Both movies were very fascinating because of their vastly different takes on the concept of AI and how they would react in the world. I would say Machina told a fascinating story that focused heavily on the psychological aspects of humanity, but the movie left off in a way that I feel the story is only half-told. Chappie, ignoring the physical impossibility of actually creating consciousness on the limited harddrive of a device like those droids, was a more lighthearted look at the physical aspects of the human condition and while it was an interesting contrast to Ex Machina, the whole gangster presence drove me crazy (I absolutely couldn't stand Ninja and could really only tolerate Yolandi half the time. They helped develop the background behind Chappies susceptibility to a poor education, but I would've preferred it existing in another way.)
Back to the contrast between the two movies:
On one hand, you have Ex Machina, a world where the AI is kept in a cold, calculated, and controlled environment. She is brought into the world through the use of information from a social networking database and is already quite intelligent from the start as she lives in a world where deceit and deception are her only weapons.
On the other hand, Chappie is a very chaotic environment. Where Machina would be a control experiment, Chappie is just the opposite. He's thrown into a war-torn body, surrounded by weapons, drugs, destruction, and abuse. He has no intelligence at birth and is left to learn from the environment around him, which in turn develops a dependence on the individuals that he knows best and gradually adapts to a lifestyle that allows him to relate to humanity.
The interesting thing to take into consideration, given the differences between the two, is that they both theoretically could exist in the same existential space. Who's to say Chappie, a highly sociable entity, wouldn't have developed a disliking of humanity when kept in isolation and who's to say the AI in Machina, when allowed to thrive in a more friendly and sociable environment, wouldn't have developed a more accepting disposition and would've developed skills beyond lies and deceit?
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