Neil Blomkamp is already an acclaimed director, although he’s only a few movies into his filmography. The two movies that this director has released so far are Chappie and District 9, which are actually pretty radically different from each other despite the fact that they’re both pretty hardcore sci-fi films. They’re both pretty heavily influenced by the fact that Blomkamp is from South Africa, which is also where they are both set.
While the issues of apartheid, colonialism, and race are indeed a major part of his films, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t occasionally fun, and it also makes for some hard-hitting themes. We’ll be looking at which of his films would be better served by a sequel if that’s what he decides to do with his next effort.
Chappie: It’s A Lot Of Fun
Chappie is definitely the more fun film of the two by this director. Chappie stars Ninja and Yolandi Visser from the South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord, who discover a robot who’s powered by artificial intelligence and really hasn’t had much interaction with the outside world. They essentially do their best to train him to be a gangster so that they can pay a debt back to a loan shark, but they have more to worry about than just the people they owe. Regardless of the plot sounding a little heavy, it’s mostly just Chappie messing around with Yolandi and Ninja.
District 9: It’s A Legitimately Thought-Provoking Sci-Fi Film
While Chappie might be fun, it really doesn’t have very much to offer in terms of deeper themes. This is mostly reserved for District 9, which, while including a lot of very heavy socio-political themes, also gets into some pretty heavy existential sci-fi territory. District 9 is about a race of aliens who crash-land in South Africa, only to be detained by the government and put into containment camps. When one of the people who comes into contact with the aliens begins to transform into one of them, he teams up with them to help them fuel their dropship.
Chappie: It Seems Like A Pet Project
Where District 9 has some very serious themes and a certain sense of dread pervading the entirety of the film, Chappie is pretty much just a very fun time all the way through.
That being said, Chappie isn’t exactly entirely tonally consistent and it seems very often like it doesn’t know what type of movie it wants to be. At its heart, it’s a comedy action film that’s got some seriously high stakes, but it seems like a lot of the sci-fi elements are pretty much slapped on to a story that was already written. Either way, it seems like District 9 was the one Blomkamp did for the sake of funding Chappie, which he had tucked away.
District 9: It’s A Great Debut
When District 9 first came out, pretty much everyone who saw the movie was wowed. It did very well critically, and with fans. Some people complained that the film was a little bit slow or boring, but those people were by-and-large most likely not the biggest fans of genre films like this one. Sci-fi has always been about biting social commentary, even if a lot of people would argue that art isn’t necessarily political. In the case of District 9, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The film also got much more acclaim than its successor, Chappie, proving that this is the superior film.
Chappie: The Casting Is Great
One of the things that are immediately apparent when watching Chappie vs. watching District 9 is that you can tell Neil was excited to have a bigger budget and to work on something that he had a larger amount of freedom with. It’s most visible in the casting that now that Blomkamp proved his worth with the wildly important District 9, he could turn his efforts towards a love-letter to fun sci-fi romps. The cast for this film not only includes the stars of the movie, Yolandi and Ninja from Die Antwoord, but also people like Hugh Jackman (probably most famous for portraying Wolverine in the X-Men franchise) and Sigourney Weaver, who played the sci-fi heroine Ripley in Alien.
District 9: Die Antwoord Has Been Embroiled In Controversy
One of the major issues with a sequel to Chappie is that Die Antwoord doesn’t really have the greatest reputation anymore. There have been plenty of controversies that they’ve been embroiled in, and a lot of them aren’t just small things.
They’ve been accused of appropriating Zef culture, which is a specific subculture that Ninja (real name Watkin Tudor Jones) kind of just hopped into. There are plenty of pictures of him before founding Die Antwoord, in which he’s a member of other musical acts and he’s positively clean-cut. There have also been other, serious accusations of grooming. While Chappie 2 could work in concept, it probably shouldn’t have anything to do with them.
Chappie: It Helped Introduce The World To Zef
Zef is a subculture from South Africa that a lot of people aren’t familiar with, mostly popularized in the eyes of the public by the aforementioned Die Antwoord and by the film Chappie. A lot of people claim that Die Antwoord doesn’t actually represent Zef at all but is more a group who took it to give themselves a gimmick, and that true Zef is something else. The term is a reference to the Ford Zephyr, a car that was frequently souped up in South Africa, usually by poor white people in post-apartheid South Africa, the demographic that Zef is most closely associated with. Others claim that the movement itself is satirical as people struggle to find a place in a new social space.
District 9: It Includes Biting Commentary
District 9 is at its core, a film about segregation and apartheid. The district itself that the aliens live in is an analog to neighborhoods in South Africa that people were segregated into.
It becomes obvious when the viewer is shown that the aliens are vilified by humans and that it’s claimed by the humans that they’re all lazy criminals who leech off of the humans. When one of the humans begins to turn into an alien, it becomes increasingly obvious that the claims made by the humans are untrue, and while the film has been called out for being a “white savior” narrative, it does raise some important points throughout its runtime, even if the metaphor is a little obvious.
Chappie: It Explores Some Existential Questions
A lot of people have said that Chappie isn’t incredibly deep, and there might be some truth in that assessment given that at the base, this film is pretty much just a fun time with 2 musicians, a lot of action, comedy tossed in for good measure, wearing the costume of a legitimately thought-provoking sci-fi film. That being said, there’s much to say for the fact that the movie treats Chappie like a child, with Yolandi making it a point that she’d like to be a mother to the robot rather than just training it to be a gangster as Ninja would do. There’s also a lot of discourse going on in modern-day artificial intelligence circles about how humans would take on the role of parents to this new form of “consciousness”.
District 9: It Might Be In Development Already
Blomkamp has been quoted as saying that he’d very much like to do a “District 10″ which we’re assuming is merely a tentative title. There’s also the fact that the ending of District 9 did all but tell the viewer that there would be a sequel on the way, with the aliens failing to take off back to their home planet and our protagonist having fully undergone his alien transformation. All of this to say, there’s really no evidence that a sequel is in development at the moment, but provided Blomkamp keeps going strong, we could see one in the future.
