild her life after she suffers a career-ending injury. She reinvents herself as a coach and marries Art (Mike Faist), a fellow tennis champion, and coaches him to success in the pros. But when Art’s career takes a turn for the worse, he must face off against his arch rival Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who just so happens to be Tashi’s ex. Fireworks, both personal and professional, ensue.
Boy Kills World
Bill Skarsgård, who you might remember as Pennywise from It, stars as Boy, who is actually a man. The Boy-man’s family is murdered by Famke Janssen, who was the best Jean Gray in any X-Men movie, but I digress. Rendered deaf and mute by the attack, Boy is rescued by a mysterious shaman (revered stuntman Yayan Ruhian) and taught the means for revenge. Bob’s Burgers’ H. Jon Benjamin provides the voice in Boy’s head.
Civil War
Alex Garland’s searing cautionary tale about an America at war with itself is an unexpected hit. Kirsten Dunst stars as Lee, a journalist on a mission to get from New York City to Washington, D.C., to interview the President (Nick Offerman) before the White House falls to the Western Forces. In this clip, Lee and her partner Joel (Wagner Moura) try to buy some gas in West Virginia.
Alien
Ridley Scott’s seminal sci fi horror film returns to theaters for a victory lap on its 45th anniversary. Sigourney Weaver’s star-making turn as Ripley set the standard for tough-girl protagonists for decades. The alien xenomorphs will be the most terrifying screen monster you’ll see this, or any other, year. Take a look at the original trailer from 1979, which causes 21st century horror trailers to hide behind the couch.
It took George Miller 18 years to shepherd Mad Max: Fury Road from pre-production to release. He went down blind technological alleys; wrote, produced, and then canceled an anime version; and went through multiple Maxes and Furiosas. But the false starts and revisions paid off — Fury Road was the best film of the 2010s, and arguably the greatest action movie of all time.
James Cameron’s been cooking his sequel to 2009’s Avatar for 13 years. The Way of Water was originally scheduled to bow in the summer of 2014, but underwater motion capture photography, which had never been attempted before, turned out to be much harder than the director anticipated. Then came the pandemic.
Miller used his time to refine Fury Road down to its essence, assembling a stripped-down hot rod of a film that goes full throttle for two hours. The years of delay had the opposite effect on Cameron. His original idea for an Avatar trilogy expanded into a pentalogy, and TWOW is a bladder-bursting 192 minutes long — comparable to the running time of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King but with fewer endings.
We return to Pandora to find that just about the same amount of time has passed there as in real life. Jake (Sam Worthington), the runaway space marine, has married Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and now permanently inhabits his blue Na’vi body. He’s the chief of the tribe, and they’re raising quite a brood: two sons, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and their daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). They’re also raising Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the Na’vi daughter of the avatar of the late Dr. Grace Augustine (also Sigourney). Who Kiri’s father is, or how any of that works, biologically speaking, is left a mystery for future installments. In the midst of all the techno-wizardry, using mo-cap to empower Sigourney Weaver to play her own teenage daughter turns out to be Cameron’s greatest stroke of genius.
Two Sigourney Weavers meet in Avatar: The Way of Water.
The strangest member of the mixed Sully clan is Spider (Jack Champion), the biological son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), Jake’s former commanding officer who died during Avatar’s final battle. Spider was abandoned on Pandora after the humans withdrew and was adopted by the Sullys.
But Col. Quaritch’s story isn’t over. The Resource Development Administration (RDA) backed up his consciousness as a way of preventing the loss of institutional knowledge. The powers that be implanted his mind into a Na’vi clone. When the RDA returns to Pandora in force, clone Col. Quaritch is sent on a mission to hunt down the traitor Sully and terminate him with extreme prejudice.
Had TWOW been released on time in 2014, the last decade at the movies would look very different. It’s quite possible the 3D revolution Avatar inspired wouldn’t have fizzled in the mid-teens. Cameron understands the technology better than anyone. Instead of just throwing things at the screen for cheap shocks, he uses 3D to add depth to scenes. Cameron’s goal is to be immersive. And with TWOW, “immersive” becomes literal. The director’s other obsession besides filmmaking is scuba diving, and one gets the impression that he would be perfectly content to jettison all of this annoying story and just take us on a 3D swim with space whales — and I’d watch it.
The Sully family meets the space whales, who are called “tulkuns,” when they flee for the coast to hide among the Metkayina, or “Reef People.” Na’vi who are aqua-green instead of turquoise, the Reef People are led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet), who, like many female Na’vi in this film, is what I like to call “skinny-pregnant.”
Kate Winslet and Cliff Curtis in Avatar: The Way of Water
Cameron’s ambition for his story is to become the Tolkien of the screenplay format, with Avatar as The Hobbit. Instead of Tolkien’s high European fantasy, Cameron’s idiom is the “hard” science fiction of the 1950s, with a sprinkling of New Wave influence (primarily from Ursula Le Guin, whose A Wizard of Earthsea provides inspiration for The Way of Water’s archipelago setting). Cameron’s gender politics blind spots and gung-ho militarism reflect the limitations of his chosen genre. On the other hand, TWOW is an anti-colonialist work, The Last of the Mohicans as eco-science fiction. Even though he’s a hero to his adoptive world, Sully and his kids are stuck between cultures. The human colonists are mostly craven xenophobes, but even the enlightened Na’vi carry their own prejudices.
TWOW is big, unwieldy, and sometimes clunky. But it is also truly epic in a way very few films have ever been. After a long wait, James Cameron finally delivers the goods.
Sundance wanted to return to a fully in-person festival for its January 20th-30th run, but the coronavirus pandemic had other plans. Luckily, when it became obvious that the omicron variant was spreading uncontrollably, and a 40,000 person gathering in Park City would have been a non-stop superspreader event, there were already plans in place to repeat the virtual programming the venerable film festival instituted last year.
After two years of rolling pandemic shutdowns, the film community is used to online festivals. Even in non-pandemic times, the virtual option is great for cinephiles who can’t attend in person. But that doesn’t mean all the kinks have been worked out yet.
Sundance is embracing virtual reality, with a program of various VR works and a festival village inside a virtual space station. This glimpse of the metaverse future is less Ready Player One and more Second Life. The biggest lesson from the festival’s opening weekend is, don’t cross the streams of cinema and VR.
The opening feature, 32 Sounds, is an experimental documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Green that does what it says on the tin. It’s an exploration of sound as a phenomenon that is designed to be watched while wearing headphones. Much of the sound was recorded using binaural technology, which uses multiple microphones and physical models of the human ear to create recordings that sound more authentically “wild” than even stereo. It’s a fascinating concept, once you get into the movie’s headspace, so to speak. The problem was the opening program was presented in a virtual recreation of the Egyptian theater in Park City, a real-life festival hub. Technical issues delayed the beginning of the program, which meant that when the virtual screening period ended, everyone was unceremoniously kicked out of the virtual theater before the film was over. We got 25 sounds, tops! There are a several more potentially interesting VR events on the schedule, but after that experience, I have not been back to the metaverse.
Luckily, the vast majority of Sundance’s offerings are presented in a more conventional streaming format, with both limited-time premiere slots, designed to increase audience participation by ensuring everyone is watching at the same time, and longer, second-run slots to catch up on films you missed because of conflicts. This flexibility was great for me, as I was juggling a huge work project at the same time. It has not, however, been great for my sleep schedule. But I guess staying up way too late is an authentic film festival experience.
Finn Wolfhard and Julianne Moore in When You Finish Saving The World.
My takeaways from the first weekend are that the documentaries have so far been better than the narrative films, and that the foreign narratives have been much better than their American counterparts. Take the case of Jesse Eisenberg’s feature directorial debut When You Finish Saving The World. It has a crackerjack cast including the great Julianne Moore as the burned-out head of a nonprofit who runs a shelter for domestic violence victims, and Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard as her son, a streamer who has attracted a small but growing audience with his folk-rock songs. The actors struggle to create well-rounded characters, but Eisenberg, who also wrote the film, doesn’t know what to do with them. The struggle between mother and son to communicate through the teenage years ultimately goes nowhere, and the impression you’re left with is that both of these people are kind of jerks, anyway.
Elizabeth Banks in Call Jane (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Wilson Webb.)
Call Jane is by director Phillis Nagy, most familiar as the writer of Carol, which is one of those films whose list of accolades is so long it merits its own Wikipedia page. It gets off to a promising start, with Joy (Elizabeth Banks), a housewife in 1968 Chicago, diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition. She’s also pregnant, but carrying the baby to term will almost certainly be fatal for both of them. When the all-male hospital ethics board denies her physician’s request to authorize an abortion, Joy seeks out the services of Jane, an underground organization of feminists who arrange abortions for the desperate. After Jane, led by a flinty Sigourney Weaver, helps Joy, she gets sucked into helping other women in similar plights.
The tension of suburban good-girl Joy leading a double life as an illegal abortion doula propels the first two acts of the film, but when it’s time for a climax, Nagy whiffs. The real-life Jane collective operated in Chicago for years until it was finally busted, and its leaders were awaiting trial for murder and conspiracy when the Roe v. Wade verdict was handed down. That’s some high drama, especially considering in this film it would be Sigourney Weaver in peril. But Call Jane instead omits the police raid (it’s mentioned as having happened off screen during the epilogue) and opts instead for a useless adultery subplot between Joy’s lawyer husband (Chris Messina) and their widow neighbor, played by Kate Mara. What could have been the feminist version of Judas and the Black Messiah instead fizzles into banality.
Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World.
Much more successful is the Norwegian import, The Worst Person in the World, by director Joachim Trier. It’s a flight-footed romantic comedy, shot through with magical realism and a heavy Bergman influence that sometimes put me in mind of Ira Sachs. The film is grounded by a generous performance by Renate Reinsve as Julie, a young woman in Oslo who falls in love with a graphic novelist named Askel (Anders Danielsen Lie) 15 years her senior. The episodic film is told in 12 chapters, with a prologue and epilogue, which map out vital events in the course of their relationship as they meet cute, grow apart, break up, and reconcile in the most melancholy way. The film is funny and sad, and all the characters feel like real people.
Sinéad O’Connor in Nothing Compares by Kathryn Ferguson (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo: Independent News and Media.)
Speaking of real people, the documentary side of the equation has a pair of killer biographies. Nothing Compares is the story of Sinead O’Connor’s meteoric rise to fame, and the painful history behind her songs. O’Connor is best remembered today for getting canceled after a protest at the end of a performance on Saturday Night Live, where she ripped up a picture of the Pope. But as the film reminds us, the specific thing she was protesting was the Catholic church’s ongoing cover-up of pedophile priests preying on congregants. Time has proven her absolutely right on that issue, just as it has about everything else she says in the film’s wealth of archival footage. O’Connor paid the price for being ahead of her time.
Katia and Maurice Kraft in Fire of Love
The first big sale out of Sundance’s film market was Fire Of Love, a documentary about volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft by director Sara Dosa. The Krafts devoted their lives to studying volcanos, but they seemed to be just as drawn to the insane risks they were taking as they filmed lava rivers and pyroclastic flows at point-blank range. Fire of Love is a great combination of idiosyncratic love story and spectacular footage of fire fountains, It’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser when it sees wide release.
The Strokes tear it up in Meet Me In The Bathroom.
Last year’s festival was a hotbed of great music docs, including the transcendent Summer of Soul and the inventive The Sparks Brothers. Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s chronicle of the millennial Brooklyn music scene, Meet Me In The Bathroom, doesn’t approach those heights. There’s no shortage of great footage of The Strokes, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem in the film, and the directors effectively make the case for the scene’s enduring influence. Specifically great is the treatment of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, which pairs explosive performance footage with a confessional interview. But the film is plagued by bad choices, such as inexplicably throwing Frank Sinatra’s “When I Was Seventeen” and Ace Freley’s “Back In The New York Groove” into the middle of a film about indie rock.
The opening image of Saul Williams and Anisa Uzeman’s Neptune Frost.
The find of the festival for me so far has been Neptune Frost by poet Saul Williams and director Anisia Uzeyman. I’m not even sure I can put this one in a clean category, but I’ll go with “Afro-futurist cyberpunk musical.” Shot on location in the countryside of Rawanda, it concerns a group of refugees from the harsh realities of war and economic exploitation who retreat into an alternate dimension to wage guerrilla war on The Authority. At least that’s part of it. It’s complicated.
Neptune Frost’s budget was minuscule, but it does everything right. It’s visually stunning, thanks to some incredible costumes and set design, as well as cinematography that punches way above its weight. The opening image literally made me say “wow” out loud. The directors stage full-on musical numbers with live singing in places like the jungle and a strip mine where rare earth elements are extracted to produce the electronics you’re reading this on right now. The songs are great, combining disparate elements like synth-pop, hip hop, high life, soca, Sondheim, and juju, with lyrics in five languages. The whole project’s perspective is bracingly revolutionary, but one banger after another makes it go down smooth. You’ll be bopping along and suddenly realize they’ve got you chanting “Fuck Google!” In the mixed bag of Sundance 2022, Neptune Frost is the first bona fide masterpiece
A perfect movie is a rare beast. To make every shot work, every actor deliver, to land every script beat requires skill, vision, and luck. The 1984 Ghostbusters originated in the fevered brain of Dan Aykroyd while he was in the middle of one of comedy’s greatest hot streaks. The OG SNL star conceived of three movies to feature him and his best friend, John Belushi: The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and Spies Like Us. Just as the unlikely success of The Blues Brothers gave the pair the run of Hollywood, Belushi OD’d. Aykroyd and Caddyshack director Harold Ramis retooled Ghostbusters‘ insane first draft, which featured psychedelic scenes of astrally projecting Ghostbusters fighting hordes of interdimensional spectres, as a more grounded ensemble movie set in New York City.
In 1984, all the pieces fell together for producer/director Ivan Reitman to make the quintessential action comedy. Aykroyd and Ramis created a pair of indelible geek icons in the schlubby Ray Stantz and the Spock-like Egon Spengler. Sigourney Weaver did duel duty as symphony musician Dana Barrett and gatekeeper spirit Zuul, playing off of Rick Moranis as a geeky accountant possessed by the Keymaster Vinz Clortho. The role of Winston Zeddmore was originally offered to Eddie Murphy, but when he turned it down in favor of Beverly Hills Cop, Ernie Hudson stepped into the thankless role of audience surrogate. Looking back on Ghostbusters from the perspective of 2016, it’s clear that Bill Murray is the key to the picture’s success. His Lothario con man turned paranormal investigator Peter Venkman is a perfectly pitched performance worthy of Chaplin, Keaton, or Cleese.
Remaking Ghostbusters seemed a fool’s errand. Reitman captured lightning in a bottle, an artifact of a certain moment when all the players were at the top of their game, by mixing ’80s horror beats with Second City gonzo yucks. Even the core creative team couldn’t reproduce the magic. Remember Ghostbusters II? Of course not. You might as well try to remake Casablanca.
This was the task set before director Paul Feig. In a move that upset a vocal hoard of internet man-babies, the creator of Freaks and Geeks upped the already impossible difficulty level by gender-swapping the characters. Well, I’m here to tell you that the Men’s Rights movement picked the wrong hill to die on.
Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, and Kate McKinnon don the proton packs in Paul Feig’s remake of Ghostbusters.
Feig surmised that the secret of Ghostbusters was in the chemistry, and the director of Bridesmaids knows funny women. The team of Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones is even more finely balanced than Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, and Hudson. Wiig’s Erin Gilbert, a former paranormal investigator trying to get tenure as a physics professor at straight-laced Columbia University, can’t touch the crystalline genius of Murray, but she’s a good fit for this version. McCarthy hones her wild talent with discipline and precision, turning in the best performance of her career as Abby, the Ray Stantz analog. Feig and Parks and Recreation writer Katie Dippold’s script gives Jones’ character, Patty, a New York transit employee who gets sucked into the Ghostbusters’ world, more to do than Hudson, and the film is all the better for it. The most perverse casting choice is Chris Hemsworth in a hybrid of Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts’ cynical receptionist; Thor rises to the occasion by whipping out previously unseen comedy chops. But it’s McKinnon who slyly steals the show. McKinnon reworks Ramis with a brash physicality. Geeks are cool now, but McKinnon, who takes her look from the animated version of Egon, avoids the autistic minstrel show approach epitomized by The Big Bang Theory and wrings more depth out of renegade techie Holtzmann than the script provides.
As long as Feig and Dippold follow Aykroyd and Ramis’ beats, the movie hums along, but when they attempt to graft on a parody of The Avengers climax in place of the intimate confrontation with Gozer the Destructor, the film spins out of control. Still, speaking as an old school Ghostbusters fan, this remake is better than it has any right to be. In 1984, Ghostbusters was a standout in a quality field that included Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Purple Rain, and fellow action comedy classics Gremlins and Romancing the Stone. 2016’s Ghostbusters comes as a sip of water in a historic drought. Feig has pulled off the impossible by successfully reworking an unlikely masterpiece, and everyone involved deserves major kudos.
But seriously, let’s not try to remake Casablanca, OK?
2003’s Finding Nemo was the first Pixar film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature — an award that didn’t exist in 1995 when Toy Story announced the coming of the animation giant. Pixar went on to win eight of the 15 total Animated Feature awards given so far, with Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton repeating in 2008 with WALL-E, which remains the studio’s pinnacle.
Despite a failed push into live-action science fantasy with John Carter, Stanton has remained a stalwart at Pixar, working in some capacity on every picture, even after it was absorbed by Disney and Toy Story director John Lasseter was promoted to head of the studio’s animation unit. Pixar is notoriously collaborative, but there’s no denying that Stanton is responsible for a big chunk of the Pixar aesthetic. Which is why the lackluster Finding Dory is so disappointing.
Ellen DeGeneres voices Dory, the Pacific regal blue tang in Finding Dory, Pixar’s sequel to 2003’s blockbuster fish film Finding Nemo.
Let me stipulate here that Finding Dory is not a bad movie. Much thought has gone into this film. The little Pacific regal blue tang (fish fans are sticklers for specifics), voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, stole the show in Finding Nemo, so the choice to put her at the center of the sequel was obvious. Stanton opens in flashback, when Dory is but a mere blue pip with two giant eyes. Dory’s dad, Charlie (Eugene Levy), and mom, Jenny (Diane Keaton), are trying to help their little girl learn the skills to deal with her lack of short-term memory. Then we flash forward to the present, where a grown-up Dory is hanging out on the Great Barrier Reef with her clownfish buddies Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence, replacing the original Nemo, the now-grown-up Alexander Gould) when she begins to have visions about her parents. Dory, feeling deprived of even a memory of her family, decides to try to find them. But it’s a tall order, since she has only the scant bits of information she can dredge out of her easily distracted head. So she persuades Nemo and Marlin to accompany her and keep her focused on her quest. They hitch a ride with some surfer turtles on the California current and head to the Jewel of Morro Bay, which turns out to be a marine biology institute devoted to rehabbing injured wildlife and releasing them back into the sea. The three fish put their scant brain power together to figure out that Dory’s parents are probably in a tank somewhere in the huge aquarium compound, and, with the help of a couple of cockney-accented sea lions (Idris Elba and Dominic West), they plot an aquatic break-in.
Dory as amnesiac protagonist suggests some intriguing possibilities, something like Christopher Nolan’s Memento under the sea. The first two acts of Finding Dory provide some impressive individual set pieces, such as a stingray migration that echoes a classic Disney animation moment, a spectacular chase scene with a bioluminescent squid, and a cameo by Sigourney Weaver playing herself. But where the usual Pixar model is tight and economical, Stanton’s narrative meanders clumsily until the third act kicks in. When Dory hits the “Descent Into the Underworld” part of her Hero’s Journey, the film suddenly clicks into focus. Stanton and his animators pull back to reveal Dory as a tiny blue dot in a vast dark ocean, and, combined with the greatest voice performance of DeGeneres’ career, they show the old Pixar tearjerker machine is still as potent as ever.
The burst of energy is short-lived, however, and even an homage to the wrong-way car chase from To Live and Die in L.A., recreated with a surly octopus (Ed O’Neill, in a terrific vocal performance) behind the wheel, can’t pull Dory out of the ditch.
But then, what do I know? This $200 million lollipop almost paid for its production in three days of release, with the biggest animated movie opening of all time. The kids in the audience I saw it with were quiet and attentive, and they all seemed to really enjoy themselves—although I remember the response to last year’s Inside Out being much more enthusiastic. The Pixar animation masters have created another visual feast, with images and effects not even contemplated in 2003. Had Finding Dory come from any other group of artists, perhaps I would have judged it a success. But Pixar I hold to a higher standard.
Like his feature debut District 9, South African director Neill Blomkamp set his new science-fiction film Chappie in his hometown of Johannesburg. To American audiences, that lends the films an air of unfamiliarity. Some characters, such as the muscle-bound gangster Hippo (Brandon Auret), speak with such thick Afrikaans accents that they require subtitling. There are plenty of familiar aspects on the screen, such as brand names and Washington’s portrait on the American dollar bill, which shows up on a memorable pair of shorts, but they are reshuffled and reused in unfamiliar ways. This is useful to Blomkamp’s world-building, as he uses his documentary-style camera work to make the South African capital look like a Mad Max post-apocalyptic dystopia without much trouble. But it can also be problematic. Watching a Blomkamp film like Chappie must be what it’s like to watch American movies translated into other languages, and one wonders what has been lost in translation.
In the film’s not-so-far-off world of 2016, the Tetravaal Corporation, led by CEO Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver), has created a line of virtually indestructible humanoid robot policemen to help maintain order in lawless Johannesburg. The robots, known as scouts, have enough artificial intelligence to perform basic functions, but that’s not enough for their lead designer Deon (Dev Patel), who spends his off hours trying to develop a truly sentient A.I. that can allow his creations to make real moral choices. Meanwhile, rival designer Vincent (Hugh Jackman) is pushing his project, the MOOSE, a walking tank remotely controlled by a human operator. When Deon has a breakthrough, he asks his boss for permission to test out his new A.I. on one of the scout robots. But when she says no, he steals the broken chassis of an unlucky robot that has taken an RPG to the chest, intending to use it as a testbed.
The strangest thing about Chappie is not the titular robot, which is a seamless collaboration between Blomkamp, who began his career as a 3D CGI animator, and District 9 star Sharlto Copley, who provides the voice and motion-capture performance. It’s the supporting players Ninja and Yolandi of the South African rave-rap band Die Antwoord. Using their own names, they are essentially playing themselves — or at least, they’re playing a version of their public image, which has made them international YouTube stars. Die Antwoord takes American hip-hop culture and reflects it back at us through a funhouse mirror. Their distinctive visual style is all over Chappie, from the neon-colored assault rifles to the strangely sinister beach wear Yolandi sports through most of the film. But here, like in their music videos, it’s difficult to know exactly how seriously they take themselves. And that problem translates to the film as a whole.
Ninja and Yolandi are in hock to Hippo for 10 million Rands, and they kidnap Deon and his creation, hoping to find a way to thwart the police robots and rake in enough dough in a big heist to pay off their debts. So when Deon activates his robot, which Yolandi christens “Happy Chappie,” the first people it meets are insane gangster rappers. Needless to say, Chappie gets some pretty weird ideas about life.
As in District 9 and Elysium, Blomkamp is playing with some heady concepts. When Robbie the Robot was introduced in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, the concept of a walking, talking, reasoning humanoid robot seemed like something from the distant future; in 2015, it seems like something we’ll be dealing with sooner rather than later. Like Spike Jones’ Her, Blomkamp wonders about the ethics of creating artificial intelligence. When Chappie discovers his battery is running out, he asks Deon, “Why did you just make me so I could die?” — a question philosophers have been asking the heavens since the Book of Job.
Despite flashes of brilliance, Chappie‘s script often resembles a list of stuff that would be cool to see in a movie rather than an actual story. The obvious nods to Paul Veerhooven’s Robocop, the go-to example of how to combine satire and action, only reinforce the sense that Chappie is an intriguing near miss.
