Chappie
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Twitch will stream five short films and a Q&A by Neill Blomkamp
Neill Blomkamp, director of dystopian sci-fi epics District 9, Elysium and Chappie, will be live on Twitch tomorrow, April 11, showcasing five independent films made by his film studio, Oats Studios. After each of the short films -- Rakka, God, Zygote, Kapture and Firebase -- Blomkamp, his art director Rich Simpson and his VFX supervisor Chris Harvey will do a Q&A, where fans will have the opportunity to ask the team about its inspiration and, pertinent to the types of movies Blomkamp is known for, its logistics.
Five things 'Chappie' gets right, and wrong, about AI
Take Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, add a dash of Wall-E and a bit of badass swagger from RoboCop and you've got Chappie, the star of Neill Blomkamp's latest film. He's the first robot to achieve consciousness in a near future where other, less smart bots are taking on the grunt work of policing. But instead of being recognized as a major scientific breakthrough, he ends up being raised by a group of gangsters (led by Ninja and Yolandi Visser of Die Antwoord), after being created in secret by a brilliant engineer (Dev Patel). While the film, unfortunately, isn't quite up to par with Blomkamp's breakout hit, District 9, it still brings up some interesting points when it comes to the eventual rise of artificial intelligence.
Barely Related: Star Wars wakes up the Force
This week was full of little geeky goodies. Om nom nom. Welcome to Barely Related, a conversational Friday column that presents the non-gaming news stories that we, the Joystiq staff, have been talking about over the past week. And no, we're not stopping our focus on industry and gaming news. Think of this as your casual weekly recap of interesting (and mostly geeky) news, presented just in time to fill your brain with things to discuss at all of those weekend shindigs. Grab a fresh drink, lean back in your armchair, and get ready to talk nerdy with us.
