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Looking at the rather lukewarm reception to the Gran Turismo trailer, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that the video game adaptation won’t be the project that sees Neill Blomkamp finally recapture the magic that marked him out as cinema’s latest wunderkind with District 9, before the law of diminishing returns set in across Elysium, Chappie, and Demonic.
In the filmmaker’s defense, making your feature-length directorial debut with an instant classic sci-fi that won rave reviews, made a killing at the box office, and secured multiple Academy Award nominations including Best Picture before you’d even turned 30 heaps immeasurable pressure on shoulders that were brand new to Hollywood, but repeating himself certainly didn’t help.
Both of Blomkamp’s follow-ups to District 9 adopted almost all of the same sociopolitical and thematic ideologies, and as a result it began to wear very thin awfully quickly. Chappie did manage to do a decent turn at the box office after earning upwards of $100 million on a $49 million budget, but the response was largely apathetic.
It would be six years before he helmed another feature, and that one sank without a trace, but is Chappie worthy of a reappraisal? According to a recent Reddit thread, somebody wants the answer to be yes, but the comments and replies paint an entirely different picture. The infamously awful acting by musical act by Die Antwoord still hasn’t been forgiven, it would seem, which is fair enough when it almost torpedoed not just the film, but Blomkamp’s entire mainstream career.