The latest trailer for CHAPPiE was released a few days ago and it looks pretty awesome. It’s the latest work from District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. The film, starring Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver and Dev Patel, is set in the near future, where an intelligent robot is created and then hunted down. And from the looks of the trailer it has 80s in its very core.

First of all, the whole movie looks like a short between Short Circuit and RoboCop. When I watched the trailer below I got a real sense of Chappie being Johnny Five from Short Circuit, but particularly at the 2:12 mark.

Also, the fact that there is a showdown between a humanoid robot and a monstrous biped just had shades of RoboCop about it. Check out the ED-209 lookalike below.

Chappie ED-209

Then there are some other cool 80s references in the trailer. The first one is the main obvious one. CHAPPiE is watching TV to learn about how to be more human, and for some reason the TV in this abandoned industrial warehouse has He-Man and the Masters of the Universe on it. Hey, who am I to argue with something as awesome as that. And then CHAPPiE mimics the transformation pose with his sword hand!! I am sold. I’ve bought my cinema ticket already. I reckon this is just a very clever bit of marketing from Sony though. They’re currently working on a He-Man movie, in order to get a new generation into He-Man, and by placing this He-Man snippet in the film it will help the kids learn who He-Man is.

Chappie HeMan

When CHAPPiE is practising his painting skills he chooses to paint a car. They could have picked any car but they went for a VW Beetle, which although it’s not a direct reference, it’s still a very retro car, and always reminds me of Herbie and also Bumblebee from Transformers.

Chappie Herbie

Next up is a cool one for me personally as I love these watches. When Dev Patel is getting spoken to forcibly by Hugh Jackman you can clearly see his watch and it looks very much like a Casio Databank. Possibly the best watch in the world, ever.

Chappie Casio

And as the trailer progresses, we see CHAPPiE sporting some fine gold chains around his neck. There’s no way of knowing from this trailer if this is a direct reference to Mr.T or that he’s just been given a bit of bling, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was watching The A-Team along with He-Man and if so then he must make a ‘pity the fool’ line at some point. Here’s hoping.

Chappie Mr T.

All in all this looks like a pretty good movie, and the 80s references alone will keep me interested until it’s released in March.