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What is Chappie (2015) really about? On most levels it’s just an action-filled, brightly-colored enema of goofy entertainment, but its story does stem from some heavy concepts - immortality being chief among them. If someone were able to calculate human consciousness as binary bytes of information, as absurd as that sounds, they would be able to transfer that consciousness to any other receptacle capable of processing it. That’s what happens in Chappie, and the success of that displacement of consciousness effectively allows several characters to cheat death. A person could live forever as long as a surviving person continues to transfer the being’s consciousness after they die. Just ask Chappie - he figured out how to do it in like ten minutes, and it’s a good thing, because it saved his life.

The film’s plot doesn’t really delve into the meat of the consciousness-transfer idea. It shows it happening, but it doesn’t consider the ramifications of such a concept being feasible. It also uses the procedure as the film’s climax, asking the viewer to capitulate all scientific logic and root for the process in a situation where we’re supposed to want it to work. If it fails, the only two quasi-likable characters in the film are going to die. So yeah, it works.

Assuming the film isn’t just being ignorant about the subject, it comes across as a thumbs-up for immortality through technology. Sure, it renders two formerly-human characters stuck forever in robot bodies, but they’re doing so with the memories and experiences of their former human selves. For many, that would be worth doing if it meant you wouldn’t die (it’s Sheldon Cooper’s ultimate dream in The Big Bang Theory, after all), but in reality, it’s a massively terrifying prospect.