Modest spoilers for Chappie and District 9 below.
It seems to me that people aren't quite sure how to handle Neill Blomkamp's depiction of his family's ancestral home. As I noted the other day, Blomkamp's family fled from Johannesburg after apartheid ended and crime rates skyrocketed. While things have improved a bit in certain regards in recent years, South Africa is still something of a hellhole, boasting the 11th-highest murder rate in the world and a rate of rape so high (127.6/100,000 people, according to Wikipedia) it is considered by some to be the "rape capital of the world."
I highlight these facts because I think the studio kind of misses the point with ads such as this:
Out of control criminals, rampant police brutality. Chappie is humanity’s only answer. #ChappieMovie https://t.co/6KzK2NCDGD
— Chappie Movie (@ChappieTheMovie) February 25, 2015
The idea that the police are out of control in Chappie—that brutality is a problem—is, frankly, kind of bizarre. In the film, we see no acts of police brutality. But we do see rampant criminality. We see gangs committing tons of horrible crimes. When the police robots that have kept a lid on crime are remotely shut down by a corrupt businessman, crime literally explodes: riots proliferate and fires rage and cars flip. People are killed, businesses destroyed. Failing to maintain tight control of the criminal element makes life in South Africa's largest city totally impossible.
We see something similar at work in District 9. Though it is often described as an apartheid metaphor—and it is, in the crudest sense of the term, insofar as the aliens are kept in a ghetto and humans are free to come and go as they please—it is an oddly conflicted one. As Blomkamp has said elsewhere, the movie has less to do with apartheid than with uncontrolled immigration, with the influx of crime and decrease in job opportunities such policies bring. That theme is explored more thoroughly in Elysium.
Blomkamp clearly takes a very dark view of the city his parents fled, one that neither film writers nor film distributors seem to quite understand how to parse. While Chappie has its problems—Blomkamp desperately needs to find a writer he trusts to help him shape his scripts, improve characterization, and close off glaring plot holes—it is a fascinating portrait of society on the brink of breakdown.