Discussing
Chappie: Gnostic clown or resurrected body?

The robot hero of Chappie teeters somewhere between the Gnostic elevation of the soul and the Christian understanding of humans as embodied beings.

*spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen this movie* I honestly thought in those last moments that Chappie would transfer his body to another robot and it wouldn't have worked. How much more impactful and thought-provoking would it have been to have the movie that way. I honestly don't think it would have rescued the movie, on a whole, but it certainly would have been a better way to end it than it did.

But I honestly think that the movie assumes that our consciousness IS something that can be stored outside a body and then downloaded into a new vessel. Raymond Kurzweil espouses this view in his book, "The Singularity is Near" and his newer book, "How To Create A Mind." I honestly got that vibe from Blomkamp's movie that the brain can be reversed engineered and we can essentially map our consciousness and then reproduce it again and again. I know that the struggle in the movie is for Chappie to get a new body, but doesn't it assume that he didn't start as a body, but a program, and then was downloaded into a reject robot? It all seems just wildly hodgepodge in the movie, but that might be because scientific concepts don't always transfer well into narrative form.

And honestly it assumed WAY too much about consciousness to even have that be a major motivating plot in the story. Again, a provocative ending and thoughtful seeds do not make a good movie.

Awesome article! Great conversation starter, as well!

"Wildly hodgepodge." That's just about the perfect way to describe Chappie! I'd also agree that the movie assumes a lot when it comes to AI and consciousness, when it would be better served by exploring those ideas a bit more deeply. And great point about Chappie's consciousness originally being a computer program. That's certainly more Gnostic, I'd say.

As for the ending (spoiler!), I loved the twist where Patel's designer gets shot and needs to transfer his consciousness before his body gives out. That's really when some of my thoughts above started percolating. Sadly, Chappie doesn't do much with this element either.

By the way, TC's Jason E. Summers previously wrote about Kurzweil and the singularity here: http://thinkchristian.reframemedia.com/can-singularity-and-christianity-coexist