Chappie is a movie that somehow blends Bicentennial Man with Pacific Rim. It’s a big-budget science fiction movie with one of the best ever CG-capture performances not by Andy Serkis. It features Sigourney Weaver as a glorified window dressing executive, Hugh Jackman wearing a mullet and his shirt tucked into khaki shorts, and South African hip-hop group Die Antwoord playing loosely fictionalized gun-loving versions of themselves. It has a giant robot fight and completely earnest scenes of an engineer trying to teach a robot to paint. The fact that it exists at all is something of a miracle. And the only person who could have made it is Neill Blomkamp.
Blomkamp is one of the most distinctive science fiction directors of the modern era. Watching his first film, District 9, it’s easy to see why—a saga of aliens roped into a ghetto in Blomkamp’s hometown of Johannesburg, it’s one of the most acclaimed genre films of the last few years, mixing well-designed aliens and ripping action with a surprisingly potent apartheid allegory. Elysium, Blomkamp’s second outing, suffered from the same overindulgence as the later work of his mentor, Peter Jackson. But now he’s got some breathing room: not only is Chappie as close to a personal vision as it is possible for a big-budget movie about CG robots to be, it’s also (with the exception of Johnny Depp’s execrable Transcendence) one of the most radical pop culture representations of mind-body dualism in years.
At this point, the movie’s off-the-wall trailer is so familiar that you might be able to write out the movie’s beats from memory: a broken police droid is given sentience by a scientist with a conscience (Dev Patel), then learns to think (in true Iron Giant fashion, Chappie also acts like an adorable child in an Oscar-bait movie). Also, stuff blows up. But for a filmmaker who tends to be primarily excited by explosions—his love of Michael Bay is well-chronicled—Blomkamp seems to have done some serious thinking about the nature of consciousness. Much of that is visible in Chappie’s third act, which essentially (in the interest of keeping things spoiler-free) attributes sentience to a vague “energy” that turns out to be remarkably easy to move around.
This seemingly simple, largely intractable philosophical problem—are “we” something separate from flesh? Are our “selves” different from our brains?— dates all the way back to Plato (whose Phaedrus is an extended argument for the immortality of the soul), but it finds its most common form in the work of Rene Descartes. Like Chappie, Cartesian mind-body dualism posits the complete separation of mind and body as separate “substances.”
Opposition to Descartes came from writers like Friedrich Nietzsche, who repeatedly emphasizes the people’s corporeality; according to him, it not only wouldn’t make sense to think about “minds” as something distinct from bodies, it would be a grievous mistake to try to conceive of oneself in this way. And while your instinct might be to dismiss the very idea as a purely theoretical problem, its repercussions are relevant even today, especially with regard to identity-based issues like gay and trans civil rights. (The notion of a difference between one’s gender identity and one’s physiological sex—performativity—is a key concept in understanding trans issues, one that makes a distinction that is at least implicitly Cartesian.) Chappie takes those centuries of intellectual history and hits them with a missile, building a world in which body and mind—or soul, or something resembling a soul—become modular and malleable.
But the best science fiction doesn’t simply ask “what if the world were like this?”—It spins that premise forward to make a statement about the way we live now. And that’s something that Chappie seems utterly unconcerned with. (At least in this regard; the movie is far more agile when engaging social disorder and the privatization of law enforcement). The movie places humanity at the brink of transcendence, but it does so seemingly without considering what might happen when a mind is divorced from its bodily vessel, or how it would change the way we consider ourselves human. At one point, human characters find themselves in such a situation—yet they don’t remark on their inability to smell, taste, or touch. In Chappie’s ontology, the only relevant manifestations of the mind seem to be sight and verbal communication.
But don’t press Blomkamp on the fine points and expect a graduate-level treatise. He’s a storyteller, not an academic. In fact, trying to describe sentience during a press conference about the film, he describes sentience in the same terms Dev Patel’s scientist does: as the ability to think and act creatively. Later, in a hotel room discussing the movie, he describes Chappie’s own consciousness as “something so pure, so innocent,” that it’s a wonder it manages to “exist in such a violent and shitty world.” (Not that Chappie’s optimism is always uninteresting: One of the best things about the film is the way the police drones—which in any other American sci-fi movie would revolt against the humans—simply do their jobs, and do them well.)
And despite Chappie‘s emphasis on the nature of the mind, Blomkamp denies that the movie is really interested in those possibilities. “The core reason for making Chappie isn’t about A.I.,” he says. Instead, he claims it’s about Chappie as a being distinct from the predatory elements of organic life. “The world is a hostile and violent place,” he says. “RNA and DNA have a selfish nature”—what he describes as a constantly running string of programming—“that will deceive and manipulate and try to get what it can get from other organisms.”
How do those two sides of one picture of humanity—the computer scientist and the artist—interact? It’s a frustrating question, the sort of thing that often gets little to no treatment in films, with the possible exception of droll biopics that suggest that being really, really good at science is like art. And the grandeur of Blomkamp’s ideas (and of much of the film’s action sequences), is in sharp contrast to the ideas actually embodied in a deeply, almost painfully optimistic movie about human (and robot) potential.
Blomkamp’s films tend to focus on moments of massive historical change: The end of District 9 sees humans’ mistreatment of the alien “prawns” exposed, while Elysium concludes with the destruction of the class system. But in both of those cases, action-movie structure–and the conventions thereof—prevent a nuanced exploration of their premises. (Blomkamp’s ambition seems perfectly suited to TV, where he would be forced to spend 10 or 20 hours in a world without blowing it up.) Thankfully, in this case Blomkamp may actually be able to pursue his ideas—he has treatments written for two Chappie sequels.
And that leeway may allow him to explore his own shifting perspective: Blomkamp changed his mind about the possibility of artificial consciousness over the course of filming, butting up against an almost religious respect for the innefability of the human mind. “There may be some natural parameters that we’re going to bump into,” he says, “that are more unexplainable than equations and CPUs.” The Singularity anxiety that seems to be gripping ethicists and AI researchers right now—that “AI is going to declare war on the human race”—doesn’t concern him. “It’s super prevalent,” he says, “but there’s a piece of me that thinks it’s wrong.”
Among currently working popular sci-fi auteurs, Blomkamp’s only competition may be the far more cerebral Christopher Nolan (sorry, Wachowskis), so it’s probably a good thing that he feels strongly about consciously rebuking the preexisting traditions of the genre. That tendency will hopefully serve Blomkamp well in his next project—a take on Alien. “I’m not pushing back against it just to push back against it because I’m, like, a sulky kid,” he protests. “I’m pushing back against it because I think that evolution always finds answers in the weirdest places. If we want to play God, things aren’t going to be as easy as we think they will be.”
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