Overall, a really entertaining movie that kept me invested the entire way through and it moved along at a pretty good pace that brings up some really interesting questions as to what life and consciousness is, and the fact Chappie's impending mortality is measured over the length of the film by his depleting battery gauge that you see on his chest really builds a sense of urgency and impending tragedy. The more Chappie learns and grows from a child-like innocence and naive disposition, the more he realizes he's mortal and only has so much time left and he begins to question why he was given life in a body that was going to die in less than a week, and his blind trust from the criminals who possess him and the man who created him becomes more complicated when he realizes they were manipulating him and had no intentions or means to save his life, which leads to one of the most interesting parts of the movie where Chappie decides he isn't going to accept the fact he's going to die and attempts to find a way to save himself.
For the most part, the casting is pretty great and the characters interesting. The whole gangster culture that's predominant in the movie is kind of crating, but part of that is because you as a viewer don't want to see Chappie used like that, and the attachments he forms with people is genuine. He experiences and suffers from trauma, which given the fact he's a robot and it can be repaired acts as something of an inspiration for himself to try to find a way to save himself later in the movie. His "mother" figure, Yolandii, acts as a mother figure for Chappie and is one of the few people who takes Dion, the man who created the Scout robots and Chappie, seriously when he explains that Chappie is like a child who has to be raised and taught properly, whereas Ninja (gangster names, ugh) who imprints himself as Chappie's "father" to manipulate him into committing crimes wants to turn him into pretty much a robot gangster and enforcer to give him some serious power and means to escape a terrible crime boss, who is baffingly subtitled even though he's speaking clear, if heavily accented English. Seriously, I understood everything the man said even though he constantly has subtitles when he's speaking, which reminds me of this hilarious comedy sketch where a reporter is interviewing a Taliban fighter who agrees to an interview and speaks perfect English, and he realizes that everything he says is being subtitled to the audience, which drives him nuts. This character was one of the weakest in the movie, mainly towards the end of the movie when chaos takes over the city, the dude's response is "I WANT EVERYTHING!" okay, that's fine. But in the film's climax, he's super literal about that claim; he wants Chappie (understandably, he saw how effective he was on TV), but when one of the characters is in a van trying to escape Hugh Jackman's (a character I'll get to in a bit) Robocop murder bot reject, he literally yell in Dion's face that the van belongs to him. Seriously, you just watched a shitload of your goons get mowed down by notED 109 and a van with all your money blown up, and now you're threatening a meek nerd who is the least of your problems that you want a van. How the fuck are you still alive when you're so oblivious to danger?
Hugh Jackman's character was another one I took issue with. He's basically a rival for Dion where his department's funding keeps getting cut with the runaway success of Dion's Scout police robots that had brought the crime rate in Johannesburg down by 64% since they were introduced because his project, Moose, which is said Robocop ED 109 reject, is hilariously inappropriate for law enforcement purposes by virtue of being Metal Gear Rex's little retarded sibling that's controlled by a neural network with a human operator, kind of like the movie Avatar, only instead of being sucked into a blue furry, you take control of a giant clumsy murder machine. So, anyways, Moose is about 12 feet high, is hunched over with arms that don't have hands and instead has giant hydrolic scissors, a rotary saw, an automatic grenade launcher, cluster bomb pods on the chassis, and a minigun on the top. They kind of beat you over the head that Hugh Jackman is a soldier instead of an engineer, but they really fucking brain you with this monstrosity existing. Basically, its method of fighting crime is by colossal property damage and obliterating suspects with no intention of taking them alive. It's also bafflingly less durable than the Scout robots because earlier we see Chappie take an RPG to the chest, which causes his irreplaceable battery issue and we see Moose fall to pieces with explosive rifle rounds and grenades. A handgun fucking shoots out one of its only functioning cameras, which becomes an issue for Hugh Jackman at some point.
Also, gangsters shooting gangster style in this movie apparently have superb accuracy.
So, Sigourney Weaver, the boss of Hugh Jackman and Dion, understandably is in favour of the Scout bots which are working amazingly and have had no issues at all. Hugh Jealousman reacts to Dion stealing company property (that belongs to his division for the Scout robots, but still) to test out his artificial intelligence program that became Chappie as an opportunity to not only put the city in dire danger to force Ripley to give Moose a chance to prove its worth (while leaving a massive fucking trail leading back to him that he tried to shittily cover up that Dion managed to uncover in less than a working day under the pressure of him fucking shutting down all the Scout robots and letting the city slide into anarchy, by the way) that she agrees to out of desperation to let Moose hunt down and kill Chappie because Chappie was seen committing a heist on TV that would be understandably horrible press for the entire company that the police robots are now working with the criminals.
Even if Hugh Jackman's plan went according to plan and he pinned his espionage that caused all the Scouts to shut down, he'd have to explain why his machine murdered his coworker Dion under HIS control (Dion is unarmed and with Chappie in a company vehicle, which gets destroyed in Hugh Jackman's rampage), but also why his murder machine destroyed a huge chunk of property, several suspects, including one that is literally crushed under Moose's foot and then cut in half with those giant scissors which goes waaay the fuck beyond excessive force. All this when he's not a police officer and was not authorized to kill a shitload of people, which even if it's not recorded in Moose's computer banks, which would be a massively irresponsible oversight by the company otherwise; the machine's supposed to be law enforcement, and if they have no way to monitor what the operator's doing or review footage of what the machine did during operations, then that is straight up negligence. There should at the very least be a fail safe to prevent rampages like we see in the movie from occurring.
So even without all of that, his crime scene would be impossible to miss, especially since if he could locate Chappie by his chip, then that should have been noted by the company who can't possibly miss the goddamn war zone he created. Dion yelling at Hugh Jackman that he'd reveal what he'd done (a reminder, cause all of the robot police to shutdown and endanger the entire city) in a crowded office of his employees not long after Hugh Jackman held a fucking gun to his head in the very same office while joking it was a fucking PRANK a few days earlier that somehow didn't result in him getting arrested, or at the very least fired from the company after being tackled by security. Seriously, why the fuck is he allowed to carry a sidearm at work, which he demonstrates his "pranking" intentions by showing everyone it was unloaded and saying "What, do you think I'd be crazy enough to carry a loaded gun in the office?" This is... beyond words. Anyways, point is, dude commits a lot of crime and he has no oversight in this company that for some reason let him not only build his giant murder machine, but keep it and deploy it in a city. Did I mention it was supposed to be a law enforcement robot? Because it was fucking trying to be sold as a policing robot to the city police, who understandably laughed it off. The fact the company had a psycho developing a military weapon by the time the movie starts is concerning enough; not having him arrested after he threatened his coworker with a fucking gun in the middle of a crowded office is unspeakably bad. I can't stress enough how awful this character is.
Onto what's probably the biggest spoiler of the movie and the one with the most interesting implications that's meant to get you talking, but Chappie discovers a way to transfer his consciousness to another body after learning every possible theory of how to do so after connecting himself to the internet, which I thought was pretty neat. He manages to not only save himself an Dion, who is mortally wounded by the "I WANT EVERYTHING, INCLUDING EVERYTHING I SAY TO BE SUBTITLED" crime boss by transferring their consciousnesses into other Scout Robots using the program Chappie designed and Hugh Jackman's neural control network for Moose, but it's shown at the end of the movie that he had copied Yolandii's (his "mother") consciousness into a flash drive (which in itself would be incredible because I don't think a computer exists that can house an entire person's memories and consciousness, but I'll let it slide because it's a science fiction movie with a lot of improbable things already and suspension of belief is required for a lot of things we enjoy) a few days before she's killed in Hugh Jackman's rampage. Chappie hacks into the automated manufacturing processes that made the Scout robots and he makes her a new body and inserts her copied consciousness into this new robot body, which in itself is a sweet gesture, but there's a troubling question this brings up. With both Chappie and Dion, their immediately left their bodies and entered new ones with the neural network, so it's plausible it's actually them and not just copies who think they're them, but with Yolandii, who died in her human body and only had her memory copied, is now having that copied consciousness transferred into the new robot body, which we saw worked. There's no way this is actually her, but rather someone who has all of her memories and thinks it's her. She also wouldn't have any memory of anything that happened in the days after she had her mind copied, so that alone has some red flags. Yolandii is dead; someone else is stepping into her life that Chappie and Ninja are going to think is the same woman they love.
Anyways, to sum up, it's an enjoyable movie with some fantastic special effects, mostly likable characters and a fantastic concept and overall plot that his marred by some serious plot holes and frustrating events that make no logical sense. I'd give it a 6/10, I'd recommend people see it, but definitely don't expect perfection.