• Chappie

Last week I argued that the new live-action version of Cinderella deepens (or some might say stultifies) the classic fairy tale with lessons in European social history. I could have added that, in this regard, the film represents the inverse of two current mainstream hits, Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie, which employ fairy-tale narratives to consider real-life social issues. Kingsman is something of a modern-day Cinderella story, telling the tale of a working-class goon (Taron Egerton) who gets transformed into a dapper, world-traveling spy with the help of an older agent-cum-fairy godfather (Colin Firth). Chappie, which has its roots in Pinocchio, tells the story of a “police robot” who acquires a soul, gets separated from his benevolent creator, and discovers the evils of humankind. Both films communicate a sense of blunt, political anger—conservative in Kingsman, leftist in Chappie—and in both cases, the fairy-tale trappings provide a context in which that bluntness feels relatively plausible.

Chappie directs its antiestablishment anger at the military-industrial complex, specifically the influence of the American arms industry around the world. American iconography is everywhere, and the film’s one American character, played by Sigourney Weaver, is the CEO of a weapons manufacturer. Her company produces the police robots that have replaced 150,000 human cops in South Africa (it’s indicative of Blomkamp’s political outlook that he presents the phenomena of unemployment and rampant crime as interrelated). These anonymous-looking, self-operated fighting machines inspire associations with drone strikes, much like the remote-controlled attack planes in Blomkamp’s Elysium did. Despite trading in brutality, Weaver’s CEO is cool and personable, showing how easy it can be to defend violence when you don’t actually have to see it. More loathsome is the war-obsessed engineer (and Afrikaner caricature) played by Hugh Jackman, who wants to design bigger and more brutal police robots than the ones already in service.