The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014)

[Buttercream]

It felt like if Paul Verhoeven made a kid's movie, at least for the first half, in the way it plants you inside of its corporate dystopia. It's politics feels a little like Brazil mixed with the sardonic wit of a Mike Judge picture (sorry for all the comparisons). It certainly gets a little ham-fisted near the end, but it doesn't detract from how solid the entire production is. Honestly, it was the most fun I've had in a theater in some time, I found it to be more inventive and cleverly written than most of the Oscar noms I've been wading through, although the comparison isn't totally fair.

[PfR73]

There's actually at least one nod to Clone High in this movie, since both feature Will Forte as Abraham Lincoln.

There's at least two. Listen for the dolphin noise during the meeting in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

[Altair]

Probably the best damn toy tie-in commercial film ever made, mainly as it (mostly) subverts all our expectations as to what type of film that will be (reinforced in recent years by the likes of Transformers and Battleship). Very witty throughout, mixing verbal humour and slapstick seamlessly, as well as, like Pixar (of old) having enough for the older members of the audience - in other words, the perfect family film, with all the finest connotations such a phrase brings to mind. A particular, surprising highlight for me was the Superman - Green Lantern relationship that is one of the more memorable throwaway sidelines of a film I've seen in recent times.

[colinr0380]

That film was a lot of fun! I do agree with MichaelB that perhaps a few less frantic chases (or something with more particularly structured action beats) would have been better but since it is all a child's action fantasy of clashing blocks together anyway, that doesn't really matter too much and the excessiveness and lack of coherence can end up conveying its own meaning.

(Though it does suggest that the child at the heart of the story is already superhero pop-culture addled, to the extent of already having certain ingrained notions about the personalities and cultural symbolisms of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the Green Lantern!)

I thought as much as it took following the rules to an extreme, perhaps the film is just as much about allowing someone the opportunity to finish their story. There is a deflation that occurs near the end of the film that is kind of similar to the feeling of being told that you have to pack all your toys away before bedtime, followed by an elation that you get allowed to stay up for an extra hour to finish up, leading to a bit of a hasty yet happy rush at the end to tie everything up neatly. Then once your story is finished you can spend time restoring order and reassembling to create a backdrop to a new story of destruction and the fight against oppression in all its forms!

Spoiler

I also think it is interesting that Lord Business is perhaps the most creative of all the Lego characters, since he is the one who is appropriating and putting into use non-Lego pieces such as the plaster or the Xatco blade and so on. So he is performing the most extreme kind of non-authorised use of Lego blocks of anyone. Much like the father is in the real world by not respecting the uses of the Lego pieces and the age range on the box! But the film seems to also understand that the key to the success of Lego is that, like Meccano (where is our film of that!), fathers end up getting almost involuntarily dragged into the orbit of anyone playing with the blocks due to their own personal interest (in other words not just doing the activity because it is your mandated time to play with your kid where you have to feign interest in what they are doing!) and can often love being involved as co-builders!

I guess the moral of the film is that micromanagement can be fine until other real people are involved; and that if you are going to have kids realise that your world is going to turn into one of utter disorder, and be prepared to embrace that chaos!

I was also amused at the "Kragle"! I wonder if Zardoz was any influence on the naming of the other wordly objects?

The best thing about this film is the obvious care and attention paid to the Lego world, down to the smallest details. For anyone who has their favourite particular Lego block (which can happen when you play with the pieces long enough!) you can be assured that it will turn up somewhere in the film! My favourites are the long tubular pieces that appear walking around at the beginning of the Cloud Cuckoo Land section!

The minifigure that I most identify with is the 1980s blue spaceman Benny (and particularly the iconic broken bottom section of his helmet where the plastic was thinnest!), as that feels like a representative of my own era of early to mid 80s Lego play. My parents actually won my very first Lego set in a raffle at a party they attended, which was this spaceship set, so I have always associated Lego with space vehicles and the spacemen with their jetpacks (along with Medieval castles, which provide the iconic old-style Lego horses for the Wild West section of the film, and city building sets) despite all the other kinds of sets and commercial tie-ins produced much later.

Spoiler

And presumably Benny, obviously loved and battered around a bit, beatifically happy and wandering around an environment crowded with licensed movie tie-in figures, is perhaps an abandoned remnant of when the father used to play with his own Lego pieces just for fun when growing up. Eventually the opportunity and acknowledgement of Benny takes place and for a moment we get away from enormous structures, Batmobiles and even the concept of boundary-less free play where "everyone is right" but nothing coherent gets created, back to the pure pleasure of someone building their very first Lego "SPACESHIP!!!!" set, whether following the instructions to the letter or not. In its own way this film is as insightful about the psychology of toy ownership as the Toy Story movies.

And I particularly loved that the film was fully embracing of the inherent class divisions present in the Lego universe - Lego itself is the safe and unthreatening all round middle ground accessible to everyone, while Duplo is the friendly but less nuanced and simpler character that can be looked down on as just being a stepping stone to Lego 'proper'. Presumably if there is ever a sequel we should expect a threat from the coldly intellectual Technic people and their complex systems of gears, remote controls and piston powered engines!