Ryan McNeil
Time and again, we are taught that we should be more individual in our thoughts. We’re taught that herd mentality is bad – that we should be listening to more than what commercial radio plays and eat better than what is offered at your average chain establishment. But if going against the grain is so virtuous, why don’t more people do it?
To put it another way, if we should be working without the instructions – why even bother including instructions?
Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt) is an ordinary construction worker. He lives a pretty humdrum life, and quietly longs to be part of the gang. One day at his construction site, he comes across a strange woman looking for something. The woman’s name is Wyldstyle (voiced by Elizabeth Banks), and she claims to be hunting for “The Piece of Resistance”. Through a fluke, Emmet finds it first – which according to prophecy means that he is a Master Builder, and the person who will save the world.
The world needs saving from Lord Business (voiced by Will Ferrell), who wants to use a new super-weapon called The Kragle to make the world more to his liking. Putting his plan into action will require keeping The Piece of Resistance at bay, and for that he unleashes his henchman Bad Cop/Good Cop (voiced by Liam Neeson) and his squad of Micromanagers.
It’s up to Emmet and his team – rounded out by Vitruvius, Batman, Unikitty and Benny (Morgan Freeman, Will Arnett, Alison Brie, and Charlie Day respectively) to encourage builders to think for themselves. Only then will they thwart Lord Business and keep everything awesome.
SPOILER WARNING: While most of my reviews stay spoiler-free, this piece discusses a point which happens in the film’s final act. Consider yourself warned – RM
Lego has been around since before I was born, and that it has never waned in popularity through all of those years is truly amazing. Over the last decade or so, its popularity has swelled into a subculture all its own thanks to a series of video games centred around it. I had hundreds of pieces as a child, and enjoyed building things as much as the next person. While I can still get a few moments amusement using the toy, I don’t consider myself a fan. I say that because I think it’s important to state where I’m coming from in my reaction to this film.
One of the core themes of LEGO is that scores of people who play with the toy have lost their imagination. The film bemoans people looking for the instructions, wanting sets in lieu of pieces, and ultimately unable to think for themselves. We are supposed to see it as dastardly the Lord Business wants to keep the worlds separate; that pirates and cowboys should be able to play together in some sort of imaginative utopia. That’s a great notion, and one that I can et behind if it weren’t for one big problem:
Lego created that problem themselves.
It was Lego that started selling entire sets dedicated to genres, properties, and characters. It was Lego that started putting these sets on separate shelves. It was Lego that started marketing certain sets towards girls and certain sets towards boys. When I was younger, my parents gave me package upon package of blocks. What I built was up to me, and how it interacted with my other Lego toys (or – God forbid – my non-Lego toys!) was all the fun. Sure sometimes I got bricks of a certain colour that were geared for particular ideas – grey bricks for castles, for instance – but to suggest that Lego fans aren’t able to use their own imagination and be unique is like standing in a house you’ve set on fire and complaining that it’s suddenly so hot.
Perhaps I’m being too hard on LEGO though…perhaps encouraging children to have a few more unique thoughts is a noble quest. Well, I could get behind that if the story stuck to its guns instead of becoming an orgy of pop culture references. On the one hand, getting everyone into the pool underlined what the film wanted us to take away – that these sets shouldn’t be isolated, and that seeing cowboys ride through the corridors of space station should be encouraged. Unfortunately, the script never keeps things that simple and instead gets everybody from Gandalf to Shaq in on the action. What starts out clever, soon turns overly meta and by the end of it, the filmmakers are just throwing references at the wall to see what sticks.
During many of these moments, it feels more like the filmmakers are trying to amuse themselves instead of amusing their audiences. For instance, on the Sunday afternoon that I watched this film, children accounted for at least half of the packed cinema I was in. Very few of these children laughed when The Millennium Falcon showed up…none of them laughed when Lando Calrissian popped out of the cockpit.
What I’m saying is, there’s a reason why Robot Chicken is fifteen minutes long.
I should be able to roll with these points and just enjoy the movie, but I just can’t. It would have taken a lot for me to see THE LEGO MOVIE as more than a 100 minute toy commercial, and what I got didn’t even come close. Its death knell came in the final act, when a grown man sees the light and realizes that he should let his son play with his toys too. Seriously folks, this is what it’s come to? We live in an age where we enjoy the luxury of prolonged youth. Everything from comic books to video games are being marketed at grown-ups with jobs, mortgages, and children of their own. That some adults have the time to enjoy such toys – that some even make the time – is nice…but no adult should need to learn that they need to share their toys. Last time I checked, that was taught in junior kindergarten, and a grown man remembering that lesson isn’t something to be celebrated.
Children will definitely enjoy seeing their favorite toys come to life on the big screen. Parents might enjoy coughing up fifty bucks for more sets for their children next time they pass a Toys R Us. As for the rest of us, there’s nothing new to see here: just what you’d get if you dropped yellow plastic, too much sugar, and twenty years of pop-culture into a blender and hit ‘frappé’.
I feel like some of your problems with the film seem to exist outside the film itself. I think the film does a fantastic job of subverting the idea that there’s this one right set way to make things. The film has tons of opportunities to show off sets Lego actually has for some of the universes, but instead it’s the filmmaker’s own interpretations of these universes. Middle Zealand could have been actual Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit sets. Instead, they made up their own stuff for the film.
Also, to me, the bit with the father at the end is less about sharing and more about recognizing the tyranny that can often result from trying to impose complete order and control in our lives. By embracing the messiness and roughness of playing with Legos along with his kids, he’s also able to become a less controlling person. Kids know they aren’t in control, a less adults are quick to forget.
As for all the pop-culture references, those are always very subjective. Personally, this is the hardest I’ve laughed watching a movie in a long time.
Somehow I managed to skip right past you and respond to everybody else – sorry about that.
Admittedly, it’s difficult to separate product and production here. Thing is, I think the film deliberately tries to blur those lines. There are too many references to instructions, kits, and the like to keep one isolated from the other. So my perception of the film might have been influenced by my perception of the property, but no more so than the latest comic book adaptation.
I would agree with your point about less parental tyranny if it were about almost anything else. You’re right – parents hold too tight a grip on a lot of what families do, from how they pray to how they play. But this wasn’t just about a father dictating how his son could and couldn’t play with; it was a father saying “don’t touch”.
When my father said “don’t touch”, it was directed at things he could see I was curious about but that could cause trouble (tools, knives, important object like keys that I could lose). This father is too hellbent on the way he wants to use a toy versus the way his son wants to lose a toy. At the end of the day, it’s still a toy: kid’s stuff. The father should know better.
I generally avoid arguing when stuff comes down to sense of humor or whatever…
But I think you treated the film as “Directed by Lego” rather than a Miller/Lord story that stands on its own and subverts whatever Lego is doing elsewhere. Lego were pretty hands off on the story.
I also don’t get it when any reviews try to describe what the audience is thinking. Unless there’s walkouts in droves, it’s so easy to counter the ‘they sit on their hands’ stuff with the fact I saw this again, same day as you apparently did, and likely the same theater (Yonge/Egg) and during the Star Wars part this one kid screamed “THIS MOVIE IS INSANE!” and he and his friends (a birthday party) were shouting “GO GO GO” during various action scenes.
I know that Lego didn’t commission this movie, and that it’s a property adaptation more than it is “A Lego Inc Joint”. Unfortunately when the product itself and how it is used is at the core of the film, it gets tremendously difficult to divide church and state.
We weren’t in the same screening – because I would have noticed that. If anything that sort of enthusiasm might have pulled me over the top! But the audience I was part of wasn’t really into it. The handful of jokes that did get a chuckle out of me were met by silence from the rest of the room.
And by “noticed that”, I mean noticed the children’s reaction – not notice that you and I were sitting in the same cinema 🙂
“no adult should need to learn that they need to share their toys. ”
And yet they really really really really really really do, and that goes from beyond the literal kids toys to just about every film property.
Man of Steel is Exhibit A.
They do, but they shouldn’t. They don’t get pats on the head for finally acting like grown-ups.
At the risk of going down a rabbit hole, explain the MAN OF STEEL point.
I thought the Man of Steel point is obvious. There is nothing about the latest Superman film which is going to inspire wonder and fandom in a new generation of tots. It’s for adult comic book fans who won’t share their toys.
Interesting theory.
I disagree, but that’s I think that’s going down a whole other road. Not a bad idea for a post though…
The children in your theatre probably had the fun-gene beat out of them by their parents. Mine was full of laughing and squealing kids who loved everything from SPACESHIPPPPPPPPPP to Unikitty’s rages.
…or they weren’t getting the jokes because they’re too young to have seen The Matrix or the original Star Wars trilogy.
Children going nuts over the rages & “Spaceshi-i-i-i-i-i-p” are low-hanging-fruit. They’re the same children who laugh when clowns fall down.
Clowns falling down IS funny. Especially when it’s down elevator shafts or into alligator filled pits.
The SPACESHIP line is not low hanging fruit. They built up to it via several previous scenes and a good deal of its humour comes from this guy being so damn enthusiastic about being able to help with his particular skill. It was one of my favourite parts of the film.
Also, I think I had that exact same lego character as a kid – even with the cracked helmet.
Yes they built up to it…and when they finally got to the payoff they unleashed a child who’d been stuffing his gob with cupcakes for forty-five minutes and let him run screaming around the living room. So. Funny.
I had that astronaut too. He might even still be in my parents’ house somewhere…
“it feels more like the filmmakers are trying to amuse themselves instead of amusing their audiences.”
You really lost me here Ryan…Shouldn’t the filmmakers be making their own film? How many blockbuster films have you seen that try far too hard to please their audience and end up pleasing no one? One of the reasons the old Bugs Bunny cartoons (I’m not trying to raise LEGO to the height of Bugs, just making a point) were so great is that the filmmakers made them for themselves (with tons of pop culture references from the time) while also understanding that a wide variety of people would see them. I remember watching Bugs as a kid and laughing at different parts than my Dad. Reversed the roles when I started watching with my own Boy. Granted there are plenty of recent animated films that try to do the “one for the grownups and one for the kids” strategy, but I think both Bugs and LEGO succeed because they make it somewhat seamless.
“and a grown man remembering that lesson isn’t something to be celebrated.”
But a grown man embracing his child’s creativity and encouraging it IS something to be celebrated. I guess it’s all in how you view it, but I think you pulled the wrong message from that ending. It is a bit overbearing I agree, but I love the fact that they can show a parent playing with their child and letting the child guide the narrative. Kids will always find ways to be creative and our job as parents is not to stifle it, TO occasionally nudge it and enjoy the crap out of it.
I tend to agree with James above that you had certain biases walking into the film (hey, who here doesn’t have certain expectations before any film?). I too wondered how the movie could avoid being just an Ad and I’m quite impressed that they were able to put their own stamp on it.
Oh, and SPACESHIPS! SPACESHIPS! SPACESHIPS! SPACESHIPS!
Let me clarify:
The last time I came across a film that made me feel like the filmmakers were more in it to amuse themselves than the audience, it was THIS IS THE END. In that film, as in this film, I felt like there weren’t enough script editors in between the brainstorming sessions and the final draft. I get that tossing everybody into the pool is meant to mirror the way the boy wants the worlds to intertwine…but it feels less like a ten year old wrote it, and more like a bunch of fratboys wrote it.
I know what you’re talking about with jokes aimed at the parents (Shrek used it well, Aladdin before that. But there’s a balance, and for me that balance was off. It was always either too kiddie or too grown-up, never in that sweet spot where Loony Toons, The Muppets, and so many other greats exist.
We live in a world where many people can – and do – create content like what we see here and post it on YouTube. I wanted a reason to shell out $13, and this movie didn’t give me that reason.
You’re right – a grown man embracing his child’s creativity and encouraging it IS something to be celebrated…but he has to learn that here, doesn’t he? The father in this movie isn’t cut from the same cloth as you or Halfyard. He’s the guy who buys his child a remote control car and only lets him play with it when his wife says “Let junior have a turn”. Sure, he gets there eventually…but that’s my point – he should already be there. There are no participation trophies for understanding the role of parent.
I don’t get why you are fixated on the fact that the father “should” already be embracing his child’s creativity. Yea, that would be lovely, but when not only some parents, but many institutions encourage a certain sameness in approach, why pick on a movie for encouraging parents to encourage their children to be creative? I’m sure we’ll be all talked out about this before next pub, but I’d really like you to explain that further to me over a beer. I’m serious – I’m not sure I understand your point here. I see only goodness from that message.
I like Shrek and all, but I felt that LEGO hit that balance much better (though I may be thinking of the subsequent Shrek films which devolved steadily into crap). But I guess we differ here – I got my $13 worth, you didn’t.
But can we at least agree that clowns are evil and must all be destroyed?
Every time I see a clown I wonder what theatre is staging Pagliacci and how the clown escaped.
Bob, a grown man embracing his creativity is something to be celebrated; agreed. But the problem is that this movie is so so so UNcreative in order to dish out that message that it just becomes a slog.
Ryan nailed it, LEGO thrives (these days) on being totally pre-packaged. And they can’t even bother to make their movie creative. It too is just a bunch of prepackaged ideas all thrown on screen at the same time to see if audiences will proverbially buy it. Apparently they have. They love seeing Harry Potter and Star Wars and My Little Pony and NBA players in LEGO form.
It’s so sad that a movie about LEGOS – which should be the epitome of being creative – is so UNcreative and totally white-washed.
Sure you might argue the message is a good one (I personally think it’s a weird, confusing, message), but just because the message is there, doesn’t mean the film is a masterpiece (yes, many critics are hailing this as a fucking masterpiece) on every other level.
It’s humor is typical, it’s visuals are as awful a color palette as I’ve ever scene and the storyline/plot is so vanilla I was yawning through most of it.
Amazing to me that everyone hates Timur Bekmembetov’s “Wanted,” but for some reason love this LEGO retelling of the same story.
Yay! re-enforcements!!
Like you said on The Cinecast – realizing that this is from the same guys who gave us CLOUDY just underscores the disappointment. In every way that CLOUDY is clever, LEGO is lazy.
Yes, this. So much this! Cloudy is SO bananas weird/creative, it makes LEGOS that much more disappointing.
Well, whether the movie is creative is certainly a subjective call – I don’t think it’s a masterpiece at all, but I think it was indeed creative in many aspects.
However, you seem to be equating the movie with the current state of the company. The movie is, at the very least, encouraging kids NOT to be pigeonholed into using their toys in only one way. Sure they use all those known pop culture characters (which happen to be the majority of LEGO these days), but they reconfigure them and mix them up to be working together. Not to mention the hero of the story is the generic “anyone” figurine.
I get the reaction to today’s LEGO – I loved the buckets of pieces that you turn into anything and incorporate with your slot car racing set, your dinosaurs, your Meccano and everything else you owned – but the movie is not trying to sell the new LEGO sets to you. Prepackaged? It’s an encouragement to dump all your packages on the floor and mix them up.
You guys didn’t like it? That’s fine. But I can’t help but think you are purposely looking for cynicism where none lies.
But that’s my own personal bias and skew. No better or worse than yours (well, better than Ryan’s anyway…).
Haven’t seen WANTED, so I have no opinion on that front…
Since this movie I’ve heard Kurt complain at least a dozen times that you can’t get Lego in buckets from toy stores anymore.
Went into a Toys R Us on the weekend and there were full shelves and endcaps of buckets. Ryan can walk across the street to the Yonge/Eg mall and see for himself.
I supposed I didn’t do my research. YOu couldn’t find buckets, I had to go to a specialty store, back in 2006-2008 date range when I was getting my young son started with Lego Blocks.
“…you seem to be equating the movie with the current state of the company.”
Like I said in an earlier comment, the script making allusions to sets and instructions makes it *super* hard to separate church and state where Lego the toy and THE LEGO MOVIE are concerned. And to that end, the message of not pigeonholing children to use their toys one way seems to have gone a long way at Lego (the toy’s) headquarters:
http://shop.lego.com/en-CA/Lord-Business-Evil-Lair-70809?fromListing=listing
You’re right to point out that I have a stripe of cynicism running through me, which is somewhat hypocritical considering how many of toy-shilling cartoons I used to watch (and then ask my parents to buy me toys from). However, I promise I arrived at this conclusion honestly. You know me Bob – you know how much I like to laugh, and how easy it is to make me laugh.
THE LEGO MOVIE didn’t make me laugh, and didn’t get my brain thinking about bigger ideas. After 100 minutes of that, grumpiness started seeping in.
Most of my beef with the movie is totally subjective. I think it looks like shit, the story is boring and the characters, besides not being funny, I actively disliked. On the surface level, I hated pretty much everything about this movie.
I review it by the same standards I review any movie. There is no intentional looking for cynicism. I simply found it boring/aggravating. And since the whole thing is always moving at diesel level 150%, the boring aggravating was amplified.
My passion for talking about it is amplified even more since everyone seems to love it I don’t.
Outside of the message, I’m still looking for someone to tell me one thing this movie does that is new, innovative or creative. So far no one has mentioned anything.
http://youtu.be/fTH71AAxXmM
Andrew, you left the frigging theater before it even got to the Will Ferrell message, and probably missed WyldStyle’s long rant about the message of the film. You went online claiming the movies message was to follow the instructions, which is just objectively incorrect.
To come online and complain about a message you didn’t stick around to see is just insane.
And again… I’m not really complaining about the message all that much. The movie lost me WAY before that could even take place.
I didn’t like it for all of the other reasons I mentioned above. I couldn’t really care less about what it is saying, because I don’t really care. I’m not seven years old.
The movie ITSELF is uncreative, uninspiring, unoriginal and unfunny. Period. The last ten minutes of the movie is not going to change any of that. If someone else thinks Morgan Freeman mispronouncing Dubmledore is hilarious, more power to ’em. I found it loathsome – along with every other joke in this movie.
But to be fair, I’ve been told about the ending and discussed with others, so at this point I think I’m qualified to at least discuss it.
Andrew mighta bailed, but I stuck it out. If you ask me he got while the gettin’ was good.
Where I would most disagree with you is that I don’t think the film is bemoaning people for losing their imaginations or creativity. Rather, I think the film is taking a middle ground where it’s championing individuality but also highlighting the importance of other ideas and working together. There’s dangers in being too individualistic or too much of a robot, The Lego Movie’s main thematic thrust is about finding that place in the middle where you can really thrive.
I will say though, I don’t find the film as funny as most seem to. It’s very funny at times, and Batman is always funny. But, I found most of the middle section comedy to be bland and for 90% of the time I found Morgan Freeman’s character painfully unfunny. Still, that ending comes and it elevates the film, taking a mediocre film and retroactively transforming it into a great film that is able to overcome its many flaws.
Yeah. Humor and visuals are subjective. I totally get that. But the near universal love is what is troublesome to me. Sometimes I still feel like I’m kind of “right” on the humor and visuals side of things. This is not ‘Nam, there are rules. And these rules are broken in the most grotesque ways.
Morgan Freeman’s character and humor is absolutely BRUTAL in the LEGOS Movie. I want him to stop. Just stop.
Rules? Rules?! Damn Andrew, you sound just like LEGO Corp! “Follow the instructions!”
B-)
How does one complain that something is too ordinary and uncreative, but also complain that it also doesn’t follow the rules?
How’s thie for a rule: watching the full movie before spending an equally long amount of time, if not longer complaining about it. Follow the instructions.
Doesn’t come across well on internet-speak, but tongue was firmly in cheek with the “rules” comment. But yes, in terms of color theory, there are general guidelines. These guidelines can be bent and molded to make interesting things happen. That’s called art. Music follows similar rules.
Puking up a 400 piece crayola set does not follow these guidelines. And IN MY OPINION it looks terrible. If you think it looks great, that’s fine. I don’t.
The humour is the hardest part to get into right – considering how subjective it is? Where the jokes are concerned I found myself sighing way more than I was laughing (“Y’all ready for this”?…really??…it’s 2014, were the “Woot There it Is” jokes edited out?).
I will admit as a fan of both Superman and Green Lantern, I did get a chuckle out of their dynamic, but it sounded like I was the only one.
Best line in the film is from Morgan Freeman, “It’s true because it rhymes.” Which offers shades of the Monorail bit from a classic episode of The Simpsons
I agree that the humor didn’t quite hit my funny bone at the level I’d have expected, but I disagree about the main point of your argument. I think that the movie was subverting the idea that you should follow lego directions. The movie starts out mocking the fact that everyone follows directions to their doom. Then we watch the happy worlds of builders who fail to follow directions. Ultimately, following your OWN set of directions saved the day. So I think it’s trying to say that you should be yourself – play with it however you want, follow the directions if it makes you happy (if you’re making the Millennium Falcon, you’d better follow the directions), but don’t mock the people who chose to go their own path. Well articulated review. Though I too wanted it to be funnier – the kids in my audience were enthralled, but didn’t get the same jokes I did.
I’d have to agree with you on this one Ryan. While I mostly enjoyed the film, I don’t think it really knew what it wanted to be. I found it a slightly awkward mix between fan boy service and a heavily-branded kids film. I found myself quite bored in the second half and the film’s soppy ending made me feel slightly ill. The voice cast was great, I just wish the material was a little more consistent.