For John David Washington, who I enjoyed in BlacKkKlansman and less in Tenet. Notionally it's humans versus machines as we've seen so many times before but really it summarises all the Star Wars tropes of the past several decades, right down to the inability of almost anyone to shoot straight or to pay attention to the stuff we're forced to. Most annoying is that everything has a memorable antecedent outside of that universe: the nuking of Los Angeles from Terminator 2, the child of destiny (various, say Kundun), land wars in Asia (every Việt Nam war movie ever), death from above (ditto, Independence Day minus Bill Pullman), despoliation of utopia (Avatar) and so on and on. It's so crassly unoriginal and dumb. I'm not going near the racialism (essentialism).
Strangely this is set in the same year (2065) as Foe. Here there's dumb A.I. (notionally created dynastically by Gemma Chan and ancestors) but not self-driving cars or military satellites. 2065 must be the new 2001.
Jason Di Rosso interviewed co-writer/director Gareth Edwards and was plenty blunt about it being not much chop: I needed to take him seriously and literally. Nicolas Rapold. IMDb reviews: Chappie, Elysium: just imagine what Copley could've done with it. Some humour would have helped immensely (The Mitchells vs the Machines).