CHAPPIE (2015)

saw it last night and really enjoyed it

die antwoord were totally convincing and worked really well in it. the film features some of their tracks as well, which i'm usually not a fan of at all, but they really fitted with the atmosphere

the robot cgi was fucking awesome and an absolute joy to watch

also it was a lot funnier than i expected

but yeah i'd go see it, it was cool and i'm definitely glad i caught it at the cinema

Same here: just saw it with my wife and son, and we all enjoyed it. This movie is way underrated. Seems like the whims of fashion among critics are against this director. It's undeserved. The film was more endearing than I initially thought. Of course, the philosophical views of consciousness are a bit naive (transferring minds vs. merely duplicating them; computational theory of mind; ontological dualism vs. materialism; etc.), but for a film, I would cut it some slack on these issues. It's more important that it gets you to care about the title character, and if the audience thinks more about these issues, that's cool. Oh, and I was pleasantly surprised by Die Antwoord's role in this. And it's weird to see the Aphex logo on the big screen in the theater for a major hollywood production.

"Chappie" was cool; it's worth your time as an action film, for sure.

nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

no

Well, sir, you articulate a fair case against the film. In light of these considerations, I withdraw my support for the film. How could one maintain an opposing position, given your powerful insights and carefully reasoned conclusions? I dare say, you are a critic for the ages. Bravo. Please regale us with more of your deeply penetrating thoughts on many various topics, my good man. Do you have similarly intelligent things to say about politics, I wonder? If so, do tell. Also, your thoughts about Wittgenstein or God would help us in understanding the sticky and complicated nature of truth. A person of your powers of intellect must surely have a dissertation or at least a treatise lying around your study someplace, aye?

i really enjoyed this! someone point me towards official chappie merchandise. my girl and I want tee's (not matching of course)

  On 3/15/2015 at 7:01 AM, apriorion said:

Well, sir, you articulate a fair case against the film. In light of these considerations, I withdraw my support for the film. How could one maintain an opposing position, given your powerful insights and carefully reasoned conclusions? I dare say, you are a critic for the ages. Bravo. Please regale us with more of your deeply penetrating thoughts on many various topics, my good man. Do you have similarly intelligent things to say about politics, I wonder? If so, do tell. Also, your thoughts about Wittgenstein or God would help us in understanding the sticky and complicated nature of truth. A person of your powers of intellect must surely have a dissertation or at least a treatise lying around your study someplace, aye?

lol

Well I still haven't seen it, but the reviews I'm seeing here plus the audience praise being substantially higher than that by the film critics is convincing...

If I go see it and end up enjoying it too, then I will relentlessly criticize the critics.

The score by Hans Zimmer was real good too

  On 3/15/2015 at 7:01 AM, apriorion said:

Well, sir, you articulate a fair case against the film. In light of these considerations, I withdraw my support for the film. How could one maintain an opposing position, given your powerful insights and carefully reasoned conclusions? I dare say, you are a critic for the ages. Bravo. Please regale us with more of your deeply penetrating thoughts on many various topics, my good man. Do you have similarly intelligent things to say about politics, I wonder? If so, do tell. Also, your thoughts about Wittgenstein or God would help us in understanding the sticky and complicated nature of truth. A person of your powers of intellect must surely have a dissertation or at least a treatise lying around your study someplace, aye?

phling's video on the last page covered most if not all of the problems i had with the movie. it was all over the place. basing a story around die antwoord raising a robot probably was a bad place to start. given chappie's extrememly fast ability to learn (learn's how to transfer conciousness via an array of sony brand playstation 4s in a single day) you'd think he'd have maybe come across the actual uses for shurikens and butterfly knives (they're not sleep aids?). hugh's character was hilariously bad ("how about a cluster bomb"). sigourney weaver allowing the use of moose at the end of the movie was beyond comprehension. hugh using the helmet to control the moose but also needing a joystick and 3 monitors that he couldn't see was pretty awesome. never felt sympathetic towards die antwoord. patel's character acted far too stupidly to sympathize with. felt chappie's selective learning/understanding was pretty poorly written. basing all the climactic moments around whether or not conciousness.dat is going to upload or not was pretty lol.

10/10 best comedy q1 2015

Oh, that 'half in the bag' video? I couldn't be bothered to use 28 minutes of my life to watch those guys talk about a movie. I made the exception for that guy's star wars videos because they were funny, but I've found that HITB series are not nearly as entertaining, so not worth it to me. Anyway, to respond to your specific criticisms:

--basing a story on DA raising a conscious robot is an excellent idea, about as stupid and terrible (if it were real) as Aphex picking up ladies all over LA and changing them into his likeness. Since this is the core idea of the film, I'd agree that you'd like the film iff you'd like this idea. I'm not a fan of DA (in fact, I'm pretty sure I've been harsh about them on this forum in the past), but that sort of mashup is an idea I can get behind, and the fact that it actually happened (a big budge studio production, no less) makes me happy.

--yeah, I'll admit that there are certainly plot holes, and the manner of Chappie's language learning depicted in the film was off. But I'm a pluralist about film standards: I use one set of standards for evaluating popcorn action flicks, and another set of standards for evaluating Criterion Collection films, etc. For this, I think it's appropriate to give some slack for things like the science of learning and language development, since they're trying to get to something more entertaining later.

--I've already mentioned that the consciousness transfer stuff is naive, but I teach many philosophy courses at the college level, and I've seen many smart college students struggle with these concepts in pretty much the same way as Blomkamp, so again, I cut him some slack. Who knows? Maybe these plot holes will get young people interested in consciousness studies and will impel them to work on things like Higher Order Representation theories or Global Workspace theories of consciousness. Again, popcorn film standards here, not Criterion Collection standards.

--Perhaps the robot was willfully ignorant about the proper function of throwing stars--being endowed with consciousness might involve the ability to be self-deluded? I don't really think that there's a necessary connection there, but for the purposes of this story, it's contingently possible, so why not?

--Jackman's mullet man was hilariously bad. So we agree: perfect bad guy for an action film. Next...

--Using the moose was important for the progression of the film's plot. It's part of the action movie formula--show the audience the big bad, then final showdown at the end, even if it makes no sense. Like Chuck Norris vs. Bruce Lee at the end of "Way of the Dragon". Once again, this is a matter of having appropriate standards. I think all of our disagreements so far stem from this.

--Maybe Jackman's helmet was an Augmented Reality type thing. I just heard a news story about a rival to the Oculus Rift that uses this tech.

--I felt sympathy for the DA girl, less for the DA guy 'cause he was such a dick to Chappie at first. But he gave an awkward apology, which didn't really feel convincing. I'll give you that. But that might work in the fiction, since perhaps the character's apology wasn't convincing in the fiction.

--Patel's character was rash because he "broke the code of consciousness" or whatever. He was excited and passionate about his breakthrough, which he wasn't being allowed by the corporate suits to pursue in his research. So he did stupid things. Doesn't sound that far-fetched to me.

--Already addressed the accelerated/selective learning objection.

--Again, oversimplified philosophy of mind, but the purpose of the film was really more about getting to a few scenes where a conscious robot is learning to become "Gangsta Robot Number One" from DA. I forgive them, given that those ends justify the means for an action/popcorn film.

  On 3/15/2015 at 8:01 AM, ambermonk said:

 

  On 3/15/2015 at 7:01 AM, apriorion said:

Well, sir, you articulate a fair case against the film. In light of these considerations, I withdraw my support for the film. How could one maintain an opposing position, given your powerful insights and carefully reasoned conclusions? I dare say, you are a critic for the ages. Bravo. Please regale us with more of your deeply penetrating thoughts on many various topics, my good man. Do you have similarly intelligent things to say about politics, I wonder? If so, do tell. Also, your thoughts about Wittgenstein or God would help us in understanding the sticky and complicated nature of truth. A person of your powers of intellect must surely have a dissertation or at least a treatise lying around your study someplace, aye?

lol

 

Well I still haven't seen it, but the reviews I'm seeing here plus the audience praise being substantially higher than that by the film critics is convincing...

 

If I go see it and end up enjoying it too, then I will relentlessly criticize the critics.

 

I'd say that you should set your expectations at the right level. Go in expecting to see a shit film, as the critics are leading you to believe it is. Then you'll be pleasantly surprised, as I was. As I mentioned above, the key is to have the right set of standards when evaluating a film like this. If you agree with me on that, then I think you'll find that the film has flaws (basically many of the ones the critics are pointing out) but that doesn't add up to the film sucking entirely, when you compare it to other members of the same class of film.

lol how much time did you spend typing these words?

personally, I thought district 9 was kinda meh. It had good parts, started out nice enough but then quickly became cringey. The fx was good though.

Elysium then was a total shit, with good fx.

Interestingly, it had a very similar structure and characters, e.g. kinda idiot "hero" and super-onedimensional baddie.

"Oh look how baaaad this guy is"

It's like he has this one idea stuck in his head, and the idea is kind of a 50/50 mix of playstation games and that simplistic message that he is ramming down your throat.

Critics with whom I share a similar opinion on these two films universally slammed Chappie, they are saying it's his worst yet. So personally, I think I wouldn't like it and won't watch it.

I only really care because of the upcoming Alien film.

I've said this before but his main motivation for it is likely a wet dream of his own Aliens vs. Power Loader battle, everything else is secondary to this.

It took me about five minutes.

probably he's making power loader noises with his mouth while drawing storyboards at this precise moment

I like that image. If that's what he's actually doing right now, I'm a happy guy.

also, life advice: lower standards to zero, everything will be infinitely good.

It wasn't as bad as Elysium somehow

39 from Metacritic.com

hmm so its not bad? People told me its unwatchable

i didn't mind it. don't go in expecting a big budget thing, just more a little tale about a thing wot happens and you'll be all good. i can't be bothered restating what i wrote in the films thread.

  On 6/3/2015 at 7:58 PM, o00o said:

39 from Metacritic.com

 

hmm so its not bad? People told me its unwatchable

If you got 39% in an exam would you consider that good?

  On 3/15/2015 at 8:24 AM, Avarik said:

The score by Hans Zimmer was real good too

I laughed when I saw the credits. I wasn't too sure exactly what he composed? Incidental music?

Most of the sound track is Die Antwoord: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1823672/soundtrack

The music was better than their 'acting.'

I really enjoyed District 9.

I watched it the other day and can't really think of anything good to say about it.

one of the best parts was it was a robocop remake

haha I kind of thought that at the end a little