Hacker Cinema
Chappie
2015 · Film · 120 min
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Every child comes into the world full of promise, and none more so than Chappie: he is gifted, special, a prodigy. Like any child, Chappie will come under the influence of his surroundings—some good, some bad—and he will rely on his heart and soul to find his way in the world and become his own man. But there's one thing that makes Chappie different from any one else: he is a robot.
6 positive2 negative1 mixed13 neutralfrom 22 commenters
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappie_(film)
> because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections
This is quite amusing, because I always could tell the CGI [in the films] off the real deal because it was or too perfect or too imperfect, along with a shitload of a motion blur.
It was so until Chappie when I couldn't distinguish between the green screen and Rogue One when I couldn't distinguish a fully rendered scene.
Also a conterfeit VHS along with a DivX compressed copies (hey, 4700:700 !) always looked... more immersive than the 'real deal' in a theater, heh.
Some anecdata:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30911383
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488958
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
I think elysium isn't an effective sci-fi in the sense that it discusses the effect of technology on mankind. It is just a metaphor for the US/Mexico border.
The only takeaway I got from the movie is that the robots look cool, it's the same robot design from chappie. Both half-baked scifi movies, but I would like to imagine they both exist in the same world.
Chappie was awesome and Elysium was at least entertaining. Anyway, I was trying to think whose aesthetic a dystopian but wacky futuristic tech movie would suit best
2017 interview, https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/looking-back-at-chappie-with-director-neill-blomkamp/
It’s not about AI. Ex Machina’s about AI. Chappie’s not about artificial intelligence – it’s meant to be asking questions about what it means to be sentient ... That doesn’t mean AI, that means sentient at all. If you are sentient, if you are conscious, first of all, what does that mean? Because you’re watching the birth of consciousness with Chappie. ... The main reason for Chappie existing in my mind is because it has the most farcical, weird, comic, non-serious pop-culture tone, that is almost mocking or making fun of the fact that it’s talking about the deepest things you can talk about. The fact that those two things exist in the same film is what the film is about. Because that’s what the experience of life is about. It’s an unknowable question, and no one’s going to answer it for you.
> Movies like Distric 9 and Chappie have shown you can make an effects driven movie for far less that is a critical and commercial success.
District 9 had a budget of $30 million, Chappie had a budget of $49 million. That is a big chunk if money. These are serious ventures.
Compared that if Blomkamp‘s choosen art form were poetry. He could have made his art for a few hundreds of dollar.
Don’t get me wrong! I love those movies. I love that they made them. But they are fundamentally a business. Somebody had to ask “are we going to make this money back?” Because you don’t get that kind of pile of money without answering that question with a very confident yes.
> Check out Corridor Crew in youtube to see what's possible now out of your garage.
Absolutely. I love them too. If you haven’t heard of him yet I also recommend Ian Hubert’s Dynamo Dream movies too. It is incredible what is possible nowadays “on the cheap”.
Yes and no. Yes for big blockbusters like Avatar and Marvel movies. No because CGI tech is being rapidly democritized and lower cost houses are increasingly able to do amazing things. Movies like Distric 9 and Chappie have shown you can make an effects driven movie for far less that is a critical and commercial success. Check out Corridor Crew in youtube to see what's possible now out of your garage. It's amazing, there are so many fun fiction type movies being made today that are equal or higher quality to commercial movies from 10 or 15 years ago.
They have these laws in a movie called Chappie, which was indirectly an AGI.
I am a fan of the film chappie by Blomkamp
> we're awfully sentimental about our own meat bags
As much as I've enjoyed my meat bag and worked towards making it better through different means like diet or weightlifting, the older I get and the more ailments appear, the more I think about being able to live long enough to acquire my new and improved robot body, Chappie [0] style!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappie_(film)
Usually any UI in a movie is bad and drops me back to reality out of the magic of the movie.
There are meaningless percentages with silly labels, animated histograms, so much useless movement, scrolling nonsense, and sometimes even a world map, blinking stuff -- all crammed into one screen. And best of all, the useless extra data is often rendered extra useless with a font size that is too tiny to read without a magnifying glass.
There are movies with nice, (semi) plausible fantasy UIs too! For example, The Midnight Sky (damage assessment, map views etc.), Chappie (firmware upgrade, policebot PoV, etc.), Interstellar (flight controls, robot "debug" displays etc.).
Star Trek LCARS screens have been generally well thought of, but not always. There are weird numbers and "display nonsense" here and there. But, I can believe a starship could be steered with such a touch UI with clearly distinguishable big buttons and clear separation of functions.
Valgeind and vim are both pretty neat looking IMO. Showing the real tools occasionally is something I’ve enjoyed seeing in some recent Sci-Fi movies. Tron Legacy and Chappie are both examples and even though the end result was unrealistic I thought they did a neat job showing the engineer working for years tediously on the project.
I didn't necessarily have anywhere specifically in Africa in mind but I was not thinking about South Africa. Tho if SA is included, definitely something like what Neil Blomkamp made SA look like in District 9, Chappie, et al, is sort-of cyberpunk to me. Love his aesthetic in those movies. Tho that's not exactly what I was going for here.
Don't get what's "great" about these movies. According to IMDb, the ratings are: Synchronicity: 5.5 Lazer Team: 5.7 Southbound: 5.9 The Witch: 6.7 10 Cloverfield Lane: 7.3 Midnight Special: 6.7 The Lobster: 7.1 Hardcore Henry: 6.8 Elstree 1976: 6.1 High-Rise: 5.7 TMNT: Out of the Shadows: 6.0 Swiss Army Man: 7.1 Kubo and the two strings: 8.1
Surprised I didn't see any of the following on that list: ARQ (6.4), Project Almanac (6.4), Self/Less (6.5), Chappie (6.9), Star Trek: Beyond (7.2), Ex Machina (7.7), Train to Busan (7.6), The Martian (8.0).
The use of rotoscoping to deliver realistic 3D animation has been used extensively by Neill Blomkamp for his films: CG characters such as Christopher Johnson (insectoid alien) and Chappie (robot) were animated by rotoscoping an actor's on-set (or on-location) performance rather than suiting the actor up in one of those ping-pong-ball suits and having them gesticulate in an imaginary set in front of a green screen.
Chappie: No. I can't shoot people. Chappie no crimes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappie_(film)
However after District 9, Neil Blomkamp is on a downward trend. His recent movies are much less engaging, and Chappie was really, really bad: it tried to copy the frame of District 9 but every story aspect was much worse and smelled fake kilometers away. Really disappointing after the excellent experience District 9 was.
I found Sunshine quite poor, too. First the whole story makes no sense (even the largest spaceship you could build would anyway be way too small to do anything meaningful, it's so obvious it's preposterous), and the last scene is a deal breaker: after they succeed, you see a woman and a child playing on the snow. Oh, I thought people were starving on Earth, but no they are actually enjoying the snow and winter sports? So what was the big emergency all about? That was stupid.
I want to watch this movie/or someone play this game for a few hours. I can assume that Adam is a human who was put into a robot for some reason. There is some potential there, like Chappie re-imagined.
Primer was great! I liked the gritty, detailed, realistic but fictional engineering in the story as much as anything. That aspect reminds me of the Neill Blomkamp films - District 9, Elysium, Chappie.
Ex Machina is a work of fiction. It says a lot more about its authors than it says anything about humans, artificial intelligence, or sex. In this case, it says that the authors really think female bots are about sex and male bots do not necessarily have to be about sex.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ex-machina-turing-bechdel-test/
The only example of a sexualised male bot in fiction I can think of is Gigolo Joe in AI, and maybe Schwarzennegers' insistence on being nude in Terminator scenes. Chappie, Johnny 5, the Iron Giant, HAL 9000, the nameless robots in the I, Robot movie; none of them had to put up with being a sex object. There is overwhelmingly a huge skew towards sexualised fembots, to the point where being sex objects is their usual definining characteristic in fiction, whereas other male or ambiguous bots have a chance to explore a larger philosophical world in fiction.
And his next film Chappie, "a $60 million contemporary sci-fi movie due to begin shooting in Johannesburg in September" according to the article.