With a hugely dedicated fan base for the decades-old creative construction toys and a slew of recent successes in videogames, retail outlets – even its own theme park(s) – the future looks increasingly bright for LEGO, the Danish toy manufacturer, back from the brink of bankruptcy in the early 2000s and enjoying a renaissance in the worldwide cultural zeitgeist. The myriad of movies bearing the mark of the multiversal brand have never threatened to breach the mainstream, that is, until now…
The LEGO Movie (2014) 100 min. – Animation | Action | Comedy; Australia, USA, Denmark; dir: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller; written by: Dan & Kevin Hageman (story), Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (story/screenplay)
The LEGO Movie seemed like an easy target when it emerged that filming had started in 2012. We’d just had Battleship – which sunk – and with beloved childhood franchises seemingly optioned on a daily basis, Hollywood in the grips of a creative meltdown, another corporate movie based on a toy license – even one which invites such immense nostalgia and goodwill – still felt a little weak. The strongest hint of its potential came with the news that Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, 2009) were attached to write and direct. Still, with the smoky ruins of Battleship still skulking on the surface, it seemed quite unlikely that a movie so blatantly product-oriented could actually be any good. That said, Cloudy… was a distinctly great animated comedy, a box office smash – managing to entertain younger audiences with silly slapstick and cunning caricatures whilst dazzling adults with its boldly irreverent, bravely anarchic sense of humour. Director/writer duo Lord and Miller bring that same mix to the LEGOverse too, embracing the spirit of infinite possibility from almost start to finish. They’re the kings of the comic non-sequitur – sure, you might guess that the ending is happy, but you’ll never guess just how happy it’ll be or how they’ll get there. It plays out in a very similar way to Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, fused with the dark and dazzling action of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, the playfulness and pathos of Pixar’s Ratatouille and the ingeniously irreverent logic and humour of universe-bending time-travel movies like Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure and Time Bandits.
The LEGO Movie sees Emmet (Chris Pratt) – a regular construction worker in a world full of regular guys and gals, in a regular town where everyone has the same routine, likes the same annoying songs (more on that later) and drinks the same over-priced coffee, where they all know their role and they’re all SUPERHAPPY about it. A little extra-curricular exploration leads to the discovery of an ultra-rare brick in an underground cavern, where Emmet is mistaken for a Master Builder, and ends up on an adventure that spans across countless LEGO worlds. Accompanied by the unlikely team of Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), Unikitty (Alison Brie) and, uh, Batman (Will Arnett), Emmet has to find his own talent or risk defeat by evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell) and his henchman, Badcop (Liam Neeson). That’s probably as much as you’d like to know about the movie without seeing it – laugh-a-minute is putting it mildly – it’s much nearer to laugh-a-second; in fact, I can’t think of another movie where so much of interest is happening on-screen without distracting from the narrative. It’s a beautiful movie to look at too, inspired by the stop-motion style made popular most recently by Aardman Studios (Wallace & Gromit) but charmingly rendered in high def, full palette CGI. The level of intricacy in every frame as well as the sheer volume of movement – seeing every building, landscape, sea, sky and character seemingly realised from scale-sized LEGO pieces is both an amazing advertisement and an astonishing work of high-concept art. And what if the world were made of LEGO pieces…? It’s a visual universe so richly idiosyncratic, passionately and obsessively detailed, it seems only fitting to see it not once but many times – not that anyone could keep up with all of the references, hidden gags, cameo appearances, one-liners and slapstick after one watch, anyway.
Complimentary to its undulating landscapes and Matrix-like multiverses, The LEGO Movie also riffs intelligently on the pitfalls of a society controlled by a singular omnipotent force – in this case, Lord Business (Will Ferrell) – the leader of a Huxleyesque dystopia where everyone is seemingly happy to follow the instructions, and true individuality is frowned upon. This, one of the films most engaging and most crucial ideas, reveals The LEGO Movie as a continuously awesome tribute to the endless possibilities abound when creativity – SLAM! – meets self-ownership.
In this world – where we first meet Emmet and his daily routine – we also hear the theme tune, Everything Is Awesome, an inescapably catchy song that you are destined to hear and repeat ad infinitum, whether you decide to watch the movie or not. Designed to be an ironically cheesy and overbearingly happy techno track, it seems to have stuck firmly in my mind, and everyone elses too. Killer score aside, The LEGO Movie also boasts everyones soon-to-be new favourite on-screen Batman, played for laughs like (almost) everything else in the movie; a raspy, insufferable jerk with an implicit inferiority complex; obsessed with everything black and using Bat- as a prefix to pretty much everything else, his scenes provide many of the high points in a film full of colourfully surreal encounters. Liam Neeson is hilarious as Badcop, Will Ferrell demonstrates all of the usual Will Ferrell-y comedy inflections and reactions, whilst the Napoleonically-ionised Unikitty, voiced by Alison Brie, is simply adorable, in a repressed-feline-cosplayer-desperate-to-go-postal sort of way. In truth, there are so many other characters and cameos (I couldn’t list them all and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone) but if I tell you that one ten-second scene alone unites Gandalf, Milhouse, Abraham Lincoln, Superman and a giant shark, and about a hundred others, well, you get the drift.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone not getting caught up in the party-like atmosphere of The LEGO Movie, with its smart counter-cultural messages, relentless humour, its cheerful, engaging visuals and rapid-fire direction, and for all intents and purposes, I fully expected to be amongst the haters. It is, after all, a movie about a toy – a brand not known for lending its name to movie superiority, until now – and there’s certainly an argument that the film is one giant commercial for LEGO sets, with a few big names to add credibility; if you didn’t know, there’s a videogame based on the movie out right now, along with special collectible sets and a new series of mini-figures, so that’s a fair and true argument. You might then feel wary about the upside of sitting through a one-hundred minute long commercial for LEGO, a thought which would ring true if the film wasn’t so gosh-darn brilliant. In that regard, it shares more than a few genes with Pixar’s reverberant film Toy Story, similarly brand-focused, also expected to be an overlong commercial for kids. Like Toy Story, the final ten minutes of The LEGO Movie are pure Hollywood over-sentimentality, but they earn it, and as such, you never feel manipulated into feeling a bit emotional for these tiny bits of plastic-with-a-pulse. Anyway, those weren’t tears – I just had something in my eye from watching so hard. Honest.
Where LEGO was once ‘just’ bricks, its recent efforts suggest a shift towards the cult of personality – through mini-figures and sets based on famous movies and comic-book superheroes – making The LEGO Movie an entirely contemporary, must-see movie for debutant fans and long-time aficionados – kids with a bucket of LEGO pieces in the toy box, older fans with good memories, hardcore collectors and real-life Master Builders. Thankfully, it earns both their attention and its own plaudits every step of the way, standing tall amongst the best and funniest animated feature films of recent history.
Deryn O’Sullivan (@Silverscene_)
Deryn Paul O'Sullivan 