In Defence Of Dumb Fun: Why You Shouldn’t Feel Guilty For Secretly Loving Silly Movies

Critical consensus on Neill Blomkamp’s robot fairytale Chappie is: “More like Crappie.” Reviewers slammed the film as glib and derivative. They hated the Jar Jar Binks-esque capering of the childlike robot (mo-capped and voiced by Sharlto Copley). They scratched their heads at the casting of Ninja and Yo-Landi from South African rap duo Die Antwoord, whose acting as gangster poseurs is at best workmanlike. Most of all, critics have castigated Chappie for unoriginally echoing other, more coherent science fiction films, including RoboCop, Short Circuit and even A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

Chappie is sitting on a rating of 30% at Rotten Tomatoes, and a more generous 41% at Metacritic. For many disappointed critics, Blomkamp is squandering the extraordinary promise of his feature debut, the apartheid parable District 9 – and Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir reckons Chappie is so bad it might erode goodwill for Blomkamp’s forthcoming Alien reboot, “if not kill off the project entirely.”

Nobody doubts Blomkamp is an excellent visual stylist – especially when it comes to urban dystopia and high-tech weaponry. But Sydney Morning Herald critic Craig Mathieson expressed a widespread sentiment when he wrote: “there’s nothing substantial to underpin the technical skill.”

I agree that Chappie is insubstantial. But I simply don’t think it deserves the ridicule it’s getting. I found it consistently entertaining, and was surprised that it wasn’t wall-to-wall ‘cool’ imagery. Some moments packed real emotional heft as Chappie – a damaged police ‘Scout’ rebooted with an experimental AI – discovers love, betrayal, fear and existential pain.

Discovering his failing battery cannot be recharged, Chappie cries to his earnest young ‘maker’, roboticist Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), “Why did you make me to die?” Haven’t you had this wrenching realisation? I still remember how it came to me as a kid, while watching The Adventures of Baron Munchausen – directed by Terry Gilliam, another noted visual stylist. I ran away from the TV, crying to my mother, “I don’t want to die!”

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What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Style?

The sorts of films pilloried for pursuing ‘style over substance’ tend to be judged as not serious enough. Critics delight in calling them philosophically flawed and thematically hackneyed, pointing out the logical holes in their sketchy narratives. While we’re happy to admit that such stories look great onscreen, we tend to prize intellectual coherence and originality over other criteria, such as the evocation of emotions and use of pattern or symbolism.

For New York Times critic AO Scott, Chappie’s allusions to other films “feel like the handiwork of someone who’s eager to make something cool and so borrows with promiscuous abandon.” The director himself is the first to admit this.

“The problem with me is I get so caught up in concepts and ideas,” Blomkamp told Uproxx. “I’m not like a normal person in the sense that I have to have a story for something to be interesting. … And you sort of realize that all these people prefer this element I didn’t pay as much attention to.”

Like Chappie, the Wachowskis’ recent space opera Jupiter Ascending looks fantastic, but has been critically savaged. Yes, the film is deeply silly, cornering from the sublime to the ridiculous on Channing Tatum’s anti-gravity rollerblades. But I found myself reluctant to laugh at its clunky dialogue and simplistic characters because it was all so heartfelt, and executed with such unironic verve.

New Yorker critic Richard Brody points out that we situate a director’s style along a continuum of respectability. Ironically, Brody writes, French New Wave critics invented auteur theory to counteract directors’ respectable invisibility in the Hollywood studio system, “but their disreputable passions were widely received as respectable,” and have helped create “the constipated naturalism of the art-house consensus”.

Even as we vilify Baz Luhrmann, Tim Burton, Tarsem Singh, Guy Ritchie or Zack Snyder for being reductively obsessed with particular themes, palettes or shot repertoires, other filmmakers – Terrence Malick, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Bernardo Bertolucci – are celebrated for the beauty and consistency of their style. I’d argue the former group are interested in enthusiastic exuberance, where the latter represent a kind of fussy languour. Excess isn’t respectable. Discipline is.

A counter-canon of ‘vulgar auteurism’ has arisen to celebrate directors whose work has previously been deemed too showy or dumb to be respectable – Michael Bay, Justin Lin, Paul WS Anderson, John M Chu. While I’m mindful that intellectualising vulgarity can simply reframe it as respectable, we do need to value bold, unapologetic aesthetic risk-taking, even when it ‘fails’.

If we cede the special-effects blockbuster to perfectionists who strive for intellectual coherence and plausibility, argues Alex Pappademas at Grantland, we get “a movie like Interstellar, in which the soulless but hyper-competent Christopher Nolan ponders all of time and space and sees only a Rubik’s Cube. The Wachowskis hear a symphony.”

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In Praise Of Messy Wonder

There’s especially little goodwill extended to films that adopt a magical, wide-eyed tone, emphasising special protagonists and cosmic grand plans. Some find their appeals to Feels silly and manipulative. I disagree. Last year I linked Mike Cahill’s film I Origins to a tradition of ‘silly’ sci-fi fantasy – epitomised by the oeuvre of M Night Shyamalan – that demands to be approached with innocence rather than suspicion.

“Bees are genetically designed to recognise royalty,” says the deterministically named Stinger Apini (Sean Bean) in Jupiter Ascending, as the insects cluster in homage around Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), who is the genetic reincarnation of an intergalactic corporate matriarch. The moment sinks into bathos because we refuse to believe in it as the Wachowskis do.

Perhaps what has annoyed critics about Chappie is the credulous mood of Blomkamp’s film: it feels as unsophisticated as its namesake. But what if we’re wrongly interpreting the film as proof of its creative team’s ‘failed maturity’? What if, through Copley’s clowning, or Ninja and Yo-Landi’s candy-coloured Soweto lair, Blomkamp is actually seeking to communicate innocence, trust kept and betrayed, and the stumbling process of learning to be a good person?

The film’s antagonist, Deon’s rival roboticist Vincent (Hugh Jackman), doesn’t get this. Vincent’s problem is that he lacks imagination and refuses to adapt. While Deon has been working on developing empathy and creativity in his police Scout robots, Vincent just keeps on pushing his own drone project, the Moose – an ED-209 ripoff just as forceful and inelegant as Vincent – even though he’s repeatedly told nobody wants it. He aggressively taps Chappie’s head: “You know what’s in here? Bunch of wires, mate!”

I’m reminded of how, when I was in high school, a tremendously brilliant friend once snapped, “Why don’t you just grow up?” only for her more exuberant classmate to retort, “Why don’t you just grow down?”

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She tweets at @incrediblemelk.