The Lego Movie is
a fantastic film. It is smart, funny,
surprisingly poignant, and just damn fun in the way it’s animated. It’s a movie that should by all rights be
just a cynical cash-grab by Warner Brothers Studios and the Lego Corporation,
but instead, this film goes off the rails in a subversive way addressing the
conflict between rigidity and creativity in both surface-level and
meta-critical ways. This is a powerful
message and reaches beyond itself and becomes about how we as a people view our
own popular culture and the treasured memories of our childhoods. And I REAAAAAAALLY want to tell you all
why. Unfortunately, much like the issue
with last week’s review of Non-Stop,
going into a full analysis of the film would be telling too much, and I want
everyone who sees this movie to get the full benefit of the experience. So I’m going to touch a bit on some of the
more superficial elements of the film, and hopefully that will get you to watch
it if you haven’t already. But when you
get to the film’s final scenes, think back on this paragraph, which ends with
the words “I told you so!”
Emmet is a Lego person living in the orderly Lego City. He follows the instructions every day, and
goes to his job like everyone else, listens to the same music everyone else
does, and is an all-around excessively average guy. But then, destiny sweeps Emmet up into a
league of renegade Master Builders, who use their creativity to take on the
overlord of the realms of Lego, President Business. Business wants to bring eternal order to the
world through the use of a MacGuffin known as the Kragle, and Emmet is the
Special, the only person who can stop him.
If this sounds like the overly-done “chosen one” narrative you’ve heard
a million times before, well, yeah, you’re right. But this film is well aware of that and plays
it for laughs, using a tongue-in-cheek sensibility to its storytelling that
contributes to much of the film’s humor.
Along the way, Emmet will encounter many awesome characters, including a
hardcore girl who’s more complex than she first appears, an eternally happy kitty with
a unicorn horn, a spaceship-crazed astronaut from an 80s playset, and, of
course, the goddamn Batman in what is perhaps the greatest parody of the Dark
Knight’s persona ever put to film. The
dialogue these characters have is both symbolic and comedy gold, and the
frenetic pace the film moves at is fantastic.
And that pace is accentuated by the brilliant use of
animation that purposely looks like real Legos in motion. Though the film is clearly computer-generated,
the art style of the film makes everything look like Legos, including people,
vehicles that can transform at will, water, fire, lasers, smoke, you name
it. The jerky animation of the
characters feels like a stop-motion film of days long gone, and this only adds
to the comedic timing that goes with their exaggerated movements. It’s a gorgeous movie to watch, and there’s
nothing else that looks like it, including the animated specials Lego’s
in-house studio produces.
Alas, this is where the review must end if I’m to restrain
myself from giving away the movie’s biggest surprises. I obviously adore this film, and I recommend
it to anyone and everyone. It’s
hilarious and fun, and when you break through the surface there’s some
surprisingly deep commentary to go with the jokes and slapstick action. This is a must-see.
Do you have fond memories of playing with Legos? Or perhaps those memories aren’t so far
removed from the present. Let me know in
the comments below!
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