Chappie

Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie grew out of Tetra Vaal, a short he made in 2004. The most widely repeated error about it concerns Sharlto Copley, because no motion capture was used. Copley played the scenes himself in a grey suit covered with tracking markers, and animators later matched that performance and replaced him with the robot in every shot. Weta Workshop built chest blocks so he carried the robot’s bulk, giving the other actors the right volume when they reached out to touch him, and he wore a small camera on his head to record the point of view. That choice corresponds to something you notice while watching. Eyelines land, hands find shoulders, bodies crowd each other correctly, because a performer really was standing there. Members of a rap group play the parental figures under their own names, and the tonal swings come from that casting more than from anything in the script. Made for forty nine million dollars, the film opens a question about machine consciousness and then closes the argument with a shootout. A good fit if you want to see what an actor physically present in the frame does for scenes built around a digital character. Not a fit if childlike comedy alternating with heavy violence inside one scene reads as a film that could not decide.