Neil Blomkamp is making a new movie

Its called Chappie and is it just me that it looks like a Short Circut remake?

Also Sharlto Copley is doing motion capture for the robot and It looks way better than Elysium which was really dissapointing

Oh, this is that nightmare with Die Antwoord in it.

@shindig: I thought that was who they were. I hope they can act...

Probably, seeing as their entire career has been one. So this is another film about South Africa, then. You've done that, Neil.

Elysium was suuuuuuper disappointing. At least this looks terrible right out of the gate.

This is the kind of movie I want him to do.

@jeremyko: so was District 9 for that matter. Promising as all fuck, but definitely a letdown.

Can't he just direct other people's stuff?

seems like the right place to share this story. Coworker/friend of mine played enough Die Antwoord around me to get me to go from ironic to real appreciation. So I texted him "Here's two reasons you can go fuck yourself, first you got me into Die Antwoord, second, I just figured out their stupid name." Only instead of my friend it went to my District Manager.

Luckily he is a cool guy who sent back "What? :( " and then joked about it to the entire district......

Him making this movie isn't really news, it's been out there for some time now, though I haven't seen the trailer. At first, I really liked District 9, though after more than one or two viewings it wasn't as great, and Elysium, while looking great, didn't really impress me. Too bad he didn't do anything with Halo.

Chappie looks like Briareos from Appleseed.

I wanna see the years leading up to this, where guy from Slumdog Millionaire is just building sex bot after sex bot after sex bot.

So this is another film about New York then. You've done that, Scorsese.

Please, teach me how to be so fuuuuuucking jaded.

Looks like he's making Tetra Vaal into a full movie, like he made Alive in Joburg into Disctrict 9. Great!

Elysium was kinda terrible, but District 9 is still fantastic. Watched it again recently.

@ripelivejam: Elysium was only disappointing because of how much I enjoyed district 9.

Okay. For this recipe you will require:

1 Unsatisying job, a loveless relationship, a general numbness to everything.

Proceed to mix all in a bowl and simmer for the rest of your life. Serves one.

I enjoyed Elysium.

Isn't that girl in the trailer from a really weird South African musical group or something?

Elysium was okay at best, but I really enjoy District 9. So maybe I'll see this too?

The best thing he made is still Halo: Landfall in my opinion.

What was that? They should call the movie Sappy. What a shitty trailer. Blomkamp is quickly becoming M. Night. He's wasted potential.

Does the robot go crazy? Cause that looks like Short Circuit and Frankenstien.

Wait people didn't like District 9? Huh, I thought a vast majority at least enjoyed the movie, the premise and opening half hour were fantastic. Never saw Elysium, seemed aight but never got around to checking it out.

So all his movies seem to look exactly the same. You'd think he would try something a little different, he makes decent movies, but seriously try something new.

Boy, the people from Die Antwoord are super distracting to me. Like, I can't imagine them as being somebody else other than those two crazy fucks from Die Antwoord. Really weird choice for them to be in this.

I liked District 9 a lot, and Elysium was just ok, as it's really heavy-handed with it's story and morals. I think it's cool he's continue to use the very slim and angular designs for machines he's used in the past, but I really hope it's not more of the same in terms of location and trying to do an allegory to real life, not to mention we've had so many films about sentient AI and what the dangers of that I feel it will be retreading old ground.

This seems to be more about the good things a sentient AI can do rather than the dangers.

True, but we've had plenty of those as well. A.I. and I, Robot for example.

Neil Blomkamp was also watching the Sony e3 press conference and thought it was time for a live action Vib-Ribbon film.

I dunno why everyone hated Elysium so much. Apart from the paper thin plot I really enjoyed the setting and all the special effect. In fact I enjoy the world that Blomkamp crafts so much I was able to blissfully ignore the plotholes and enjoy watching Matt Damon straight up murder people with laser beams and shit.

I'd have way more of a problem with this if his style wasn't so particular.

It was a really good movie, apart from the headache inducing shaky cam for every damn action scene.

This film looks pretty damn good though.

Looks cool, but I'm still waiting for my District 9 sequel goddammit.

@turtlebird95 said:

He promised that he'll be back in three years. THREE YEARS! It's been nearly six. Fookin Prahns.

The trailer is more intriguing to me than Elysium so it could be alright. I like it when his films take the sci fi and bring it to modern sensibilities and see how it clashes. That's his most intriguing strength.

Despite the fact that it seems to be about racism again I think it will still work. Maybe a little dulled edge being that he already did District 9, but I am still much more interested in this than I was Elysium (which seemed like Halo without the Halo franchise just from the trailers- no I haven't seen it).

I don't know. I'm kind of a sucker for these kinds of stories.

What's with the guy that's trying to look like Guile? haha

I'm gonna continue to feel good about liking Elysium.

I like how everyone is dismissive out of the gate, I quite like the fact there isn't much shown, something more trailers need to do.

The shaky cam is sort of a director trademark for him isn't it? Either way this looks interesting although I will agree the subject matter is a bit tired. Hopefully it's better than Automata cause oooh boy, that had all sorts of potential for the first 20-30 minutes before the rather violent downward spiral in the second act.

I haven't enjoyed any of his movies, so I don't really care for this one based on just that trailer. But I have a friend who really liked District 9, so he'll probably be stoked.

Finally a sequel to District 9: An Elysium Tail :)

I enjoyed District 9 but I feel it was because of how specific the allegory presented by that story was. There was a confidence and deft touch to how those ideas about the what is going on in South Africa were handled and I imagine that was due his intimate familiarity the issues. Of course he directs CGI in a way that makes it feel real and he's a competent action director but that wasn't enough to make Elysium anything than a bloated allegory for the American healthcare system. I don't think Blomkamp's heavy-handed method of treating current issues within the realm of sci-fi works in every situation, so when I see yet another movie about the little A.I. that could I can't help thinking he's not the right guy for the job. Give him a straight-ahead action movie with a budget instead of this succession of sloppy statements about socio-economic problems.

His movies always look great visually I think but the stories often come up a bit weak.

So someone please correct me if they know something that I don't, but is there an assumption that it's going to be a political allegory about racism because that's basically what he's done before? Is there more evidence for that than just his last two films?

To me I get more of a sense that this is going to be about the ways in which negativity in our environment has negative effects on our personality, and how it can be a struggle to not let it get to you.

Admittedly Jackman's character does seem to be presented as a typical bigoted bad character, but Blomkamp doesn't seem like someone who can totally leave behind narrative conventions (or doesn't want to jettison traditional structures at the risk of reducing the commercial appeal). That tension certainly seemed to be there in District 9.

So I'm not saying I'm definitely right, but I do think what I saw in that trailer does suggest as much potential for it to be a quite Universal, philosophical and humane film as a stretched political allegory. I hope that's the case, because it could indicate a step up for his career, moving beyond the SFX-artistry-meets-b-movie-sci-fi of his previous films and applying that to meatier stories with real heft to them.

I don't know that I can take more shaky cam.

Neill Blomkamp is a one-note filmmaker who uses the medium as a veneer for his own politics. Die Antwoord is cool though.

The people from Die Antwoord explaining what a black sheep is? Seems about right.

They've actually had a couple of refrences to Neil in their videos, so it's pretty cool they have now come around to being in one of his movies, plus they are big into doing skits before/after/during their videos in which their acting has always seemed good, they've always been weird enough to pull off whatever crazy crap they were doing anyways.

And I forget which video it was but there was another with a picture that (paraphrasing) said "The History of Africa, Mandela, Neil, Die Antwoord"

I feel like this movie is going to give me flashbacks to being traumatized by Short Circuit 2 as a kid.

I like this alot.

I had heard they were going to feature in his next movie, but I didn't really expect Neil to give Die Antwoord such prominent roles. I hope they're up to the task.

Elysium was my first ever IMAX movie, which probably explains why I think that movie is fucking awesome.

Huh. Well...huh.

I kind of wish a similar amount of money would be given to a full-length Keloid movie honestly.

Back in February articles were doing the rounds that suggested Ninja was cut heavily from the film because he was a giant arsehole who was trying to direct things himself. But then when your name's Watkin Tudor Jones and you've been many, many different acts through the years, its hard to see it as anything other than a pisstake.

Although the apparent story where he gave Dev Patel a 'space cake' to ingest was hilarious.