Tag: Niell Blomkamp

Somebody stop this man

I was having a good day. I had a good clean, 30 minute shit. Had some ice cream. Drank some coffee. Then I had another 30 minute shit. The only thing that could have ruined this day was learning that Niell Blomkamp was going to remake Starship Troopers.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/new-starship-troopers-movie-in-the-works-1236163598/

I don’t need to remind my audience that Paul Verhoeven went on an unholy terror through Hollywood from the late 80s through the 90s. He arguably made three of the greatest modern sci-fi classics: Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. Two of those movies have already been remade with iffy results I might add. Do they think the third time’s a charm?

I will say though that Blomkamp does have an it factor despite all his flaws. He understands the language of cinema, even though it has only came together once beautifully. And that was nearly 20 years ago with District 9. So in his defense, I would love to see Niell hit another one out of the park. I just wish it wasn’t Starship Troopers.

I mean, isn’t there another Robert Heinlein book he could make? I’m pretty sure there’s a wealth of material there.

But judging the politics of Blomkamp’s other films, I don’t suspect he’ll be embracing some of Heinlein’s more “fascistic” undertones. Yet that was the genius of Verhoeven’s satirical take. He didn’t really make us “judge” the morality of Heinlein’s work. He wanted us to either laugh at or be utterly horrified by it in the way that only the director of Robocop can do. It is, at face value, a reactionary film told from a reactionary perspective, except the audience is in on the joke. It was the correct take and Verhoeven threaded that needle perfectly.

Blomkamp, I fear, might go a little heavy handed with it. While I think he’s great with visuals and pacing, his weak spot is screenwriting. That’s a big one. Chappie and Elysium could have been great. But there was something lacking there that could have delivered an emotional punch had the script been cleaned up a bit. My hope is that he won’t overcomplicate things. Blomkamp is pretty damn good at giving us a fulfilling meal in an under two hour runtime. He doesn’t need to change that up now. Just keep it simple. No interwoven narratives; A leads to B which leads to C and so on, and it all culminates in a satisfying and emotional climax.

You’ve done it before, Neill. You can do it again.

Chappie

I was driving 90 in a 35 in my brand new Fiat 500L when my mind started to wander. Whatever happened to Niell Blomkamp, I thought. So after crashing my Serbian-made piece of shit into the side of a Cracker Barrel, I crawled home with a lacerated artery and put on my copy of Chappie to see where it all went wrong. And truth be told, I had some mixed feelings. But thankfully, after losing several liters of blood, my thoughts suddenly became clearer.

Was it a bad movie?

No

Was it a good movie?

No

So it was just a meh movie?

Also no

Like any movie that swings for the fences, it is all of the above. So Blomkamp is like Icarus in many ways. And he shouldn’t be punished for that. He should be celebrated. But the problem with Chappie is that it tries to do too much in the span of two hours. As a result, this is one of those rare films that I think deserves to be longer. Yet, with that said, in an era prior to the 2010s, this story could have been easily told within a 120 minute timeframe. Blomkamp did it in 2009, very very successfully. District 9, the film that put him on the map and is the spiritual predecessor to this movie, clocks in at 1 hour and 52 minutes. The very same techniques that Blomkamp deployed there were also used for Chappie.

So what changed?

I felt that District 9 asked a lot out of its audience by sacrificing plot minutiae in favor of style, flow, and emotional resonance. It worked. But this Blomkamp recipe is quite exacting and elusive — it won’t work every time. It arguably didn’t work for Elysium and it didn’t quite work here. Strangely, in my view, what failed Elysium and Chappie were two different things. For Elysium, it was casting (Matt Damon was horribly miscast). But for Chappie, it is a more common and recognizable reason—an uneven script. I can applaud Blomkamp for wanting to explore the nature of consciousness, soul, and one’s relation to their maker, but it was done too heavy handed. Additionally, the set up was clumsily executed as it’s about 20 minutes and heavily contrived. “Chappie”, or the robot that would become Chappie, needed to land in the hands of Die Antwoord at around the 10 minute mark. Hugh Jackman’s character, and his inter office rivalry with Dev Patel, needed to be introduced with the primary plot already underway. The performances are effective, including the ones from Yolandi and Ninja of Die Antwoord, and especially from Dev Patel. The problem though is that Patel’s character is undercooked. Or overcooked depending on how you want to look at it because the quality of this movie is so hard to describe. A studio note from me would have been to make Patel less of an idealist and more of a tech-savvy but self-serving businessman whose appreciation of Chappie grows over the course of the film. Of course, his inter office rivalry would have made the film even more derivative of Robocop. But as I often say, who gives a shit? The point is to make Chappie the emotional core that all the violence and chaos orbits around.

But for all of its faults, for better or worse, Chappie is undeniably Blomkamp’s vision. The final sequence of action set pieces and the confrontation with Jackman feels earned. This is where Niell Blomkamp shines — the movie has a strong heart with blood pumping through its veins. (Which I won’t have for much longer until the paramedics arrive 😬)