I went to see Neill Blomkamp’s  Chappie last weekend, a movie about a robot who is being given artificial consciousness. Set in Jo’Burg, it casts Ninja and Yolandi from Die Antwort as well as Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver, and is fantastic, because it is well written, it is well cast and it is well done. And there is more. There is Sci-Fi. There is music. There is social commentary.

 

Chappie is a beat-down robot into which a file is uploaded. A piece of code which takes a very intelligent piece of machinery and gives it that something else that makes us more than just machines. It effectively makes Chappie a child. And that is where things begin going wrong. Chappie is about how and what we teach our children. It’s about how they soak up behaviour. It’s also about how much they will forgive and the lengths they will go to for their parents.

 

But there’s more to that. Chappie’s body is that of a police droid. He still wears the uniform. Therefore, he still elicits trust in the people he meets. More exactly, his uniform does. And therein lies the problem. We trust people in uniform, because of what the uniform stands for, be it a bus or train driver, be it a plane pilot or a firefighter, be it a police officer or a soldier. Someone who wears a uniform represents a larger entity, therefore that entity has taken care to ensure that whoever wears its uniform will be doing so in a way which upholds its value. In short, it has vetted whoever wears its uniform. So what does it say when the person wearing the uniform is not deserving of our trust? And when it’s a robot wearing the uniform, does its misbehaviour reflect on those who made it or those who use it?

 

And then there’s the company which made Chappie’s shell. The company which makes the police droids. A company which also employs someone who works on a human-driven crowd control machine. A man who is a weapons maker. One who has his elbow greasy from working on his machine. Someone who wants to play with his toy. Never mind that the toy is a machine, amongst many other things, strong enough to take a man by both ends and rip him apart, middle-age-style. There is something terrifying about the glee with which Hugh Jackman’s character directs his machine. The man used to be a soldier so killing and atrocities are not new to him, but surely that’s not enough to justify that glee, is it? And surely, someone which such tendencies ought not to be employed as a weapons designer?

 

Maybe I don’t understand the point of Chappie. In general, I’m not very good at subtext in films, most often because I don’t really want to be either. Sometimes though, it glares at you in the face. It did in District 9. It did in Elysium. It does in Chappie.