Photo: Chris White

It’s Saturday, about six hours until tipoff of another chapter in the UNC and Duke rivalry. Some time before heading over to Franklin St. to watch the game, so I saw Neil Blomkamp’s latest Chappie.

The film takes place in a not-so-distant-future South Africa. Crime runs rampant and is patrolled by a robotic police force. One of the police droids is stolen from the manufacturing company by its inventor Deon (Slumdog Millionaire‘s Dev Patel) and given new programming, allowing it to think and feel like a human. One of Deon’s co-workers, Vincent (Hugh Jackman), fueled by anger over decreased funding for his own project, finds out about the new project and will stop at nothing to end it in order to put his own robotic invention to use.

When I saw some of the first previews for Chappie, I wasn’t sure if it would turn out to be good. It looked like another one of those shallow, badass action flicks, but it wasn’t completely. Of course, the film had some awesome and intense segments of action but it also had something many action flicks don’t have. The previews didn’t reveal a meaningful, underlying theme in the film: putting others before yourself. I won’t go into detail but that underlying theme showed up in a big way toward the end.

My friend and I had similar thoughts on Chappie after it was over. It was a good film but it was also a bit out there. I had the same feeling with Blomkamp’s Oscar-nominated hit, District 9, a few years ago. Chappie is an action flick on the surface, but it had meaning and substance at its core. A well-made film overall and worth the time to see it.