CHAPPIE REVIEW: EVERY TIME MAN PLAYS GOD IT GOES HORRIBLY WRONG

"I'm your Maker" Dev Patel's character, robot inventor Deon Wilson bellows at Chappie, the title character, a robot with the ability to learn and deduce on it's on. In theory it is a materialization of "I think, therefore I am", or better yet "I am thinking, therefore I exist") a philosophical proposition by René Descartes, in French, it is known as"Cogito ergo sum". This sounds great in theory, but, unfortunately, some things should never be thought of. This film is one of those things.

Hollywood loves to play God and as in Chappie if you are to play God you must create an opposing antagonist in your story, specifically with Christian values that exclude a person's humanity, enter Hugh Jackman's character Vincent Moore. But somehow this cliché' creation of a human being on the page is generally accepted as pure truth by Jackman, tisk, tisk, oh Hollywood. "All Christians are crazy", just as, all black people are criminals, just as all cops enjoy killing black people... Hmmm, the cop thing, yep I'm going to have to rethink that one, unfortunately, it carries more weight as of late.

Ironically Chappie is a police officer, a robocop, "po po" securing the mean dirt roads of Johannesburg, where the director Niel Blomkamp is very careful to limit the number of people of color who are criminals even while creating a story in Africa. In turn, he assembles a literal band of white natives so unlikeable and so hard to look at on screen it's a wonder my friend and I didn't leave the theater on those two issues alone. A rap group that has fallen off the charts led by South African Rapper Ninja who plays, well, Ninja. Blomkamp was also heavily influenced by evolution, a belief system that heavily informed his thought process around cognition in manmade machines...MORE COMING SOON