Movie Tuesday

Got the BluRay of Chappie on Friday and watched it on the weekend. This was one that I wanted to see in the theatre, but I never get to as many as I think I'm going to and I didn't get to this one.

There are going to be spoilers in my talking about this one, so if you haven't seen the movie yet and do not like spoilers (like me!) turn back now!

This was a fantastic movie. First of all Chappie -- loved him. LOVED him. And his family and his maker were awesome characters, just different and interesting and real and I do love the South African accent -- it's not something we hear very often in North America.

Then there was Hugh Jackman, who is usually the hunky hero but in this movie was the nutjob bad guy. The one place where I thought the movie actually fell down a bit was that we didn't feel his being on the edge enough at the beginning of the movie. I wouldn't want too much more, but it just needed a little bit more to make the tipping point for him be totally believable.

I also loved that while extremely often the AI in movies is the big bad (I blame Arthur C. Clarke with his Hal from 2001), and while that was Jackman's character's big tipping point -- his robot didn't have any AI, it was 100% under human control -- it was in fact the humans in this movie who were the big bad, starting with Hugh Jackman's character.

Chappie walking like a gangsta. OMG, such a great touch. Especially at the end when he goes after the human who killed his mommy. I also loved that he had a South African accent as well. I loved the way he learned and how everything was so black and white to him, just like a human child. If you never break a promise, then you never break it, period. If it's wrong to use guns to kill people, then you do not. (And America's way of getting around that was very clever, though in the end people lying to him were called on that and Chappie couldn't understand why everyone lied to him).

And Chappie not understanding why people continued to hit him or cut off his limbs, etc, when he'd said please don't - he'd asked so nicely, why would they keep hurting him? So wonderfully childlike and it just made him that much more likeable. I loved the parallel, too, with the armoured vehicle guard saying 'please don't hurt me anymore' to Chappie and him suddenly taking notice of exactly what he was doing when he was 'putting them to sleep'.

The ending was brilliant. They didn't try to delve into the science, so they didn't get it horribly wrong so it was easy enough to just ignore whether or not it was actually possible to make these things.

Loved the soundtrack. Loved the fact that the robots looked absolutely real, not CGIed.

Yeah, this one gets two very enthusiastic thumbs up from me.

Sean
smut fixes everything