****
In a world made entirely of Lego,
Emmet is a generic construction worker. He repeats the same system every day
and is a slave to the plans and routines set out by President Business. One
day, he comes across ‘The Piece’ – an item foretold to have connotations for
the future, and something that President Business is eager to obtain. Emmet is
then whisked away from his ordinary life by a team of Master Builders who
assume that he is the answer to the Prophecy and will defeat the President once
and for all.
We should start with the fact
that the film looks fantastic – you could almost believe that these are real
Lego pieces filmed in ‘stop-motion’, and the attention to detail is simply
fantastic. Absolutely everything is made from recognisable pieces of Lego, from
the circular blue pieces that represent water, to the orange flames. (I was never
a big Lego fan myself, so I apologise if I use the incorrect terminology.) When
there is an explosion, the outburst of smoke, flame and debris is in the shape
of the blocks, and it is a pleasure to behold. There is even a scene based on
the surface of a choppy Lego-sea where you can still see the separate building
blocks. None of the figures are made to move in a way that they could not in ‘real
life’ so the horses merely slide along the floor and nothing is remotely
flexible.
It is also very funny. The
majority of the humour is definitely aimed at the older members of the
audience, with some very witty puns and pop-culture references dotting the
script. Batman (voiced by Will Arnett) is the ultimate scene-stealer, coming
out with some truly hysterical lines of dialogue. The Good Cop/Bad Cop
character (Liam Neeson) is also a joy, and I couldn’t help but feel Neeson was
using the character to poke fun at some of his more recent work. You would be
amazed at the amount of expression to can create on the face of a Lego figurine,
and this only adds to the humour. The film romps along at a good pace, leaping
from one set piece to another, and only slows down as the ‘twist’ is revealed.
It certainly does not outstay it’s welcome either.
There seems to be a theme at the
moment amongst film-makers: hit the audience over the head with the ‘moral
message’ as hard as you possibly can, and unfortunately The Lego Movie does not escape this trend. It is by far less
distracting than the frankly horrific ‘and the reason to this story is…’ which
took up the end of Monsters University,
but it is still present. In this film, it is handled well (I’m tiptoeing here
because the ‘message’ is also involved with the ‘big twist’ moment of the film)
but it cannot be denied that it suddenly comes along and jars with the rest of
the film, which is hugely comedic. I feel that child viewers to not need to be
patronised by having everything spelt out to them, and it is certainly
off-putting for the older viewer, of which there will doubtless be many in the
audiences for this film. I was also a little deterred by how quickly the ‘action’
started – literally within the first minute of the film we had already had the
Prophecy explained to us through a rather chaotic dialogue piece, but I need
not have worried.
I do not generally like children’s
films, and I am certainly not ‘big’ on comedy, preferring tragedy and distress
to romance and laughter. However, this is a joy of a film: it is witty,
excellent to look at, cleverly made, and with a heart of gold. Go and see it
and I promise you that, no matter what age you are, everything will be awesome
at the end.
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