Theodicy and Chappie (2015) w/ Papa Alpaca: Ep. 562

0:00Save with digital deals at Vons and Albertsons. This week at Vons and Albertsons, Ginny O, 93% lean ground turkey is 399 per pound, sold in a 3 pound tray with digital coupon limit two packages. And a 1 pound package of strawberries is 199 with digital coupon. Plus Kellogg's giant size cereal, 22.6 to 29.5 ounces, selected varieties are 299 each, with digital coupon limit three. Hurry in! Visit Vons or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at McDonald's. The main thing in the live is like this. You're not in the butterfly flattening wing. They're down in the forest. They're gonna cause a tree fall. Let it 5,000 miles away. Man, if they don't see it, nobody.

1:02You know what I mean? No, man. It's like you're on the other store. And you get to like this. It's like that. That's the way it might be. Like a day on piano. Man, you don't get it. No matter, man. I'm gonna have to go home. I'm gonna have to go home. All right, today's episode is something a little bit different than the last couple. There's another media review episode. Papa Apaka is back on to discuss Chappy. A film that I'll be honest, I thought I'd seen Turns out I haven't, which was much more interesting than one might initially think. This movie is fundamentally a discussion about our relationship to our creator. Did God make us just to suffer? What is the point of having consciousness if we were ultimately doomed to die? Made by Neil Blomkamp, South African director, did a number of different films, most famously district nine. But this movie has a lot to it.

2:03I think you're gonna enjoy it. So stick around here what we have to say. Of course, these episodes are sponsored, Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching. I just got a ping this morning that someone joined the group chat and called me gay, which means that some of you are listening to my ads. If for some reason you aren't familiar with it, join Axios, you get to be strong, you get fitness programming, and you get access to me, which means you can call me a homosexual on the internet. Face to face, so to speak. If you got checked out, of course, these episodes are also available behind a paywall on Substack, Gumroad, and Patreon if you want them early with no ads. Anyway, here's the full show. All right, Pop out back. Welcome back to the J-Burn show. How are you doing, man? Furious, furious at the discourse. The Halo, you know, I'm so glad they killed 343 in Halo Studios, because I'm so sick of this discussion. Like, oh, humans are at four runners. Humans were always four runners. The only reason they're not four runners now is because Franco Conner wanted to sell a game franchise,

3:04add in finitum, and you just beat master chief to death. And I'm glad that period of our life is over. Maybe we can move forward with something where like, you know, like a sopranos or whatever, it was all a dream. But other than that, I'm doing well. Here's the thing, this is not supposed to be a discussion about Halo, but we're gonna have a discussion about Halo. I actually think Reach was a good game, unpopular opinion in some circles, but we were done. Nothing more needed to be said. That story was done. We had a little bit of a prequel, some side stuff. It was finished, we saved the world. And there were trends that were interesting for a sort of spin-off title, that when taken to their logical extreme, completely erased the identity of what made Halo interesting, and I think Halo 4 was the last game I ever preordered.

4:07I remember, I was in high school, maybe late middle school, I can't remember. No, I was in high school. Super excited. And then got home and I was like, this sucks. And I was just done with Halo. Yep. Yeah, Halo Infinite, I didn't finish. I think I played like 20 minutes, I was like, this sucks. What is the point? But, you know, it was a nice period of my life. I paid for a little bit of my college with some tournament winnings from, you know, my Halo 3 team. And, you know, climbed the ranks in that game, put way too many hours into it back when I was a cheeky little in-sell, but, I don't know. I think the appeal is worn off. It's fun to get together with the guys and do like a retro game night where we just have a land. We saw, I saw friends who were like, we have like 10 TVs in the dude's house, and we just do a massive land party with all the local bros, but, other than that. I remember getting into like a very serious, seemingly life or death arguments

5:07over who was screen-sheeting. But, that was a deep aspursion on your character. And, I know 100% who did it. You're listening. I know you are. I'm not gonna say your name, but you're listening to this and you were screen-sheeting the whole time. All right. We're here to talk about a movie, not to air a personal 15-year-old gaming grievances. Yeah. So, you have been delving into, I mean, up until recently, look, I didn't contact you before, or I did contact you before you watched Infidel's, which to be fair, Art House, you know, very niche movie. But you have been analyzing some like really great movies. Like there was that one about the guy that's like, you know, goes to the buy you and gets demon possessed with like Angel, Ethan. Yeah. I watched that after you were talking. I was like, dang, this is a sweet movie. Wild film. But you've been ignoring a really important part

6:07of American and South African film history, which is the Neil Blomkamp sci-fi trilogy. Now, it's not really a trilogy. They're all disconnected stories. But the quintessential film in this, the sci-fi adventure that Neil Blomkamp provides is a movie called Chappy. And I asked you to watch it and to let me come on and spark out about it, because I find this movie absolutely fascinating. Yeah, so this is sort of, and after watching this, almost immediately after watching this, I talked to the Farrell historian and came up with this phrase, the South African Cinematic Universe, which I'm gonna go with, because I think it describes these sort of three films, which are, if I've got this correct, District 9 Chappy in Elysium. Elysium is probably the worst. There's some interesting elements to it, but having re-watched it fairly recently, it's very, very basic.

7:10It's basically just rich people bad. District 9, I think actually has a lot going on in it. That might make another interesting discussion, Paka, if you're up for it, a later date. Always. But as I was saying, I thought that I'd seen Chappy, like if you would have asked me two weeks ago, be like, yeah, I saw that movie. I had not seen it. I had seen Elysium and got them sort of mixed up. But yeah, I watched this film for the first time just a few days ago, and like, don't get me wrong. I think we're probably on the same page, Paka. It's not, it's not an earth house film. The film isn't, you know, incredible, but what's really interesting about it is the moral framework it sets up, and the disconnect between what it is trying to tell you and what it shows you. Yeah, and that's like my overriding theory based on just these three movies. You know, you gotta take them in a vacuum because Neel's done other stuff, like superhero films and whatever, different universe.

8:11But these three films all hint at this idea that while Neel is still kind of trying to tell, he's intentionally towing like a Hollywood line of storytelling where he's being very didactic with the script, like you were mentioning Elysium, right? Elysium, all the rich people built a halo and like moved off planet to live on the halo, and just kind of like make fun of the plebs from orbit. And you know, the Matt Damon character tears that all down because it turns out like, you know, Neel tells a story that has these accidentally true things. Like he's channeled into the muse. He's in the Akashic record drawing down hidden truths and regardless of what his intention of the film was, like these truths kind of come through in the final result of the movie. Like with Elysium, it's like, well, okay, so we tore down all the rich people and we stole their like secret immortality devices that can cure any disease.

9:12But the world is still overpopulated and we really don't have an answer for that. So I guess everyone dies of famine now. Like, you know, District 9, it's supposed to be this kind of like apartheid tale, right? Like a parable about the banter who's coming down from Nigeria and they're like more or less the perons. And you know, we're all not that much different anyway and they were really treated poorly, except they really were different. They all had very different motivations than what the humans in Johannesburg assumed they had. And the only way to really relate to them and to understand them was to become biologically like them yourself and lose every bit of your humanity towards becoming the prong. So like, Neil, you know, it's not the lesson, that's not what you're supposed to come away with, District 9, thank you. But the way the script and the movies reveal themselves to the viewer, tell a different tale than I think what was intended. Yeah, and that's kind of a fascinating dynamic. It's actually somewhat similar to my reasons

10:16for liking films like the Deneville and Nune films or the Odyssey, which is like, look, yeah. The like technical script level, like if you were just literally looking at, you know, the themes on like the Wikipedia article, it would be pretty gay. But there's some sort of like unspoken premise or very easy to pull out conclusion that makes them really interesting. Save with digital deals at Vons and Albertsons. This week at Vons and Albertsons, Ginny O, 93% lean ground turkey is 399 per pound. Sold in a three pound tray with digital coupon limit to packages. And a one pound package of strawberries is 199 with digital coupon. Plus Kellogg's giant size cereal, 22.6 to 29.5 ounces, selected varieties are 299 each with digital coupon, limit three. Hurry in, visit Vons or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.

11:17So this film takes place in again, the South African cinematic universe. It's this sort of near future Johannesburg crime is running rampant. And in response, the police have partnered with a company, let me check my notes, Tetra, Tetra, Vall where basically they have these sort of robot police officers scouts. And we see that they are just laying waste to criminals. They're practically impervious to most gunfire and they're just go it in there shooting people up. Like the opening, opening action scene is just robots with like two or three commandos, like blowing people away. It's sort of like this movie and this is going to sound stupid is like, it's like short circuit, robot cop. And then yeah, basically just those two films.

12:20But point is, right, that's the sort of setup. You know, Johannesburg, the set by crime. And we learned in this company, there's sort of two different factions, two different, I guess projects. There's the scouts, which are completely and totally autonomous that are already in use. And those are headed up by this guy, Dion, who's an Indian engineer. His rival is a former soldier, more huge actmen. And his project is this massive sort of human mech robot suit. Controlled by human operators. But because the scout project is going so well, no one's interested in Hugh Jackman's project. So this is sort of one of the most interesting, I guess you could say conflicts within the movie. Because this movie beats you over the head with the fact that Hugh Jackman, I'm just gonna call him Hugh Jackman,

13:22is a scumbag. He's the worst guy in the world. Because he thinks AI is an abomination against God and that killing machines should be controlled by a human being. Which, okay, the movie is tried to tell you that that is bad. However, in application, he is proven entirely right. He is justified through the course of this movie. Yeah, it's Sigourney Weaver as the girl boss of this Tetraval company. And they've got contracts now. The whole world is seeing how good Johannesburg has become now that they have robots that they can outsource any virtuous violence to. And so she's in this mode of we're scaling, we're hyper scaling, we found a product that worked. We're gonna keep going with that. And then Hugh Jackman's character, he's the noble warrior. And it's so funny. He's like a jerk, the entire movie.

14:24But they do find time for him to invite people to church. And he's almost like a stand-in for kind of the American. It's like from the GWAT era. So he's going to work, he's got a gun on his holster. He's like open-carrying in the office. Yeah. And so he represents this faction of we cannot outsource violence. We have to be the ones that swing the sword. But the presentation is just from a director that wants to pathologize that ideation in every way possible by inflecting any reasonable point he can make with some sort of unappealing characteristic. And then you have Dion, the Indian programmer who made the scout program. He's the one that's building the robots that everyone wants to buy. And he doesn't care about their effectiveness to fight crime.

15:27He doesn't care about the tetraval sales. His only interest is in doing something, in creating a new form of life. They talk about this biological step in human evolution into digital life forms. And so Dion is wholly engrossed in just that creative process and seeing where it can get him. And so everything around him is just kind of orbiting that goal. Yeah, and that's, I hate to say that, but that theme of consciousness is one that runs through this entire movie, especially at the end. But when I say they're laying it on thick with Hugh Jackman, it really cannot be overstated. He's not an expert in the same way. He's a soldier. And he worked at DARPA, but there's multiple points where people are basically, yeah, you didn't go to some high-end university. So why do you think you should be leading this project?

16:28Which is interesting. Again, we have an element of that sort of, I guess you could say, a leadism is perhaps not the best term, it's sort of credentialism. And he is explicitly religious. Before he, at the kind of climactic moment of the movie, suits up and enters the sort of human to digital interface to control this giant robot, the moose. He's crossing himself. And when he expresses his objection to artificial intelligence, it's in theological terms. He says, this is an abomination to God. And of course, he is devillate. So he's a jerk. But he's not that much of a jerk in the grand scheme of things. Like, okay, there's the one scene where he sort of threatens, you know, the threatens, you know, the Indian guy with a gun and then plays it off as a joke, which obviously, you know, he's going too far. But there's an earlier scene and we'll explain why,

17:30where the Indian engineer comes back with like a busted up face. And Hugh Jacksman is like, well, dude, is someone giving you trouble? Like, I'll take you to the gym, I'll teach you how to fight. We could even just hang out, grab a beer, go to church. And, you know, the movie is playing him up as if he is an inherently sinister character. But we see nothing within the film that indicates that's insincere. A little aside, I think, is interesting. Again, kind of talking about the, just I guess the interesting sort of priors of the, you know, the writer director, is, did you catch which nations are also interested in the scout program? I was China, US, and I think Brazil, right? No, it was North Korea. Oh, I just, I don't know. I found that kind of funny. But to return to the narrative, this is sort of the A plot, at least initially. And the B plot is this group of criminals.

18:34You have Ninja, Yolande, and a guy called America. And Ninja and Yolande are actually part of the one South African, like ghetto, rave, rap group you've ever heard of, diandt work, playing themselves, but in kind of a heightened way. And then the third one, America, I can't, I didn't actually bother to check this. He looks remarkably close to their producer. I don't know if that actually is their producer. I did try to, yeah, DJ Heichak is not in the film, although he does him and Hans Zimmer are the two music credits. Okay, but you see what I'm saying, but he looks pretty close. Yeah. Who knows if that was intentional or not? But they are petty criminals, right? And they're meeting with this sort of big bad rhino, the crime boss, and they owe him a lot of money, sort of a drug deal gone wrong.

19:35And this is their motivation throughout the film. That they owe him 20 million rent, which I think is like $300,000. Now, I did not backdate that, but less than 20 million. But still a big, star box and a barita. Yeah. Look, we should not be talking about the hyperinflation thing. That is a joke that will bite us in the ass. Not to turn this into just econ doom posting, but as we see this situation develop, right? The drug deal has gone bad when they come back to their king pen, you know, they're getting threatened. This is when we see the scout robots comment, and they're just laying waste to everyone. There's, I will say, the look of this movie is really unique and really cool. If you've seen anything else in Blomkamp's kind of unofficial trilogy, it'll be sort of recognizable where it's the look of the weapons of the 80s and 90s,

20:36but sort of run through just years and years of neglect and gang culture. So, like, ninjas got this like GWAT M4 painted in sponge bob colors. It's like a bright yellow with like a pink magazine. They look like characters from the cyberpunk video games. But the scouts are just laying waste to them. You know, there's one kind of up on a shipping container with just an anti-material rifle, just blasting. You know, and we, these are a fairly gory movie. So just blasting people into ribbons. And it is kind of funny, I don't know if it's intentional, where it's, they, you know, get out of the helicopters, basically say, put down your weapons, and before a beat has even passed, just start spraying these criminals with fire. You know, it's not a comedic movie, but there are sort of moments to it. And in this, we see, you know,

21:39as the situation is sort of escalating, Rhino runs into this house, grabs an RPG, and one of the scouts kicks down the door and gets blasted with an RPG, just straight on, knocking them out. So the criminals escape. We go back to the tech company, where they are looking at this robot that's been hit by an RPG. They poke around it, they decide, you know what? This thing is too far gone. The battery has become fused into the chassis. So no matter what we do to it, it'll never take a charge again. It's done. So it's marked as, well, condemned. We follow Indian engineer, Dion, home, to see that he has been working in his own time on artificial intelligence, a program that can mimic or can sort of ease human level consciousness. And he thinks he's got it. So what does he do?

22:40Well, obviously he has to put it in this damaged robot. So he steals it, decides to, you know, take it back home. He has this special chip that is sort of the McGuffin, but it's basically the thing that allows you to update software to these scout robots. And as he's headed home, well, Ninja Yalandia, America, they hijack it because they've concocted this scheme. They figure in order to fight these robots, well, we need the guy who controls them. He can turn them off, or he can make us one of our own. And so, I'm gonna realize I'm moving through the plot relatively quickly, but this is all sort of establishing to get to the interesting conversation at gunpoint. Save with digital deals at Vons and Albertsons. This week at Vons and Albertsons, Ginny O, 93% lean ground turkey is 399 per pound. Sold in a three pound tray with digital coupon limit two packages. And a one pound package of strawberries

23:41is 199 with digital coupon. Plus Kellogg's giant size serial, 22.6 to 29.5 ounces, selected varieties are 299 each with digital coupon limit three. Hurry in, visit Vons or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. Deon is forced to put this AI program into the scrapped robot. And, well, seemingly it works. And Chappy comes to life. Initially, he's very childlike. He doesn't understand language. And that's at least the sort of inciting sort of scenes of the movie. Yeah, and this is effectively the beginning of the movie. Because the Blomkamp talked in later interviews, the whole idea for Chappy was simply, he found Deon word and liked their music.

24:42And he liked, like if you're an unfamiliar with Deon word, they are performance artists to the point where they have now gotten lost in the performance art and now are the arts themselves. They are their own exhibit to something that they can cocted as a music career. So it's not just, there's like their aesthetic, their music. Everything that they are as a performance art piece existing in the real world is important into this movie. And the whole concept is what if Deon word was raising a robot child? And that's the foundational question that Neil asked. And so you have Chappy Awakes. He has no name. He's freaked out. He's hiding in a corner because he effectively is a toddler. He's not preloaded with language even. So it goes through a montage of ninja and Yolande

25:43kind of conflicting each other. Because ninja's whole purpose is now he's got a scout. He has equal playing field with the cops. So he wants to teach his new robot friend to do a heist so that they can make enough money to pay back Hippo and avoid getting shot with a gold plated drako. Yolande starts to have these maternal instincts like matriculate out of her persona, which has been cultivated to be like a feral pixie. And so you see horror start to like be the one. She names Chappy. She's like, oh, you're such a happy Chappy. And Chappy is connects with that name. She's the one that reads to him and is treating him like a toddler. And then Deon is coming back. He's facing these gangsters. He's constantly getting threatened with violence. And we're going to cue you. But Deon keeps coming back because he wants to cultivate this new consciousness, this new life.

26:45So he ends up being like this. He continues to call himself as the creator. I'm your creator. This is what I want for you. And you see these, like the whole movie is like a study of different ontologies interacting with this paradigm shifting new life that has been developed. And so like that's, this is the start of the movie. Like what is Chappy going to do? What is he going to become? Is there nature? Is there nurture? Does Deon being like Chappy's creator God? Is he able to just program fate into this robot to do exactly what he wants? Or is Ninja and Yolande able to buy just circumstance to cultivate a different virtue? And it all culminates with this tension within Chappy where he says, Chappy cannot do a crimes because Ninja wants him to go on a heist. And he's fighting with his own morality.

27:47No, crimes is wrong. And it's, as a technical note, it's expressed extremely well because everything is like Mochaam. And it's the voice actor for Chappy is in the shoot. But everything is very expressive with these antennae that are actually robot ears that are based on rabbit ears based on an anime and mech character that Neil was really in so. And so Chappy's the only person in this entire film that I actually care about. And that's all well done, I think, the existence of this being is within the movie. Yeah, I mean, Ninja really all of the criminals are completely unsympathetic. They're just kind of annoying is probably to, I guess, stupid a word for it. But they don't necessarily have the same charisma that Chappy does.

28:49You want to see Chappy do well. And so this sort of relationship triangle where you have Dion, Ylondi, and Ninja all sort of fighting for the soul of Chappy is really the majority of the kind of midpoint of the movie. So one of the things that Dion tells Chappy is, he's like, no, cry, I'm like, you can't do crimes. And so you see Ninja sort of yo-yoing back and forth between being very frustrated and annoyed with Chappy and then trying to inculturate him into a gangster lifestyle, a lifestyle of cry. Like one of the funnier scenes about this is when these two scumbag criminals are teaching Chappy how to talk. And he doesn't quite get it. So he's getting all the words slightly wrong, but he's still posturing, like he lives in a Johannesburg ghetto, which is fun.

29:51Another example is he's trying to teach Chappy how to shoot. And of course, he's basically a little kid so you can see him get scared at the loud noise and Ninja just hits the roof. All wall Yolande is trying to exert this sort of mothering influence on him. So what Ninja decides to do is basically drive Chappy out to the middle of nowhere, kick him out and tell him to come back, right? To sort of, you know, toughen him up a little bit. And the scene is perhaps a little overwrought, but effectively, the moral center of this movie is, I don't take this too far, but is profoundly Calvinist. All of the people in this movie are at a deep level, flawed and horrible. And the unwashed masses are just looking for an excuse

30:53to rape riot and murder. And the moment they encounter Chappy, it's like, I'm sure you remember Paco when that robot was trying to like drive across America and it made it to St. Louis and just got like stomped out in like three minutes. It's basically, Chile did not treat it well. Yeah, that's what it was, yeah, it was filling. But it's essentially that scene, right? A bunch of kids sort of surround him, you know, stomped on him, set him on fire. But as he's walking back, Hugh Jackman realizes what's going on. He realizes that, you know, the scout unit has got out that Deon's doing something with it and it has this, you know, this chip needed to update any of the other scout units. So he goes to find it and him and his goons track down Chappy, they rip it out of his brain, cut his arm off for really just villainous reasons. Like it is just because. Yeah, this is like mustache twirling villainy

31:56where it's like they're kind of just torturing this robot for really no reason. But I gotta angle grinder in the van, might as well use it. Right, exactly. They, you know, cut his arm off, Chappy, you know, runs back and now he has had his sort of sense of innocence taken away, right? He understands, you know, what the world is. And so, you know, Ninja is sort of chastised for the situation. Deon is able to repair Chappy using sort of spare parts again. And then Ninja figures out a way to sort of trick Chappy into doing crimes for them. He still won't violate this sort of core precept. But, you know, they're able to abuse his sort of lack of wisdom. So he's like a little cat. A little lawyering with, you know. Yeah, we're not hurting people, Chappy. We're not gonna shoot them. But, you know, some times people just need to go to sleep.

32:59And if you poke them with this sharp knife in their chest a few times, they'll go to sleep and they take a nap. And, you know, Chappy being a toddler doesn't really see anything wrong with that. Like, oh, everyone needs to go to sleep. That's fine. So they're taking full advantage of his naivety in innocence with a little, you know, the shifting of the lawyerly logic there. Right. And in the run up to this heist, they fund it via car theft. And they basically convinced Chappy that, hey, you know, this is my car. I'm your dad. And this bad man stole Daddy's car. So you need to go get it for me. And of course, you know, the first time he chimps out and just smashes the car, rips the door off and throws the guy like 30 feet through the air. While screaming about how he stole Daddy's car, the next time this is repeated successfully, it's not explicitly stated, but it seems like they've told him that the guy driving the car is an alcoholic

34:00who's driving drunk. And so they need to take the car away from him. So this robot just sprints out of a van, runs up to this car, breaks the window, screams, are you drunk and throws the guy out of it? Which is pretty funny. But the reason I'm even mentioning this is that this builds to a scene where they are going to secure the materials they need, specifically the explosives for this cash and transit heist. It's been a while since I've had him on, but canine reaper runs a security company in South Africa. And if you wanna hear two hours on cash and transit heist, they are 100% real, which is currently happening. Look for that episode. But they go there, they get some weirdly enough PlayStation 4s, which they're using is like ghetto computers and the explosives. But when they come out of that, there's this scene where they see two dogs.

35:03One has been killed and is lying in its own blood. The other one is still alive. And, Chappy at this point has realized that he has a very limited time. He was made with a biological clock, or digital clock, I guess, right? He's five days from when he was born to when he dies. And so, well, ninja says like there are two options here. You can either be that dog or that dog. We're seeing his point of view, right? One of these sort of forces vying for the soul of Chappy. This kind of pure, literally dog eat dog sort of mentality. I think it's an interesting scene, Becca. Yeah, and it's the first time Chappy has to grapple with like the impermanence of not just himself, but of all life, which culminates in a scene that we'll get to, but he, Chappy realizes like there's nothing he can do, this dog is dead, and there's permanence to it.

36:07And like a toddler finally coming to grips with like object permanence, where you can't play peekaboo anymore and keep them entertained. Chappy's, you know, confronting this within himself. And it's just, like it's part of, like I said, Chappy's the most interesting character here, because, you know, he's going through all of these interesting, philosophical arcs, right? Like he's coming to grips now that he understands death and impermanence of life. Like the next obvious question is theodicy. Like well, why would a loving God make life just to die? Well, and that's, that question is brought up explicitly. One of the gangsters, the kind of least interesting one, America, who's this sort of transplant cholo. Is that a slur? Is that just a term? I don't know. The point is, is lies to him and says, look, if you do this, if you help us with the heist,

37:10we can use that money to get you a new body, right? Which is something they have no power to do. And so after they've collected the material, when they come back to their hideout, Dion is there again, but Chappy is uninterested in him. And he basically says is like, why did you create me to die? That exact question. And Dion kind of doesn't really have an answer to that, right? He kind of mows a few, I guess, platitudes about like, oh, I created you to live, again, it's not the most profound thing. But it is like a very central question to this, right? What is the purpose of life when death is inevitable? The answer this movie explicitly offers to you is sort of a chilling one. But it is a very, I guess, an interesting part of this film. Yeah, and it's the whole thing is like a kind of an inverse

38:14Eden, right? Instead of like, instead of life arriving from beauty and order, life is like the primordial soup for Chappy's existence is the chaos of Johannesburg. And the carelessness, the recklessness of Dion, who really doesn't really have a plan. He's just creating for its own sake. And so when confronted with the idea, like, Dion, you've created this thing and it's definitely going to die. Like, Blomkamp is doing a stand in here because he's, personally, he's like had his kind of, I guess, deconstruction from like his traditional faith of his parents and is now like pretty Nostek and agnostic to whatever extent that is. And so he, like, I imagine this is like something that Neil is inserting for himself. Like, this is the question that God couldn't answer. And so like the God I would want would be one that would be

39:16sympathetic to my concerns about death and do something in his own power to try to mitigate those, like mitigate the consequences of his reckless creation. And so that kind of, like, that's the part of the movie where like Dion's motivations change now. He's not just interested in, interested in cultivating this new life, but he recognizes, to have before what he is, as something new, as not just a product or his own creation. It's gotten away from that. It's bigger than that now. And so Dion feels like he develops a, like a fiduciary duty to try to maintain this life and do everything he can to figure out a way to perpetuate it further. So I pulled this up because I wanted to get it exactly. Earlier in the film, he, Dion gives Chappy a number of sort of commandments, right? In sense, this is sort of a theological discussion. We use the term commandments.

40:17And it is, have respect for me. I'm your maker. I brought you into this world. It's direct quote. Interesting, right? Establishing his authority. And he also makes him promise to never commit crimes, never shoot people, and also never break a promise. There's a couple others. One, I think is particularly interesting. When he's seeing the influence of the gangsters a little bit later, he tells Chappy, don't let these people waste your potential, right? So we've established several things there. And his sort of commandments from God and this idea that his potential should not be wasted. We see that Chappy is obviously incredibly physically gifted, but also apparently artistically gifted. We see him painting. We see him doing creative acts as well as, kind of physical feats. And so when we come back to that later interaction, when Chappy is sort of understood death,

41:18he says, but you're my maker. Why do you make me just so I could die? And your point about Dionne, not really having thought through creating life, right? It did not do a lot of planning for this. He says he had no idea that he would become a unique person. And he says you became so much more than I ever could have imagined, but how was I supposed to know that you'd become you? And so in this sort of theology, right, God, the God of this film created life by accident, right? It's this sort of theological mistake in a way. Yeah, chaos in the hands of a reckless God. And so like the default position now for Chappy is to continue to try to waffle between Yolande who views him as a child as like a person

42:22relative to Ninja and America, whose entire, they view him as a means to survive because their entire ethos is based on survival. Yolande is able to sacrifice part of herself towards this maternal nurturing instinct. Dionne was before this interaction just interested in like seeing how far he could take the experiment and the rest of the gang are just trying to make 20 million ran before Hippo comes and kills him all. So like Chappy's just kind of stuck in between these choices. And that's the framing of like, where does your moral foundation come from in these circumstances where you're pulled towards your theology, your parents, and this need for survival? And I think the show plays that by the next,

43:26the kind of, we're moving into like the climax now by the inciting incident. Hugh Jackman has ripped the God chip out of Chappy's head, which is the override for all of the different scout units. There's hundreds of them across Johannesburg. And so Hugh Jackman's character just to continue to show how, how vile he is, turns them all off because he knows that as soon as he turns off the scouts, he has the God chip, he can control them and upload the firmware. So he bricks them all and they all turn off and he knows it's gonna create chaos. And in the chaos, he can come through with his machine, his version of this giant mech suit, where he's featured creeped it all the way up to having mortars and cluster missiles and machine guns and lasers. Everything is just bolted onto this machine, he's gonna come through and reinstitute order and he'll win out the funding war between him and Dion

44:31for Tetraval and their contracts. And so we find a situation where another God character, the Deus Ex Machina hits a button and Chappy suddenly finds himself like dead in the midst of these gang wars that are going on. And naturally Johannesburg kinda just turns to chaos again. And like Jay said, everybody was just champing at the bit to start raping, impillaging and murdering again. So one thing that happens in between sort of Chappy being turned off is they actually get to the heist. So this, I think what happens is they shut down all the robots, the heist happens and then they shut down Chappy in particular. Do I have that sequence correct? I can't remember now. I watched this last night. This is bad.

45:34So they do the heist, right? Because Chappy is like done with Dion, right? They go out and do the heist. They rob a car. They, Chappy is able to subdue the car guards because he's putting them to sleep with ninja stars. Well, and this is its own interesting scene because as the kind of chaos of this heist is going on, we see Chappy sort of realize the lie because he's walking over to this guy that he's stuck with a throwing star. And he's like, are you going to go to sleep? Are you going to go to sleep? And the guy's obviously screaming in pain because he's been stabbed and understandably freaked out about this giant robot with a knife leering over him. But Chappy realizes it. And so when he gets back in the car, he basically confronts ninja about the fact that he's like, what you lied to me? And the truth all comes out. Yeah, he was lying.

46:34Again, this is another kind of God figure who has exposed himself for being imperfect, right? And so obviously at this moment, the moose has been activated. The city is descended into chaos. And all three of our factions are descending on the same area. The criminal gang is going to hide out with the money. Hippo was going there both to collect the money and because he sees what Chappy has done. He's like, I want that robot. And also Hugh Jackman is coming there in his giant death robot to exterminate them all, right? So the action scene sort of kicks off that moose is just laying waste. And in this fight, we see that both,

47:36Deon is mortally wounded and Yolande is seemingly killed. Ninja is able to sort of survive because Chappy defeats this giant robot. But now we see Deon bleeding out and Chappy is absolutely booking it for Tetraval. There was a scene a little before where we see him working on copying his own consciousness, right? He is obviously super human cognition. And so he is able to using these kind of stack of playstations recreate himself, sort of separate his soul from his body. And so racing back to Tetraval, he runs in, beats up Hugh Jackman, kind of a fun action scene there. And then he uses the neural interface used to control this sort of moose mech robot

48:40to do several things. First of all, he transfers Deon, his makers soul, or consciousness essence, into another one of the robots. In turn, Deon is able to do the same thing to Chappy, right, to put him into one of these sort of disabled scout suits. And as the movie sort of fades, we see Ninja burning Yolande's possessions. And as he's going through it, he sees a flash drive, which is kind of funny, knowing about the story of a flash drive, that says, mommy's consciousness on it. And one of the last shops of the movie, we see a robot with Yolande's face. The idea is that she has been brought back from the dead in a kind of robot form. So now all three out of four of our main characters have been granted immortality through this sort of conscious

49:42transference and flesh robot. I think it's interesting as well, this kind of role reversal, where the movie starts with Deon carrying the deconstructed parts of Chappy. And it ends with Chappy going back there with well, his own creator mortally wounded. And he is the one who will create for him a new body. It's sort of an interesting conversion there, if you see what I'm getting at. Yeah, I mean, the surface level obviously is like the standard kind of mind-body dualism of all-nostic sci-fi, right? You've seen this with altered carbon and there's countless shows and movies about it. But the more interesting thing is again, my theory is that Deon is the stand-in for a god that Neil wants to see, because the ultimate message is that by the act of creating life, it is the creator who finds salvation through the new life. And being able to map consciousness successfully

50:44was something that Chappy had succeeded in where Deon had failed. Like Deon couldn't figure it out. And so Chappy was able to, you know, being a superior life form was able to finish Deon's work. And through that, Deon achieved salvation and eternal life. And it's like an, you know, it's an inversion of the story, because fundamentally I think there's this, you know, it's not really difficult to understand why someone who grew up in Johannesburg would feel this way, but like a resentfulness of this feeling of being like completely abandoned by their creator. And so like how would you fix that narrative from a theological perspective? Well, actually it's the creation that saves the creator. And you know, we go on to do a perfect world where everyone doesn't die and we're all robots. And yeah, I think from a narrative standpoint, like it was setting it up for a sequel, but like Neil Blum came sequels, none of them would ever work,

51:45because the sequel would have to just like completely contradict everything that happened in the movie previous. But like the ending questions, right, is you never really get a good answer to like nature versus nurture. You never get a good answer of like who, what is consciousness and like does this all work? Like it's implied because you know, you're hearing Dion's voice coming through a robot, but there's never really any examination of like, is that actually Dion or is this something new? Like a copy that is now, you know, just full robot Dion. And then you know, Yalandee's kind of transformation into a robot with an actual face rather than just kind of like a chassis that has expressions. You know, it's supposed to be indicative of like a next step. But that's, that's chappy. It's all questions and very few answers. And it's one of those ones where like again, Neil, he has this like, he has his preconceptions built into the script,

52:45but like the movie tells a different story. And that's the part where I found it more interesting than kind of the standard, you know, Cape Slop nonsense. It was like, cause you know, it does feel like he just tapped into like some sort of muse and is like putting on something that you can get out really, like the viewing experience is one where you can get out more than what I think the director put in. And for me, that's like, I don't think this film is not great. Yalandee's a terrible actress. Like, no, yeah, he's really the only person in this entire film that does a compelling performance. Like, which is odd, cause he's a very weird guy. He's not a particularly likable character either, but he's competently acted. And like, obviously Yalandee is the biggest offender. Dion's not doing great, but the guy playing hippo is, I mean, clearly having a blast, you know, like to be honest,

53:46he sounds like he's having a lot of fun with it, but it's a little Saturday morning cartoon in a way that like, in a movie that is otherwise fairly serious and dour. And look, like that's not a full indictment of the film. It's still worth watching, I'd say. But it is flawed. And it's really the ideas and the aesthetics that sort of carry it. I mean, speaking about that, I think one of the kind of interesting things buried into this is the incredibly mis-entropic view of human nature that this film has. And also the element that it is sort of a reverse Eden, where you have a sort of a perfect being created by imperfect beings in a deeply flawed and corrupt world, which is kind of an interesting, I guess, mental exercise. Yeah, for sure. Like I said, like the primordial soup is, like the backdrop for everything is Johannesburg.

54:48And the reason it's interesting, I think, as the backdrop, is because it's real. And this is real to Neil. It's real to everyone I've talked to from South Africa that's been to Johannesburg. Like that building where they go, Ninja talks about we're going to meet the king and it's this black gangster living at the top of this dilapidated tower where he's like, there's just pornography on the TV. Let's like happening in the background. There's people just like selling and stalling goods everywhere. And in the middle of this tower, it's kind of like that building from the rage. Yeah, there's like a big open courtyard in the middle. And it's full of trash and dead animals and filth. And that's real. Talking to people from there, it's like, oh yeah, they just chuckled their trash down in the center and I guess clean it out every couple of years or never. The hideout for Ninja and Yolande's gang

55:51where they're staying at was a building that Neil found. He rented it from the city, but they had to put up fencing around the set while they were filming there because they basically kicked out people who are scrappers. It's these vagrants that go around with blow torches and angle grinders. Just looking for metal that they can cut out of buildings so they can go and sell it. And literally three weeks after they wrapped filming, I think it was like two or three people died because the scrappers came back in after the movie was done and pulled, burn, melted the wrong beam and the whole building collapsed on them and killed them. So it's like this world is real. And so it's a fascinating backdrop. It's not like a sci-fi thing where it's like, everyone's on a spaceship and because we're doing stuff in space, we can just play with every idea ever because nothing really matters.

56:52We can create the rules ourselves. Like the rules exist in this world and Neil is familiar with them. And so he's asking the questions of the script that he wants asked and answered. And I think our answers come up different, but it's the asking of the questions that I think is really important and interesting in this movie. Yeah, and I mean that's in the kind of broader conception of sci-fi sort of an interesting thing. You could look at sci-fi as sort of answering the question of what happens to man when he encounters with technology? Is he transformed by it? And obviously there's the element to which the human consciousness is quite literally transformed. But at the same time, it's like, well, what do you do when you've created digital life? And the answer is, well, you use it to rob banks. You know, you use it for incredibly kind of venial ends. And yeah, I mean, I think that that's a very clear

57:52kind of contrast setup between, you know, Dion and Ninja in particular. Is, Dion is looking at this as sort of a scientific marvel, like an experiment almost, he's cracked the code. And Ninja could not care less. Like he almost kills Dion after he reveals that he can't just control them. He's like, okay, whatever, we're gonna have to go with something else. And is only sort of begrudgingly interested in Chappy as a means to an end. You know, this is not a world in which the fundamental human moral fabric has been changed at all. You know, sure, it's relatively low tech. They have humanoid robots, which, you know, okay, is more advanced than we are, but not dramatically so, right? And this isn't like transportation and time travel, anything like that. But I think that the moral vision of this is, I don't know, interesting because at once it has this sort of unearned optimism. You know, the idea that, you know,

58:53perhaps we could live on forever in immortal metal bodies, but also basically every human being is just like an evil monkey who wants like, you know, cash and drugs. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, you know, it acknowledges like the fall of man and like, man's sin nature, but in this world, like a real God doesn't exist. Like there is no salvation. So you have to make your own. And even in the act of making your own, it's just like, you know, you're basically just flipping a coin at this point, like, unhoping that Chappy comes out able to save you. Because otherwise, like, you know, there's nothing. You're just, you're at the whims of either these giant, you know, tech weapons manufacturers that are sending out, you know, robots with pre-programmed morality that'll probably pop you pretty quick if you cross over line. Or, you know, gangsters like Hippo and the King who don't really care whether you live or die at all. They just want, you know, either they're, whatever their dopamine loop is and money and drugs

59:53and that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, I think that that the salvation is kind of an interesting element. I think you called Yolanda's character sort of female cyberpunk Jesus. And it's not quite that explicit, but she is clearly. I guess it's feral pixie. But, oh yeah, yeah. You're a cyberpunk Jesus is fun. I mean, that is the direction that this is going, right? She is sort of this relative to the film, this sort of angelic figure. She's mother Mary in this. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And if she is the, in a weird way, also in the way that she dresses is and yet the way she relates to Chappy, she kind of is a Madonna horror synthesis. And that sounds like super pretentious and chin stroking. But you see what I'm getting at. Yeah. No, she's like, you know, she is this little, little character that has been thrust into a Madonna, like, you know, theodicose role and kind of embraces it

1:00:54in this perverse inverted way. Yeah, it's, it's, she's probably, despite being the worst actress, the most one of the more interesting characters because of that. And realistically, she doesn't actually do that much. She's sort of more archetypally interesting as sort of the one parental slash God figure in this film that does not explicitly betray Chappy in the way that, you know, Deon does by creating him to die. And, you know, Ninja does by lying to him. And so I think that that's interesting. And again, that idea that, you know, by when she is brought back with her own face, you know, the idea of both her as sort of the next step in human evolution, if we can use that trope, but also the fact that she is sort of the, the one, the God who died and was brought back and yet is sort of uncorrupted by it.

1:01:55It's not explicit, but there's something there. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's, I mean, the obvious thing right, is to contrast, okay. So like coming to this movie, I, I knew of Deon word before I knew of the movie, right? And the whole reason I went to see the movie in theaters was because I could, you know, sneak in and do it like because I wanted to see Deon word. And like, I'm fascinated by this group in like a very perverse way. Like I would never recommend, again, don't go listen to the music. Certainly don't go watch their music videos where Yolande is in like black face dressed up like a Pikachu dancing in front of like a Kanye West mural. You know, they, it's very over the top, kind of like intentionally, you know, lampooning evil. But, you know, the fact is like, Yolande is like a real person. Like she had, she had, you know, she has a daughter, I believe with Ninja.

1:02:57And, you know, she's like her, their whole arc of their life is being these people. Like they are the people in the movie in real life. And it's just, it's one of those ones, like those cases like, you know, Michael Jackson to some extent, I can't really think of any other like performance actors that became the artwork to the extent, you know, where like the, the person they were before, you know, no one knows who Henri Dutoy is, but they know Yolande Vessar. And so who is Henri, like in the face of Yolande, does she even exist anymore? Does that, did that consciousness get superseded by the performance art? Like in this, you know, chaotic Johannesburg, like, you know, new life that was formed in the outward itself. Like it's, maybe that's like way to meta. And I'm spiraling about it. But like the whole, it's, all of it is a spectacle and very interesting to look at as like,

1:03:59what is the antithesis to my life? You know, Yolande and Ninja are pretty antithetical to everything I believe and I do as like a productive member of society. But, you know, so kind of the, like I said, the Neils entire idea for the script was, what if you know, in Ninja and Yolande and Dianne word were raising a robot child? And so like, you know, viewing it through this group, this performance art that is insane. You know, it's interesting to say. Yeah, I mean, I'm not much for celebrity drama. It is relevant to mention. There have been, shall we say, fairly significant allegations of child abuse directed towards the couple in question. Now, I think it's entirely rational to approach those things with a certain sense of skepticism,

1:05:01stories about famous people and all that. Plus, shall we say, if you're familiar with their discography, there are perhaps other reasons people are mad at them, you know? They, they, there is almost no subject. They have not addressed in their music or in, you know, their music videos, like there's an infamous lot of ninja with a Hitler mustache on. They've done blackface pretty much anything. So point is, you know, take what you will from that. But yeah, man, I, to be honest, I enjoyed this film more than I thought, mostly because I thought I'd already seen it. But yeah, man, thanks for recommending this. This was a ton of fun. And if you're up for it, I think it might be fun to do district nine because I haven't seen that in years. And I, from what I remember, there's a decent discussion in that film. Yeah, I agree. And it's another, it's more, more so than at least, because I think at least he was a mess. But district nine, there definitely is more of Neil.

1:06:01I think accidentally channeling lessons, you know, like, I guess to wrap up, right? The moral of Chappy is Neil is, Neil is trying to tell you what happens. You know, if creation exists absent, you know, any sort of thought or God. And that's what he believes, like ontologically. But in reality, life is a whole nother, like consciousness is something new. It was something that was created. And without, you know, without the, the perseverance of like a loving God in a creator, it's all just kind of like meaningless. And there's, you know, it's, it's not stick fanfiction. But with district nine, you know, there's, there's questions of like interpersonal, intertribal relationships that are asked and answered in script, very differently than they're asked and answered in the movie itself. So yeah, I'd be happy to do that. But thanks for having me on Jay. It's, it's always a fun time. When the meantime, man, where can people find you?

1:07:02Where, you know, the family man trying to get back into the, any sort of content loop with back to school rituals and everything, but I'm on sub stack. You can find me on sub stack and Twitter and the YouTube's and stuff. But most everything I do is on Twitter and sub stack. Yeah, man, this was a ton of fun. I like these, these sort of movie episodes because they let you get into, I don't know, weird philosophical territory. Anyway, man, it's a ton of fun. Be sure to link your socials below. Never go to home, keep your head up. Like it lasts forever. Good night.