RoboFlop — economist.com

NEILL BLOMKAMP'S frenetic new action movie, “Chappie”, is the second film this year to feature the world’s first artificially intelligent android as one of its central characters. With a third such film due in May—Marvel’s superhero team-up sequel, “The Avengers: Age of Ultron”—it seems that AI is science-fiction cinema’s current hot topic, having replaced environmental collapse and the ever-present threat of a zombie epidemic. But don’t expect the mind-bending subject to be explored in any depth. January’s AI film, “Ex Machina”, started to ask whether a robot could have human feelings, but it soon got sidetracked by the question of how seductive a robot might be if she had the physique of a fashion model. Mr Blomkamp’s episodic, overheated film has even less time for philosophising.

Read More