"Chappie" (2015)

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I might have gone into this movie with higher expectations had I not disliked director Neill Blomkamp's previous effort, Elysium. And, between that film and this one, it's starting to look more and more like District 9 was a fluke! This was horrible!
And that's mainly down to the opening. Talk about starting off on the wrong foot! Everything that was being set up struck me as so derivative – especially the MOOSE, which is a blatant ED-209 rip-off – that it immediately tarnished the rest of the movie that followed. As a result, I was in such a bad mood that I just found the storyline clichéd and the scenes with Chappie learning things embarrassing. And the trite scene where Yolandi tells him about the soul actually had me yelling, "Oh, fuck off!" at the screen.
The maddening thing is that this isn't an inherently bad concept. The idea of an AI learning and maturing has been done well before, and it had potential to be done well here, but it's all ruined by the immediately obvious clichés and the ludicrous one-dimensional villains.
I have to commend the special effects, though: Blomkamp and his effects team have always been brilliant at replacing actors with animated characters so that they really look like they belong in the shot. But aside from that, this movie just flat-out made me angry.

My rating: 25%