CHAPPiE (R)
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This came out in 2015, and it's set in 2016. (I didn't see it until 2023.) It was directed and co-written by Neill Blomkamp, and is somewhat based on his 2004 short film "Tetra Vaal" (which I haven't seen). Like his 2009 film District 9, it's set in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has a similar dystopian vibe (though not quite enough for me to list it in my dystopian films section). Its worldwide box office was decent, compared to its budget, but it didn't do well critically, which I think is a shame. I liked it a lot, even if I can sort of understand some people liking it less than I did. But probably my favorite thing about the film is that its stars include Yolandi Visser and Ninja from the band Die Antwoord, and there are a bunch of songs by the band in the movie. (Largely I like this because at one point I was thinking something like "Are those characters played by Die Antwoord?" based mainly on their speaking voices, and I turned out to be right. And I don't even know the band that well.) Other actors include Sharlto Copley (at least his voice), who is pretty much always in Blomkamp's films, and Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, and Sigourney Weaver. Anyway, I guess I enjoyed this movie more than "District 9" (I mean I must have, because I ended up giving it a higher rating), but objectively that movie was probably better than this one. (It certainly did a lot better critically.)

So, in the movie, there's a ton of violent crime in Johannesburg, and police keep getting killed. So they start using robots (or "scouts") made by a company called Tetravaal, whose CEO is Michelle Bradley (Weaver). The scouts were designed by an engineer named Deon Wilson (Patel), who is also trying to develop artificial intelligence. There's another engineer (and I guess former soldier) named Vincent Moore (Jackman), who has developed a larger, deadlier robot called "Moose", but so far the police have shown no interest in buying that model, and Bradley... well, she's just not very supportive of Vincent's efforts. So he's pretty pissed off, and jealous of Deon. When Deon finally cracks the code to create the first A.I., he asks Bradley for permission to implement it in a robot, but she says no. There's a scout called 22 (voiced by Copley) which is scheduled to be destroyed after having gotten damaged in its missions too often, and Deon decides to install his new A.I. program in 22 secretly.

Meanwhile, there's a trio of gangsters named Ninja, Yolandi, and Amerika. (Yes, the band members use their own names in the movie. Plus there's one other guy.) They owe a bunch of money to a more powerful gangster named Hippo, so they decide to kidnap Deon and force him to help them deactivate scouts so that they can pull off a heist unhindered by law enforcement. That's not something he can do, but when they discover 22 in the back of his van, they let him install the A.I. program, overriding its police programming, which causes the robot to begin learning like a child. Yolandi becomes a maternal figure to 22, and names him "Chappie". She seems to genuinely care about Chappie, unlike the other two members of her gang, though the most volatile member is their leader, Ninja, who has little patience for Chappie's learning process, but still sets himself up as the robot's father figure. (Amerika's own attitude toward Chappie seems to me to fall in between Yolandi's and Ninja's.) Deon introduces himself to Chappie as his "maker", and makes him promise not to do any crimes, while trying to encourage him to cultivate more artistic interests. Chappie intends to keep his promise to Deon, but Ninja manages to trick him into doing crimes anyway, and the robot's style of speech and personality develop along gangster lines, despite maintaining a childlike innocence.

Vincent discovers what has become of Chappie, and um... takes steps to manufacture a situation that would finally force Bradley to give him permission to send Moose into the field. I don't want to spoil too many details about that, though I will say that despite Vincent being quite an asshole, I did at least vaguely respect his greater adherence to authority than Deon's. I mean, he probably could have activated Moose at any time, even without permission. I dunno, maybe it's his military training that kept him in check so long. (But I also feel like it's his military background that probably helped mold him into such a violent asshole, so it's a mixed bag.) And what he was willing to do to achieve his goals put countless innocent lives in danger.

I don't want to say much more about the plot, but I will say I had mixed feelings about the whole artificial intelligence premise. I didn't think it was bad, but I felt like it glossed over Chappie's learning process way too much. Still, it's important to remember he never really became much more than a child who just wanted to fit in with his found family, and I think his motivations and emotions had a ring of truth to them, as well as a ring of tragedy. So I basically liked Chappie as a character, and I liked Yolandi. I should also mention that the scouts and Moose were CGI, though I thought they looked like they could have been real, especially Chappie himself. And I think the movie has a sort of interesting ending, although it's also sort of rushed, and doesn't seem to me like it fits in with the film's brief prologue, which is set 18 months after the main plot. It bugged me that we never get to really see how the film's events led to that prologue, or what it means for the future of a few characters specifically and A.I. in general. It just seems terribly disconnected from the plot. But I still found the whole movie interesting and entertaining. Even if it sometimes (okay, most of the time) veered into the ridiculous. I still found parts of it endearing, sad, amusing, and ultimately hopeful.