Directed by Neill Blomkamp, whose previous work includes "District 9" and "Elysium," the film takes place in the South African city of Johannesburg. The movie's events occur in a speculative present when the city has deployed a force of police robots to fight crime. One of these robots, named "Chappie," receives an upgrade that makes him sentient.

Blomkamp said his view of artificial intelligence (AI) changed over the course of making the film, which opens in the United States on Friday (March 6). "I'm not actually sure that humans are going to be capable of giving birth to AI in the way that films fictionalize it," he said in a news conference. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Yet, while today's technology isn't quite at the level of that in the film, "We definitely have had major aspects of systems like Chappie already in existence for quite a while," said Wolfgang Fink, a physicist and AI expert at Caltech and the University of Arizona, who did not advise on the film.