Belinda du Plooy
ORCID: 0001-5036-1814
Engagement Office, Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Abstract
South African-Canadian writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s science fiction film CHAPPiE (2015) tells the familiar story of a robot that becomes sentient. Even though, to Blomkamp’s frustration, the film was largely misunderstood and earned much criticism from the popular and also more critical viewing public upon release, it is a rich text to consider for the way Blomkamp uses the narrative techniques of pastiche, bricolage, assemblage, homage, genre hybridity and sub/intertextual play to construct this story of human existential angst about a future with artificial intelligence (AI). The focus of the speculative narrative is essentially human and familiar themes are addressed. By scavenging from other texts, copying, adapting and playing with metanarratives, Blomkamp assembles a collection of ideas and references that create a globally resonant hybrid tale of humanity’s grand existential uncertainty and hope, set against the backdrop of hyper-realistic and dystopian contemporary South Africa. A combination of reception analysis and close reading is employed here to consider how Blomkamp uses these techniques to engage with the perennial narrative genres of (pulp) science fiction, the religious parable, allegory, fable and the bildungsroman; alongside the enduring themes of parenting, family, belonging and redemption. (193)
Key words: CHAPPiE, Neill Blomkamp, assemblage, homage, bricolage, pastiche, South Africa, artificial intelligence (AI)
Introduction
South African-Canadian writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s science fiction (SF) film CHAPPiE (2015) tells the story of a robot that becomes sentient. On the surface, Blomkamp provides audiences with yet another speculative film iteration on the familiar theme of humanity’s interrelationship with, dependence on, or endangerment by technological creations of our own making. Following on his Academy Award winning social satire District 9 (2009) and SF block-buster Elysium (2013), CHAPPiE was poorly received by audiences; being perceived as a flawed, clumsy and confusing film about artificial intelligence (AI). But, as Blomkamp noted in interviews, audiences ‘didn’t get its dual experimental tone of “pop, colour lunacy” mixed with serious questions about the nature of existence’ (Lambie, 2017; Shirey, 2015; Godfrey, 2021), because, though having a robot as central character, the film is not, in fact, about AI at all. As Alex Godfrey (2021) noted, the film is ‘an absurdist fairy tale about an exploited innocent in a harsh adult world’.
The audience reaction devastated Blomkamp so much that he did not direct feature films again until 2021 (Shirey, 2021), with Gran Turismo released in 2023. CHAPPiE’s failure also resulted in Blomkamp being removed as director from the fifth iteration of the Alien franchise and a reboot of RoboCop (Graham-Lowery, 2023; Shirey, 2012). Yet despite its initial reception, there is much to reconsider in CHAPPiE, which may grow to become a cult classic (underrated, often transgressive or campishly over-the-top films that initially fail at the box office) as it ages and new audiences rediscover it. The artistic merits of the film have been underappreciated and its previously ignored virtues need further exploration. Bryant Sculos (2015) noted that there are ‘sophisticated, nuanced, and hugely relevant aspects of this film … how we use CHAPPiE will determine the radicality of its legacy’. AJ Black (2024) said that CHAPPiE is District 9’s ‘slightly softer little brother’ and ‘the most personal of Blomkamp’s films’, while noting that the film was ‘a little ahead of its time’, when considering the conversations about AI that is currently taking place. Cilliers van den Berg (2020:1164) reads Blomkamp’s three films (District 9, Elysium and CHAPPiE) as a trilogy in which Blomkamp engages in exponential ways with the concepts of becoming and utopianism, with CHAPPiE as the culmination of this developing theme in Blomkamp’s oeuvre.
In CHAPPiE Blomkamp narratively combines a variety of techniques, such as pastiche, bricolage, assemblage, homage, genre hybridity and sub/intertextuality to engage with the central theme of sentience and what it means to be human, creating what he called a ‘grand existential joke’ (Blomkamp in Lambie, 2017), or what Vince Mancini (2015) calls ‘an absurdist lark’. In this article, using a combination of reception analysis and textual close reading, I engage with this underrated film and consider how, through using the narrative techniques mentioned above, Blomkamp engages with perennial narrative genres, like (pulp) science fiction, the religious parable, allegory, fable and the bildungsroman, and with enduring narrative themes, specifically parenting, families, belonging and redemption.
Audience Reception Analysis
The way a text is received speaks to the how rather than the what of its hermeneutical meaning-making process, which is always an interactive process of reading and response between the intention of the artist-creator and the interpretation of the receiving audience (Barbatsis, 2004). In the case of CHAPPiE there was clearly a significant disjuncture between the writer-director’s intent and the audience’s reception of and response to the film text. As Janet Staiger (1992:89) notes,
People are not always versed in the subtleties of unravelling ironies, finding latent pre-oedipal narrative structures, or deconstructing fallacious binary oppositions which structure propositions. People do not always read cultural texts the way scholars do; audiences are not ideal readers.
Donna Haraway, seminal cyborg thinker and author of the influential A Cyborg Manifesto in the 1980s, acknowledged decades later that her own use of irony as a narrative device was flawed. She said,
I learned that irony is a dangerous rhetorical strategy. Moreover, I found out that it is not a very kind rhetoric, because it does things to your audience that are not fair. When you use irony, you assume that your audience is reading out of much of the same sort of experiences as you yourself, and they are not’ (Markussen et al, 2000:10).
A similar disjuncture may have been at play in the reading of CHAPPiE by audiences upon its release. Noah R Taylor (2015) wrote, ‘the film isn’t even out yet and it’s already on track to be one of the worst reviewed films of the year’. Alex Godfrey (2021) noted that,
[CHAPPiE] arrived in the UK unceremoniously. The single press screening was the day before release, meaning the film had been practically dumped. Only a handful of journalists showed up. The one next to me huffed and puffed and grimaced at the screen while I laughed and teared up. Things did not bode well.
Don Shanahan (2015) said the film ‘lack[s] impact, presence, purpose, distinction, and, worst of all, uniqueness’, that it ‘[does not know] what it is or what it wants to be’ and is a ‘weak retread of … District 9’. Donald Clarke (2015) called it ‘derivative … chaotic, discordant, sentimental and downright ugly’, said that it came across ‘like a work in progress’ and derided its ‘sickening cuteness’.
Three Categories of Criticism
Criticisms of the film broadly fell into three categories. Firstly, commentators identified the film’s correspondences with other speculative robot films, particularly RoboCop and Short Circuit (Bradley, 2015; Clarke, 2015; Juneau, 2016; O’Sullivan, 2015; Shanahan; 2015; Taylor, 2015). Tony Bradly (2015) mistook it for a ‘mash-up’ cliche rather than reading it as a homage to or parody of the vast SF film genre of which Blomkamp is a connoisseur. Blomkamp’s genre-bending technique was mostly not appreciated, for as Eric Juneau (2016) noted, ‘there is too much dissonance between the culture that’s enthralled by AI and the one interested in gangsta life … you can’t combine Menace II Society and Bicentennial Man. It doesn’t work …’. Shanahan (2015) also said that ‘CHAPPiE needs to pick a gear and stick with it because it can’t be both … you can’t put a gun in the hands of a Short Circuit Johnny 5 knock-off in a movie operating in a South African RoboCop setting and get both effects’.
Secondly, criticisms of the film were especially scathing about the stockiness and caricaturishness of the ‘one-note’ and ‘uncompelling’ human characters (Taylor, 2015; Shanahan, 2015). Clarke (2015) said, ‘you have never seen so many talented people looking quite so uncomfortable’. For example, Vincent (Hugh Jackman) is called ‘a cardboard monster’ and both the portrayals of Jackman and Sigourney Weaver (playing Michelle Bradley) are criticised for its ‘daft[ ] one-dimentionality’, ‘ineptitude’ and ‘heavy-handedness’ (Kilkenny, 2015; The Take.com; O’Sullivan, 2015). Juneau (2016) notes that CHAPPiE’s ‘maker’, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) ‘does not have enough personality or backstory to make me care’, whilst the stilted and amateurish acting of Die Antwoord’s Ninja and Yo-landi, is also often criticised, as is the seeming overkill in terms of other stereotypical character portrayals, like drug lord Hippo (Brendan Auret) (Dieter, 2015; Godfrey, 2015; Mancini, 2015). Taylor (2015) said that ‘the first-time actors playing unlikeable gangsters are left to carry far too much of the film’s human element … you never really know who to care about, so you ultimately don’t care about anyone’. Mancini (2015) said ‘it’s like having prefab lunacy exist with bespoke lunacy’.
Thirdly, criticisms focused on the films’ seeming narrative flaws, what many identified as ‘plot holes’, ‘failure of logic’ and the film’s ‘lack of nuance’ and lack of ‘ingenuity and panache’ (Dieter, 2015; atthem77; O’Sullivan, 2015; Han, 2015; Taylor, 2015). These critiques mostly gravitate towards judgements of the realism of or science behind the film’s engagement with AI and its related philosophical questions. Michael O’Sullivan (2015) said it is ‘painful … to contemplate how naively the film treats the concept of AI and robotics’. Similarly, Juneau (2016) said
The ending provokes some agonisingly recondite philosophical questions … no-one wants to acknowledge that the singularity just happened? … It’s just kind of sad – taking these [serious] themes and corrupting them with a cosmic mess of “blings”.
Sculos (2015), however, pointed out early on that ‘CHAPPiE is not a movie about robots or AI … [it] is a movie about humanity’s dialectically creative and destructive potential’.
The fact that the film is a disguised moral fable, allegory or parable may possibly account for the mostly negative popular reception of a film that was packaged and promoted as a mass market SF action-comedy. In a morality tale, fable or parable narrative aspects like character development and plot are often of secondary importance to the axial moral message of the narrative. In CHAPPiE, this is all intentional and carefully crafted narrative technique of the fabulist and speculative auteur, aimed at emphasising the robust and vivid moral life of the anthropomorphised robot, as opposed to the vacuousness of the human characters, alongside the film’s core moral questions about the meaning and value of human life and agency in a precarious world. This construction was perceived by many as ‘a tone of preachiness that, after three films [by Blomkamp], has worn out its welcome’ (O’Sullivan, 2015). One popular reviewer, however, made cursory reference to Blomkamp’s creative intentionality, and his visual homage to the original pulp and cult fiction of 1920s SF comics and graphic novels, as well as 1950s creature feature films and television series by saying that the film is ‘so bad it’s rad’ and ‘I refuse to believe that an auteur like Blomkamp created a film with such a pervasive B-movie aesthetic by sheer accident or tragic misstep. He has made this movie, as it is, entirely on purpose’ (Cinema Siren, 2014).
Expressing his frustration and distress at CHAPPiE’s reception by viewers and critics, Blomkamp said,
What a lot of critics seemed to miss was that it was about the nature-versus-nurture thing, about how an innocent creature is the product of its environment. I thought all that was incredibly powerful … there were many elements that critics in general didn’t pick up on … . One of them is that … it’s not 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. (in Lambie, 2017)
Sigourney Weaver defended Blomkamp and his film against its detractors by saying, ‘this is a meaningful movie about a young robot who cares and feels and is much more human [than human beings]. And they [critics] did not talk about any of the [human] issues, they just talked about what [the film] wasn’t’ (Jagernauth, 2016). As Mancini (2015) noted,
[CHAPPiE] questions and then, implausibly, answers them, with sarcasm-drenched eighties action scenes … it combines brief moments of honest introspection with gleeful gore while retaining that child-like quality of a backyard wrestling video … it’s so dense with irony and subtext you don’t know whether to cheer or cringe.
This is exactly the paradoxical experience and cognitive dissonance that Blomkamp wanted to create in his audience. As Blomkamp explained,
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. … So it’s almost a grand joke, in a sense … existential absurdity. (in Lambie, 2017)
Bricolage, Assemblage, Homage and Pastiche
As the original science-fiction ‘mother’-text, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) is an obvious influence on all creature narratives. Like scientist Victor Frankenstein collects, joins, and animates scavenged body parts, so Blomkamp likewise scavenges and collects narrative strands to create the story of the eponymous robot character CHAPPiE. Blomkamp is a narrative bricoleur par excellence and his fusing together of diverse and disparate items into a unitary whole is a running theme throughout the film. For example, the robot is reassembled over and over from scrap pieces when repeatedly damaged in the field as a police robot, returned to the Tetravaal workshop to be repaired and sent out again. CHAPPiE’s creator, Deon Wilson, calls this repetitive assemblage principle ‘plug and play’.
Furthermore, CHAPPiE’s naïve child-like learning and mimicry is also a form of bricolage, as it picks up disparate ideas, often out of context, from its environment. Blomkamp here plays on, and pays homage to, the seminal ideas of mathematician Alan Turing, who noted that artificial intelligence (AI) should be based on the principles of child development (Kwiatkowski, 2016:223).
Another visual example of bricolage is the gangsters’ ‘lair’, located in an abandoned warehouse in Soweto. It consists of a confused, do-it-yourself collection of jumbled junkyard-like objects, like a child’s playpen, which they rearrange to resemble their idea of a home, but it is clearly not a home – Wilson (2015) calls it ‘a combination of junkyard and playground’.
The dysfunctional family at the heart of the film is also an example of bricolage, as it throws together a group of disparate individuals, namely a hard-core gangster couple, a stranded American Chicano, out of place in Johannesburg, a lost robot child and its ingénue computer-geek creator. Indeed, the film itself is an example of bricolage, as it fluidly moves between the genres of news reportage, documentary, hi-speed action adventure, gritty crime drama, SF fantasy, slapstick comedy, psychological thriller, morality tale and uplifting feel-good film and so ultimately defies definitive categorisation. Narratively speaking, Blomkamp borrows from and creatively combines and mines seminal metanarratives and subtexts as wide-ranging as Frankenstein, Pinocchio, the myth of Prometheus and various biblical stories.
There is also a bricolage union of actors within the film. Blomkamp combines high tech film magic (the main robot character is entirely computer generated, played for stop-motion and voice-over purposes by South African actor Sharlto Copley) alongside the international acting talent of Weaver, Jackman and Patel. Blomkamp sets them alongside the self-referential debut acting performances of local South African music duo Die Antwoord. Ninja (Watkin Jones) and Yo-landi Visser (Anri du Toit) are the music personas of the South African post-millennial fringe anti-establishment rap group, Die Antwoord (The Answer). Die Antwoord for a short while enjoyed a cult-like following, also internationally, for their counter-cultural musical performance art, aimed to shock, offend and disrupt through appropriation and crude portrayals of interwoven pastiches of popular cultural iconography, particularly South African gangster/thug style. Yo-landi and Ninja play themselves in a repetitive act of solipsistic self-creation, in which their real-world musical stage personas are reproduced in the film, without any reference to the fact that these are already roles or created alter egos from another creative space and genre. The filmic simulacra are endlessly reproduced, campishly performed pastiches of their own constructed personas, presented in a repetitive way that is mechanistic and robotic, which dramatically contrasts with the actual robot CHAPPiE, who becomes increasingly human and individualistic.
But CHAPPiE also functions in a subtle way as an homage – a respectful tribute – to SF as an originating oeuvre. That both Weaver (as Ellen Ripley in the Alien-franchise) and Jackman (as Wolverine in the X-Men-franchise) are best known for their portrayals of iconic SF archetypal characters is very important for any metatextual reading of the film, as is the playful irony of having them as supporting characters to the robot CHAPPiE. Weaver and Jackman are the hovering symbolic SF parental figures for both Blomkamp’s film and child-robot. They are arguably present in the film, less for their purposefully crafted one-dimensional portrayals of stock characters, than for what they both iconically represent as placeholders for the vast and expansive filmic SF genre – and CHAPPiE (both film and character) is their symbolic progeny. In a genre meta-reading such as this, the underdeveloped characters that Weaver and Jackson portray are redeemed as central to the ironic SF cult subtext of the film.
The film is also an example of assemblage in the way that it combines seemingly disparate and dissonant components to form a complex and fluid unit that somehow hangs together as a cohesive narrative, while also constantly regenerating itself into something different in front of the viewer’s eyes. As such, the film is a cyborg in and of itself – a hybrid, like the sentient robot protagonist, that is both the same as and more than its component parts – assembled through scavenging acts of bricolage, homage and pastiche. In the discourse of Haraway (1993:272), Blomkamp’s film represents an ironic, non-innocent and blasphemous alternative mythology of kinships of difference, both in its narrative content and themes and in its play with and between the lines of distinct filmic and narrative genres. This sense of ironic assemblage is possibly one of the aspects of the film that has been most crucially missed by popular critics, many of whom have been quite scathing about the film as ‘a mishmash of undercooked ideas and underdeveloped characters’, as ‘spinning too many plot plates for ordinary mortals’, as ‘an action-filled, brightly-coloured enema of goofy entertainment’, and as ‘a misconceived work … an exhausting slog through overly familiar clichés’(Berardinelli, 2015; Marcus, 2015; Andrews, 2015; The Take.com; Sobczynski, 2015).
A Contextualising Synopsis of the Film
The film opens with snippets (bricolage) from television news reports depicting crime and chaos in a dystopian Johannesburg of 2016, setting the background of the narrative: Tetravaal, a large multinational weapons manufacturing company located in South Africa, has created the world’s first robotic police force, called Scouts. Component parts are shipped in from China and assembled in South Africa. A single guard key keeps the system safe from hacking. These robots are so successful that the South African Police Force have been using them extensively instead of human police officers (a pastiche – imitation and replacement). CNN reporter Anderson Cooper (playing himself; pastiche) is shown reporting the following, against visual footage of the police robots in action:
…Before the success of the ubiquitous human sized police robots, there was a bigger bad boy on the block, the Moose. [Its creator] Vincent Moore is a weapons designer and a former soldier. He has a fundamental spiritual issue with artificial intelligence: ‘I have a robot that is indestructible, it is operated by a thinking, adaptable, humane, moral human being’. The hyper-advanced neurotransmitter converts the human operator’s thoughts into the robot’s actions, a departure from the artificial intelligence that governs the Scouts.
Now with interest coming from the US, China, and North Korea, the Scout’s creator Deon Wilson sees a rich future: ‘What really interests me is high level AI, true intelligence, a machine that can think and feel…’.
This introduces the viewer to the two main opponents in the film, robotics engineers Deon Wilson and Vincent Moore, and the moral-ethical dilemmas at the core of the narrative. From the start Deon and Vincent are portrayed as opponents, with their creations, the Scouts and the Moose respectively reflecting this antagonistic relationship that leads to the film’s climactic stand-off battle between CHAPPiE (a then sentient Scout, functioning independently) and the Moose (remotely controlled by its sadistic controller, Vincent). Symbolically, Deon and Vincent represent the oppositional forces of good and evil in the battle for human control over technology.
Early sequences in the film show police Scout Number 22 suffering damage during a police raid when it ‘took an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] to the chest’ and is returned to the Tetravaal workshop for repairs. Deemed irreparable due to its fused chassis and battery it cannot be salvaged. It is earmarked for demolition with stickers reading ‘crush’ and ‘reject’ stuck onto its defective body. The fusion of the chassis and battery can be read as code for the Cartesian binary mind-body duality, leaving the question of spirit, soul or consciousness (sentience) as an open question with which Blomkamp then engages during the rest of the film.
South Africa is presented as a representative microcosm of a generalist dystopian urban landscape. It is a fast-paced, lawless, chaotic world where underworld gangsters rule the streets. The reported action jumps from television news reportage to a getaway chase on a Johannesburg freeway. Four bumbling gangsters in a mini-van (led by Ninja and Yo-landi) have hijacked and robbed a cache of drugs in an act of inter-gang warfare and urban terrorism. However, the high-speed chase through Johannesburg’s streets ruined the drugs and the gangsters are given seven days to raise money to pay back the local drug lord Hippo. Consequently, Yo-landi proposes a plan to hijack the creator of the police robots, Deon, whose information they find on the Internet, and to then steal from him the ‘remote control’ which controls the Scouts.
Deon is promptly hijacked on his way home in the Tetravaal utility van he drives and taken as a hostage to their hide-out where they attempt to force him to switch off the Scouts system. This would deactivate the robots and allow the gang to freely commit a cash-in-transit heist, but Deon refuses.
What the gang does not know is that Deon had just stolen a damaged and dismantled Scout robot from Tetravaal for his own experimental purposes. He is obsessed with creating a sentient robot that is ‘truly alive’. ‘A computer system that might be smarter than a human … I could show it a piece of art and this thing, this being, could judge that art; it could decide if it liked it; it could write music and poetry’, is how Deon pitched the idea to Tetravaal CEO Michelle Bradley. He asked her permission to test his new sentience programme on the defunct Scout that had been written off (Number 22), but she summarily turned him down, laughingly saying, ‘do you realise that you just came to the CEO of a publicly traded weapons company and pitched a robot that can write poems?’.
Like Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein (the prototypical obsessed, mad scientist), Deon stole the broken robot body from Tetravaal for his experiments along with the guard key that controls the Scout programming system. Unbeknownst to the gangsters, they are therefore in possession of the ‘live’ but dying robot in the back of Deon’s van (with enough battery life to last five days), the creator of the robot, the key to the whole Scout police system, and Deon’s untested programme for robotic sentience. Held at gunpoint, driven by fear for his life, and his own hubristic curiosity, Deon reassembles the stolen robot and loads it with his new sentience programme, designed to ‘make[ ] the robot have a mind like a human’. Along with the gangsters (and the viewer) Deon watches expectantly as the robot switches back on and comes to life.
Deon starts to teach the robot language and morals and it responds surprisingly fast, mimicking the psychodynamic behavioural development of a child through various stages of language acquisition. Yo-landi names it CHAPPiE, as in the rhyming colloquialism ‘happy chappy’. At this point the gangsters evict Deon from their hide-out, but he insists on returning to continue to teach and grow CHAPPiE, who is turning into exactly the Turing-like experiment Deon originally intended. Deon instructs CHAPPiE to ‘have respect for me, I am your maker’; ‘I brought you into the world’. Deon returns the following day to find CHAPPiE mimicking everything the gangsters teach it, in addition to rapidly beginning to understand itself and its surroundings. Deon experiences a moment of moral self-insight and anagnorisis when he realises, like any parent does, that in creating a sentient being he also relinquishes his own control over it. Thus, through the desire to create, translated into the act of creation, the creator loses control over his creation. After learning that its battery life is running out and that it will soon ‘die’, CHAPPiE confronts Deon with the eternal existential question, ‘Why do you just make me so that I could die?’. Deon admits to his own limited creative insight when he tells CHAPPiE that, ‘I didn’t make you so you could die, CHAPPiE. … You became so much more than I could ever have imagined. How was I supposed to know that you’d become…you’, thus recognising CHAPPiE’s unique personal identity.
Amid carefully crafted humorous situations, many with great pathos, CHAPPiE is inducted into gangster life by its new family of reprobates, whilst Deon clumsily attempts to instil Asimovian moral lessons as the robot tabula rasa evolves to independence. As Sculos (2015) points out, the audience sees how the moral and ethical development of CHAPPiE transform it into a being with ‘a critical view towards its own beliefs and behaviours’, which none of the other characters seem to have. Sculos (2015) also says that, ‘CHAPPiE reminds us that not all violence is created equal’, a moral dilemma highlighted during the final scenes of the film, when CHAPPiE (having tragically transgressed its own moral code by participating in a violent cash-in-transit heist) faces off with the Moose (remote-controlled by Vincent). In the process Yo-landi (CHAPPiE’s mommy) and Amerika (his big brother) are killed, whilst Deon (his maker/creator) is mortally wounded, leaving CHAPPiE with only Ninja (the betraying father figure). After vanquishing the Moose and Vincent in a decidedly human paradoxical act of both self-sacrifice and rage, CHAPPiE also saves its dying creator, Deon, by taking him to the Tetravaal laboratory where it transfers Deon’s consciousness into a Scout test-robot. Deon in turn saves CHAPPiE, running low on battery life, by transferring CHAPPiE’s consciousness to a discarded Scout body that malfunctioned when Vincent shut down the whole Scout system to validate the use of the Moose.
Deon and CHAPPiE, as sentient robots, flee Tetravaal and disappear into the anonymity of the shacks of Soweto township, presumably to begin a new life together on the run from the authorities; like a hybrid Adam and Eve, banished for (mis)appropriating the knowledge of the gods of technology. Like the biblical Adam and Eve they begin to populate the earth with their own kind when they hack the Tetravaal production line to create a new robot body for Yo-landi and transfer her consciousness into it (which CHAPPiE had downloaded as an experiment when she was alive). The film ends with Yo-landi’s robot head facing the viewer and its eyes blink open in what is a chilling recognition of both the human desire for eternal life and the dangers of technological hubris.
Parenting and the Performance of Gender as Themes in CHAPPiE
From the above synopsis it is clear that parenting is a significant central theme in the film. As Godfrey (2015) noted, ‘clearly this is a film about parenthood – about getting it wrong, getting it right, and seeing your child grow up in a world fraught with dangers’. At first sight, it seems like a deceptively simple and familiar story about rivalries between creators and creations and between parents and children. The film is saturated with mother and father figures and familial subtexts. The most obvious father in the film is Deon, who creates CHAPPiE and insists on being called its ‘maker’, implying a virulent god-complex beneath his seemingly demure exterior. Ninja functions as a second or surrogate father to CHAPPiE (who calls him ‘Daddy’) and the rivalry between the two types of paternal parenting provides much of the dramatic tension, and humour, of the film. Yo-landi (‘Mommy’) is a surrogate mother figure for CHAPPiE, with its ‘original’ mother being Michelle Bradley, in her position as Tetravaal CEO.
But Michelle also functions in a symbolic parental role in relation to Deon and Vincent. As the CEO of Tetravaal, she is the quintessential corporate antagonist to Deon’s individualistic and creative spirit. Early in the film Michelle denies Deon the opportunity to use corporate resources to experiment with his new pet programme, which he believes could make robots sentient. In denying Deon, Michelle is the corporate boundary-setting parental authority figure, whom the individualist Deon then proceeds to defy and rebel against. Vincent Moore is Deon’s symbolic sibling rival for Michelle’s parental attention, in the form of corporate funding for his own robotics pet project, the Moose. Vincent is Deon’s sibling alter ego and nemesis; the Moose is the same for CHAPPiE.
Both Vincent and Deon are father figures in the film (of the Moose and CHAPPiE) and each performs a staid and culturally scripted version (pastiche) of masculinity and fatherhood, though at opposite ends of the spectrum, which results in much of the narrative tension and drama. Vincent’s virulent, normative, bullying, toxic macho-masculinity is juxtaposed with Deon’s demure, sensitive, compliant, alternative masculinity. Vincent is also depicted as stereotypically ‘western’ (with Jackman speaking in his native Australian accent): macho, loud, aggressive, gregarious, dominating. Deon, on the other hand, is depicted as stereotypically ‘Asian’ (speaking with a nondescript British accent): demure, quiet, inward-focused, deferential. Deon is depicted as an asocial loner-figure, the quintessential computer-nerd; he goes home after work to a townhouse converted into a computer laboratory (also reminiscent of a child-like playpen), which he shares with only his robot creations. When he sees Deon searching the internet for information about child development, Vincent patronisingly both feminises and infantilises Deon when he tells him, ‘are you having a baby…you’re still a baby yourself’.
Vincent is an ex-soldier, carries a side arm in the office (though unloaded and just for show, he threatens Deon with it), plays cruel pranks (‘just taking the piss, man’), handles a rugby ball in many of his scenes as an even stronger emphasis of his phallic dominance and jockish, and he condescendingly invites Deon (and everyone else within earshot) to join him at church, thus implying a sanctimonious and self-righteous attitude that ‘God is on his side’. In his first moments on screen (as part of the aforementioned CNN news report), Vincent is introduced with the statement that he has ‘a fundamental spiritual issue with artificial intelligence’. When Vincent later spies on Deon and Yo-landi, as they teach a fully sentient CHAPPiE to paint, he realises the magnitude of what Deon has done and exclaims, ‘what in the name of the Lord!’. When he finally is confronted by CHAPPiE at the end of the film, after having wrought abhorrently violent devastation with his creature, the Moose, Vincent still has the gall to call CHAPPiE ‘a godless freak’. Vincent, who wears a cross around his neck, is clearly associated with patronising and paternalistic institutionalised religion and its associated dogmatism, yet, ironically, it is CHAPPiE who clearly finally functions as the self-sacrificial and redemptive christ-figure, while Vincent is the bearer of death and devastation. I here use the lower case as indicative of a biblical type of redemptive figure, rather than the actual person of Jesus. I return to this point in a later section.
Like Vincent, but in an even more camp, overstated, played-up fashion (pastiche again), Ninja performs a type of virulent, violent, dominant, toxic masculinity in his parental engagement with CHAPPiE – he constantly angrily scolds and corrects it, cruelly calling it humiliating names in order to ‘toughen him up’ for ‘the real world’. He tells it in one scene, while scolding it for playing with a doll that looks like Yo-landi, ‘if you wanna be in the gang, you’ve gotta be cool, like Daddy. Put that thing [the Yo-landi doll] down, now. If you wanna be cool, you’ve gotta act cool. Look at how Daddy walks … [acting out gun-toting gangster swagger]’. Much of the surface humour of the film revolves around CHAPPiE’s mimicry (another layer of pastiche performance) of Ninja and Amerika’s style of gangster-manhood (which is an exaggerated performance in itself), and the dismantling, through satiric humour and irony, of these performances as CHAPPiE’s innocence leads it (and the viewer) to recognise and reject the insincere performances of stereotypical gendered roles.
On the other hand, there is Yo-landi, who, despite being a hard-core gangster and killer like Ninja and Amerika, performs the typically protective and nurturing motherly role in relationship to child-like CHAPPiE. In fact, she over-performs the role to the extent that it can only be read as a dark parody. Yo-landi continually defends CHAPPiE against Ninja’s abuse, though she does not actually protect it from Ninja. She says to Ninja, ‘he’s not stupid, he’s just a kid’, ‘he’s just a child’ and when CHAPPiE returns home after being abandoned by Ninja, Yo-landi nurses it and tends to it with the words ‘ag shame’ as she wipes its brow and fixes its broken ear with duct tape, like a mother would put plasters or salve on a child’s scrapes and bruises. One of both the strangest and most touching scenes in the film occurs then. Yo-landi and CHAPPiE are seen in bed, snuggling under the covers, in a performance (pastiche) of the typical scene when a mother tucks her child into bed for a bed-time story, while teaching lessons, soothing heartaches, and explaining big life questions. It is then the lessons about identity, acceptance, belonging, the soul and death that Yo-landi here teaches it that drives CHAPPiE’s later decisions and actions (capturing and transferring human consciousness and creating a robot body for Yo-landi) to attain eternal life and perfect (re)union with its mommy. The dialogue is as follows:
[Yo-landi tenderly reads to CHAPPiE from the children’s book, Black Sheep and Little Bit, which Deon gave him.]
Yo-landi: ‘All the sheep in McGooville were white. But Able was a black sheep. Do you know what’s a black sheep?’
CHAPPiE: ‘No.’
Yo-landi: ‘It’s like when you’re different to everyone else.’
CHAPPiE: ‘It’s like me, I look different from you and Amerika and the boys.’
Yo-landi: ‘Ja, but it’s not so much how you look, its special, like what’s inside, that’s what makes you different. See, it’s who you really are inside, your soul.’
CHAPPiE: ‘CHAPPiE’s inside here.’
Yo-landi: ‘Ja, see the outside, this, this is just temporary. When you die, the soul inside goes to the next place. The thing inside, see, that’s what Mommy loves. Mommy loves you’.
Yo-landi’s curious immediate and gleeful immersion in the mother role can possibly be seen as a plot flaw, but can equally be read as a plot device central to the fabulist nature of the film, especially when the stereotypical natures of the other characters are also considered. But most disturbing about Yo-landi’s character is her own tomboyish childlikeness, combined with overt sexualisation. For example, she dresses childishly, wearing skimpy shorts and t-shirts with images of cats on them (obvious sexual innuendo here), but handles weapons with skill and the clear intent to kill. Her maternal nurturance is therefore more like the imitating gendered role play of a child playing with a doll than that of a real mother. This possibly makes her even more subtly malevolent, volatile and untrustworthy as a parent than the openly-aggressive Ninja – she does, after-all, not prevent CHAPPiE from participating in the cash-in-transit heist and it was, in fact, her original idea to use CHAPPiE for this violent crime.
The cognitive dissonance created in the viewer, by seeing these pastiches of traditional gendered parental roles played out by these irreverent degenerates, gives the film a sense of disturbing absurdity and, paradoxically, simultaneously both a removed hyper- and non-realism. Not only does Blomkamp confront the viewer with the absurdity of a robot considering its soul, but also the ethical dissonance of reprehensible criminals communicating messages of love and care. The assemblage of ill-fitting, even illogical, narrative components carries the larger narrative whole of the film, which revolves around the voluntary choice of assembly (kinship, care, love, sacrifice) between individuals.
I already cursorily mentioned seminal cyborg theorist Donna Haraway, so I would be remiss to not mention that Blomkamp’s film, though in many ways adhering to Haraway’s ideas about cyborgism as an alternative ironic mythology, also diverges significantly from Haraway’s ideas, most specifically in its approach to the narrative centrality of typical oedipal family dynamics. Haraway said that ‘the cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family … nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar’ (1993:273). She discounted the significance of father figures in the cyborg counter-myth, since she said,
The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (1993:278).
Blomkamp, unlike Haraway, acknowledges the centrality in the human imaginary complex of these seminal mythologies of familial relationality, both positive and negative. He therefore also speculates that sentience (or at least, our human interpretation thereof, which is all that we have access to) is inextricably linked with such complexes of belonging and origin and, despite its absurdity, creates a universally relatable scenario accessible to his viewers, irrespective of the quality of their own experiences of being parented or of parenting.
For the sentient CHAPPiE the ultimate goal is to be reunited with its surrogate mother figure, whom it finds in Yo-landi, as the object of its oedipal desire. As they bury Yo-landi’s human body, CHAPPiE says (referring back to their bed-time Black Sheep conversation), ‘it’s just a temporary body, Mommy. I’ll make you a new one, you don’t have to go to the next place’, which also reiterates what it says earlier in the film to Deon: ‘I want to live, I want to stay here with Mommy. I don’t want to die.’ The burial scene is an assemblage of intriguingly many layers of pastiche and simulacra. Yo-landi’s body is folded in a shroud and laid in a grave, with a Barbie-type doll look-alike of herself (with which CHAPPiE played earlier in the film) laid on her chest and buried with her. Here she is simultaneously Yo-landi the rock music persona played by and playing herself in the film, also signified by the Yo-landi-image on the Die Antwoord merchandised t-shirt that Ninja wears beside her grave. She is simultaneously Yo-landi the dead killer-gangster character in the film; Yo-landi in her mommy incarnation; and she is Yo-landi the doll who is CHAPPiE’s plaything. Like she played the games of ‘mommy’ and ‘house’ with it, in the final instance, CHAPPiE is the player (creator) and she the plaything (creation) in an imaginary game of relationships and belonging. This is carried through into Yo-landi’s final incarnation in the last scenes of the film, where she is the robot Yo-landi that CHAPPiE rather biblically creates ‘in its own image’ (therefore pastiche again) when it hacks Tetravaal’s Scout production line. The familiar theme of the creature turned creator comes back to haunt the viewer, as the spirit of Yo-landi returns as her consciousness is resurrected via her new robot body, and the game (originally Deon’s sentience experiment) becomes dangerously real. This cyclical play with pastiche is also reflected in the resurrection of Deon, whom CHAPPiE saves by transferring Deon’s consciousness into a Scout robot body. Through these two autonomous creative acts CHAPPiE finally marks itself as fully sentient (experiencing feelings of longing for belonging) and in response creates a pastiche or imitation of a ‘blasphemous’ (borrowing from Haraway again (1993:277)) (un)holy cyborg family: child-creator CHAPPiE, killer-mommy Yo-landi and maker-daddy Deon.
Family and Fable in CHAPPiE
The themes of the dysfunctional family unit and the surrogate family resonate with a long narrative tradition that is central to contemporary imaginary complexes, dating back to the earliest mythologies of many cultures. When read within and against this extensive narrative tradition of substitute and dysfunctional family themes, CHAPPiE is ultimately a story about childhood (though it is most certainly not a children’s movie), about the perennial theme of the loss of innocence and about the ultimate existential betrayal of the creature by its creator, the vulnerable by its protector and the child by the parent. It is also about conceptualising the creation of alternative kinships and relationships of belonging, despite the inherent vulnerability and precariousness of life. CHAPPiE is, therefore, part of the long tradition of coming-of-age narratives, of the bildungsroman genre, and of narratives of hope about the triumph of the underdog, the marginalised and the downtrodden. Movie reviewer Violet LeVoit (2015) correctly identifies in CHAPPiE ‘a bildungsroman for the transhuman age’.
CHAPPiE is also fundamentally presented to the viewer as a very traditional magical fable, with a Pinocchio subtext (Berardinelli, 2015; Juneau, 2016; Kilkenny, 2015). This classic children’s story was originally written in the 1880s by Italian author Carlo Collodi, but today is most memorably told in Disney’s animated feature film Pinocchio (1940), Robert Zemeckis’ live-action Pinocchio (2022) and Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s stop-motion Pinocchio (2022). When read as a fable in the vein of Pinocchio, CHAPPiE is significantly also a spiritual (if not explicitly religious) allegory or moral parable which only masquerades as a tale of high-secular hyper-realism. Blomkamp has indeed been quoted as saying that CHAPPiE is ‘a spiritual movie’ (Goller, 2015).
When viewed within a spiritual and religious context, there are at least four clearly identifiable biblical references in CHAPPiE: Adam and Eve and the Fall, the first murder when Cain slayed his brother Able, the triumph of David (CHAPPiE) over Goliath (the Moose) and the image of Christ as redeemer of humanity. I have already mentioned the ironic subtext of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. Like David killed Goliath with a slingshot, CHAPPiE, diminutive in relation to the hulking Moose, which looks like a mechanical fusion of amphibian and dinosaur, destroys the Moose by agilely attaching a limpet mine to the Moose’s bulky body. The tale of Cain and Able is implied in the Black Sheep book that Yo-landi reads to CHAPPiE, in which the sheep’s name is Able, which also indicates ability, here maybe the god-like ability to have and give life. Adam and Eve desired God’s knowledge; as David desired Bathsheba and brought the wrath of God upon himself by having her husband killed. Able was killed by Cain because of sibling rivalry and jealousy. Human hubris is central to all these tales, as it has been in many other narratives going back as far as the Greek myth of Prometheus. The legend of Prometheus is then another major subtextual metanarrative for CHAPPiE – one also invariably remembers that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’.
The narrative subtext of Prometheus’ daring and defiant theft of fire (symbolic of technology and progress) from the gods as a gift for humanity (and his subsequent punishment) is ever-present in the hubris of both the characters of robot-creators Deon and Vincent. The stolen robot is in turn stolen from its thieving creator, Deon, by the gangsters. Vincent also abducts CHAPPiE to steal the guard key by means of which he shuts down all the operative police scouts and animates his own mercenary creation, the Moose. Early in the film Vincent’s pitch of the Moose to the police force is rejected, because, as one of the police officials says, ‘it’s overkill … it’s going to [have to] get a helluva lot worse for us to consider [the Moose]’. By shutting down the Scouts (thus eliminating the opposition), Vincent creates the optimal ‘much worse’ circumstances necessary for his own creation to thrive – possibly the ultimate act of psychotic hubris. The subtext here is that the actions of the forces for good (Deon) and the forces of evil (Vincent) are mirror images of one another and that the assumed difference between them may, in fact, only be negligible.
When the film is read as a moral fable, CHAPPiE also functions as a symbolic Everyman of sorts, an allegorical stock character from medieval morality plays. As soon as Deon reanimates the stolen robot, Yo-landi names it CHAPPiE, playing on the rhyming slang ‘happy chappy’, an expression derived from the English term ‘chap’, meaning man or guy, in the sense of denoting ‘everyman’, an indistinguishable and representative ‘one of the bunch’. CHAPPiE is then indeed presented as an incarnation of Everyman – a character with whom anyone can associate and to whom everyone can relate. Much of the central part of the film is about the gangsters’ attempts to induct (read exploit) CHAPPiE as a member of their gang, where personal identity and individuality are superseded by conformity, compliance and performance. This presents the familiar moral paradox that, in being like everyone else (belonging), CHAPPiE is also potentially a victim of forces that destroy its uniqueness and individuality and which can potentially be induced to dangerously transcend ethical and moral boundaries for the sake of belonging.
CHAPPiE as Religious Parable: The Redemptive christ-image
I end my discussion with what seems to be largely absent from discussions of the film, yet should be obvious to the astute and seasoned film viewer. This is the fact that CHAPPiE is clearly a christ-figure, signalling redemption. As already mentioned, I here used the lower case christ to indicate the depiction of a redemptive figure like the biblical figure, rather than a representation of the actual biblical Jesus. Kwiatkowski (2016:219) explains that ‘Western civilisation has recognised the redemptive potential in various technologies for ages … popular representations of robots in SF works could be understood through the concept of the image of God (imago Dei)’. The tagline of the film is a first clue to the redemptive role of CHAPPiE – it says that ‘humanity’s last hope isn’t human’. Anton Karl Kozlovic (2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2016) has noted that the christ-figure is an especially familiar theme in SF films, specifically because these narratives so often depict situations in which humanity must face its own destruction and destructiveness. Kozlovic argues that the allegorical filmic christ-figure image, or archetypal christomorphic patterning, is a ‘legitimate pop culture phenomenon’ and part of ‘a living meta genre’ of ‘holy/sacred subtexts’ or ‘divine infranarratives’ that allow for ‘anonymous religiousness’, while communicating familiar spiritual, moral or ethical messages (2004b:1, 2, 4, 23; 2005:18).
Kozlovic identified twenty-five characteristics of the typical filmic christ-figure (2004a, 2004b, 2005), most of which are present in CHAPPiE. I will give a brief summary of these characteristics to show how CHAPPiE, as christ-figure pastiche, indeed fits a spiritual metatextual reading of the film as a religious parable. Kozlovic notes that the filmic christ-figure character usually has an odd or obscure birth or origin (CHAPPiE is a police robot, created by a weapons company) and interesting infant or childhood incidents (CHAPPiE’s Turing-like development is a jumble of such events). The christ-figure is innocent or has child-like naivety, reminding of the biblical injunctions that the meek will inherit the earth and that children will be first in the Kingdom of God. CHAPPiE’s naivety and childlikeness is indeed the central charm of the film and the robot character. The christ-figure is also always an outsider – as the only existing sentient robot, CHAPPiE belongs nowhere, it is neither fish nor fowl; it is no longer a member of the police force, but neither is it really a member of the criminal gang.
The christ-figure resembles a human but is more than human (in but not of the world), which is visually apparent in the human-like figure and voice of CHAPPiE, but also in its general strangeness in its surroundings. The christ-figure always has a dual nature of some kind – CHAPPiE’s machine body and human consciousness/sentience. The christ-figure usually undergoes some form of baptism rite. In CHAPPiE’s case it is baptism of fire when vagrants throw a Molotov cocktail at it in one scene as they chase and mock it (again marking it as an outsider and outcast, spurned by even the most marginalised of society). The christ-figure experiences some form of divine intervention (CHAPPiE’s maker, Deon, bestows it with sentience) and it has a specific mission or raison d’être. CHAPPiE’s mission initially is to be ‘fully human’, later it is to save its own life when it learns it only has five days to live, which later extends to saving others (Yo-landi and Deon) and then all of humanity, as is implied by the film’s tagline. The christ-figure changes the established order of its time and place as a result of relinquishing self-interest and leave improved people or situations behind – CHAPPiE destroys evil (Vincent and his creation the Moose) and cripples corporate and state power (Tetravaal’s Scouts are discontinued and human police officers are reinstated) as a result of its willingness to sacrifice itself to save Deon and Yo-landi, thereby creating the potential for all human life to be prolonged eternally.
The christ-figure usually has a moment of triumphalism akin to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. The initial enthusiastic approval with which the Scouts are welcomed narratively serve this purpose: the Police Commissioner is shown at a press conference, saying ‘today we usher in a new day, one that represents the end of violence, the end of corruption and the start of a rebirth of our city’. But the christ-figure is inevitably ungratefully spurned or rejected by those whom they save or help and is often unfairly treated and accused of, or punished for, things they had not done, thus becoming a scapegoat. The Black Sheep bedtime story may be read to apply here. CHAPPiE is blamed for the police’s Scout system crashing (even though this is the work of Vincent) and when the gangsters commit the cash-in-transit heist, CHAPPiE (staunchly committed to non-violence) is blamed for the chaos, looting and violence that ensue and spread to the whole city. The film also starts with news reportage interviews with AI experts who condemn ‘CHAPPiE’s left turn’ (towards crime), thus setting the viewer up for the narrative arc of the character, from saviour (‘the rebirth of our city’) to social outcast, back to resurrected saviour (‘humanity’s hope’).
The christ-figure also usually has a desert-like encounter with temptation and/or a Gethsemane-like encounter with desolation. After being abandoned by Ninja and Amerika, and subsequently attacked by a group of vagrant youths, CHAPPiE is pictured sitting dejectedly on a hill-top overlooking Johannesburg, symbolising both the moment in which Jesus was tempted by Satan and Jesus’ moment of deep existential abandonment and loneliness in Gethsemane. The christ-figure is then inevitably involved in some form of willing self-sacrifice. CHAPPiE faces down and destroys the Moose, thereby sacrificing its own values of non-violence and its own already diminishing life – it tells Deon and Yo-landi, ‘I’m going anyway, my battery is getting finished. I’m gone, Mommy’. This self-sacrifice is often associated with physical and/or psychological suffering, even torture akin to the crucifixion – CHAPPiE is petrol bombed by vagrants, Vincent removes CHAPPiE’s arm with an angle grinder and the battle with the Moose is tortuous, particularly because CHAPPiE here acts against its own non-violent values and must see its family members hurt and killed. This is then followed by a literal or symbolic death (CHAPPiE, along with all the other Scouts, malfunction and die when Vincent destroys the Tetravaal system) and a miraculous resurrection (CHAPPiE’s consciousness is finally transferred to another Scout body).
The christ-figure often has associates, helpers or disciples (the gangsters and Deon), including a Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene figure (Yo-landi fulfils both roles), a betraying Judas figure (Ninja), and a John the Baptist-like ‘pointing prophet’ (Kozlovic, 2004b:13), which ironically here is Vincent, who exclaims ‘what in the name of the Lord’ when he first sees a sentient CHAPPiE. The christ-figure is also often associated with miracles or signs of some kind, for example, the way CHAPPiE’s severed arm is instantly replaced with another through ‘plug and play’ technology, the way it finds its way back to the hideout after being abandoned by Ninja (it has GPS) and the way it resurrects itself, Deon and Yo-landi through the physical transferral of consciousness, thereby accessing the possibility of eternal life.
Conclusion
Neill Blomkamp’s film CHAPPiE received much criticism upon its release, to the extent that it seriously harmed his reputation and career prospects. But I argue here, along with Blomkamp himself, that the nuanced value of the film is lost when it is read as merely a SF robot movie about AI. As a result of such readings, the film in an ironic way inadvertently and unintentionally became what the main robot character was portrayed as, ‘outcast, maligned, mistreated, misunderstood’ (Godfrey, 20121). While delivering abundantly on the ‘spectacle aspect’ required of SF action films (Taylor, 2015), the film subversively engages with eternal existential human questions, what Blomkamp calls the ‘nature-versus-nurture’ dilemma (in Lambie, 2017), and with what concepts like family and belonging means. As Sculos (2015) noted,
The rhetorical question that CHAPPiE demands us to evaluate [is] how could we possibly live rightly under conditions of instrumentalisation, rationalisation, and automation of both technology and human(e) life … when automation, efficiency, and technical rationality become the driving forces of society, the danger is not that technology will become self-aware, empathetic or disobedient but that humanity will cease to be.
Blomkamp asks these questions by using a complex mixture of narrative techniques – pastiche, bricolage, assemblage, homage, genre hybridity and inter/subtextual play in a hyper-real, syncretic style of ‘bracing, loopy, full-blooded’, ‘candy-coated madness’ and ‘deliberate, gleeful goofiness’ (Godfrey, 2012; Mancini, 2015, 2021). In the final instance, CHAPPiE, the robot, can be read as an ironic redemptive christ-figure, asking deep existential questions about the need for the salvation of humanity. CHAPPiE, the film, is then a religious allegory and spiritual fable, couched as a Bildungsroman, experienced by the viewer through exposure to the absurd moral and ethical development of the central robot character. Upon reconsidering the film and Blomkamp’s intent when making it, it may indeed be appropriate to state, as Mancini did (2021), that ‘the world owes Neill Blomkamp an apology’.
Notes: The author declares there are no competing interests to declare.
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