A few months ago my dad dragged me to this movie called CHAPPIE. He loved it but, honestly, it creeped me out a little. I saw it on pay per view this month, which means it will be on pay cable soon. I feel like I need to post a review to properly arm everyone out there in danger of being lured to watch it the way I was lured to go see it in the theater. By arming you with what follows, I am, in the words of the vampire L’estat, “giving you the choice I never had.”

So, the movie. Caution, some spoilers are forthcoming. You have been warned. Anyway, the setting for most of it was way too gritty for my taste and something about the South African twist turned the English accent I totally love into an two hour assault on my eardrums. The main human characters had kind of a scuzzy punk fashion thing going that also wasn’t working for me. And seriously, who thought it was a good idea to put Hugh Jackman in a sad mullet with tragic bangs. Completely unacceptable. I can only assume he lost a bet with the costume and makeup people on the show.

The robot thing — Chappie — loaded up with evolving artificial intelligence was kind of cute but, again, he learned to talk by listening to the scuzzy punks. It was cute for awhile — and then not. He did have these cute orange antennae on his head that looked like bunny ears. They moved around a lot, which I thought was a cool way to give Chappie a way to express emotions the way we would with facial expressions. It was also pretty much the only difference between Chappie and the robot security guards from Elysium. I’m sure that helped out Chappie’s budget.

Anyway, I wasn’t in love with the film. Then a few weeks after seeing it, I randomly stumbled onto some of the reviews and there was a lot of hating going on. The more reviews I read, the more I had to keep reading. I agreed with a lot of the stuff the critics ripped on — see above. But the more I read, the more I started to think maybe some of my reaction, and theirs, was based more on scuzziness — setting, wardrobe, accents — than on the substance of the movie, which made me feel kind of un-evolved, like the American stereotype the rest of the world sometimes wants to rub in our faces.

So then I started thinking about what the movie was supposed to be about. The gist of it wasn’t hard. It was subtle like Oliver Stone is subtle. The point was to get us to think about how we define “humanity.” The cute robot was the obvious focus of that — as in, “Can a machine be a better human than the humans it has to deal with?” But I think the writer/director Neill Blomkamp also snuck in a not so subtle dig at how we think about people on the fringes. The scuzzy punks had to be scuzzy, low rent criminals to get us to think about that just like the “establishment” types at the robot factory all had to be dressed like the sad little guy with the stapler in Office Space — even Sigourney Weaver.

The scuzzy punks really did start off seeming like straight up bad guys and by the end they were part of this weird, little, half people, half robot family that somehow seemed sweet. And, also not surprisingly, Chappie took out a little of our collective frustration with the establishment on mullet Wolverine by throwing him around the office cubicles like it was his job — because apparently the tragic haircut and wardrobe was not enough punishment for Mr. Jackman.

What really irked me about some of the reviews was this idea that the movie raised all these questions about artificial intelligence and humanity and how much control we want to give the robots in our future and then failed to answer those questions. Seriously? I don’t have those answers. I didn’t notice any of the critics offering up the answers. It seems to me those are questions a lot of people are asking without offering much useful advice about the answers. The stuff about humanity, consciousness, the soul — well those questions seem like they’ve been around since humans figured out how to ask questions. So taking shots at a movie because it doesn’t reveal the mysteries of the universe seems silly, which makes me go back to the thought that maybe the problem with the movie is that it makes people uncomfortable in a lot of ways. Hello people! Pretty sure that was the intent.

So I think you can call it simplistic. You can call it cheesy if you want. You can roll your eyes because you’re just too hipster to buy into things not dipped in artisanal irony. You can hate on a movie that had some serious plot gaps, which this one does. I mean seriously, there are times in it when you have to just not think too hard about what you just saw, which, of course, is true for all action movies these days. Hello, it’s fiction. Your suspension of disbelief is kind of important to the process when you’re watching action movies. Zombie flicks are not documentaries, after all — not yet, at least.

Anyway, you can hate all you want, but this movie sticks some pretty important ideas and questions right in your face in a way that feels different than anything else I’ve seen. And if you didn’t cry just a little at the end when the abandoned robot factory fires up and spits out a scuzzy punk robot in pink, then you, my friend, do not have enough love in your life and you should go buy a puppy immediately.