The LEGO Movie, 2014.
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller.
Featuring the voice talents of Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Nick Offerman, Alison Brie, Charlie Day, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill and Cobie Smulders.
SYNOPSIS:
An ordinary LEGO minifigure, mistakenly thought to be the extraordinary MasterBuilder, is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil LEGO tyrant from gluing the universe together.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller celebrate the absurd, the oddities and the outcasts. Cloud With a Chance of Meatballs was bizarre and an experiment in the absurd yet to describe The LEGO Movie as bizarre would be slightly restricting. It is more than simply bizarre, it’s a creative marvel, utterly bonkers and hugely ambitious. Most impressively, it’s weird. Really weird, almost Avant Garde. It celebrates the chaos and anarchy of LEGO while blending it with an incredibly human heart; a concept absent among animations in recent years.
Instead of order, chaos reigns. Emmett (voiced brilliantly by Chris Pratt), is average in every sense of the word. His favourite song is “Everything is Awesome,”- catchier than the common cold – he wakes up, reads the instructions and goes about his day as the instructions so set out. After a mishap leads him to obtaining the “piece of resistance,” Wildstyle, voiced by Elizabeth Banks, whisks him off to help fight the sinister and maniacal Lord Business.
Yet there is more to the film than simply a plot. It works as a framework for the world to be created. Each character is sillier and more inventive be it Alison Brie’s “Unikitty” or Nick Offerman’s Metal-Beard, a grotesque mess of numerous LEGO pieces that don’t belong together.
Cynicism would signal towards it simply being a further cash-grab scheme, sell the product first, build a narrative later. Yet the world they have created feels less like an advert, less falsified, more real, as if they individually built it, brick by brick. Each character has subtle scratches and broken helmets as if Lord and Miller have played with each figure for hours on end.
As the film enters it’s hectic and manic final third, chaos ensues. LEGO has no rules and the filmmakers use this, almost to a fault. Yet the filmmakers intelligence and understanding of the product results in a gloriously manic and loopy conclusion. Logic is thrown out of the window, exactly what the film is aiming for disappears but all for the better.
The nostalgia of LEGO is celebrated, resulting in a film both attractive for children and adults alike. Unikitty will please the children, 80s Spaceman glistens with scratches and a broken helmet that many adults will recognise with a gleeful smile. A heartfelt and beautiful message protrudes out during the final 15 minutes which may feel forced under the reign of a different director, but feels perfectly placed and balanced.
Absurd and gleefully chaotic, The LEGO Movie does what few animated films achieve. Witty, weird and more often than not, beautiful and touching. A film to be celebrated not simply as a piece of animation but as a marvel of cinema. Lord and Miller have created a film in a similar vein to the Toy Story trilogy. In the words of Emmett, everything is awesome.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Thomas Harris
Originally published February 4, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
