It's only been out for one weekend, but you've probably — like most of the world — seen "The LEGO Movie" multiple times. But did you catch all the Easter Eggs and plot points that zip by during the non-stop speedy dialogue and action? Here are some of our favorite blink-and-you-miss-it moments. And spoilers on, of course: "Eight And A Half Years Later" Right at the top of the movie, after Lord Business (Will Ferrell) and Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) battle for possession of the all-powerful Kragle, we cut to a title screen that says, "Eight And A Half Years Later." While this is a nice preview of the running "very specific time frame" joke throughout the movie, it's also way more important to the plot. That's because Finn (Jadon Sand), the kid who ultimately turns out to be playing with the LEGOs in the movie is eight and a half years old. So though it's never explicitly stated, when Finn was born, The Man Upstairs locked his toys away, separated the worlds and made sure that his son would never play with them.
Given the poignant ending, this is yet another beautiful, emotional detail that adds to the richness of the film. Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman all get their time to shine in the movie, but there is one other DC Comics superhero gets his big screen debut. That would be the Flash, seen during Metal Beard's flashback to the Master Builders' initial assault on Lord Business' stronghold. He doesn't get any lines, so hopefully we'll get to see more of the speedster in the sequel. When Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) and Emmet (Chris Pratt) visit The Old West, you can hear a plinky, olde timey Western version of "Everything Is Awesome" playing in the bar. One of the biggest cameos in the movie has to be when the Millennium Falcon shows up unexpectedly next to our heroes' pirate ship. Though they weren't able to get Harrison Ford back as Han Solo (he's voiced by Keith Ferguson, who's done various Ford characters on "Robot Chicken"), they did manage to snag Billy Dee Williams for Lando, and Anthony Daniels for C-3P0.
It's surprising that the Warner Brothers movie managed to get Disney's talent, but the long relationship between LEGO and Lucasfilm makes the whole thing a little more understandable. And super freakin' awesome. Another big screen reunion, Channing Tatum plays Superman and Jonah Hill plays Green Lantern, reprising their partnership from directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller's "21 Jump Street." The team will once again reunite on "22 Jump Street," though out of their superhero costumes. When Vitruvius runs down all the worlds Lord Business has tried to lock down, he mentions there's a bunch we don't care about. One that quickly flashes on screen is Bioncile, a LEGO line that ran from 2001-2010 with a deep, complicated back-story of its own. Though this may have been a joke at the expense of some of the brick-maker's failed toys, it's also an indication of places the story could go in the sequel. What's With All The Croissants? One of the more knowing jokes in the movie finds Emmet's "friends" talking about what makes them all different, which includes eating croissants, and loving turkey drumsticks.
The reason behind this is that LEGO has a few generic foods that fit right into mini-figs hands. Croissants actually show up in over 30 different LEGO sets, while turkey drumsticks are in well over 50. Probably the only item more popular is carrots, which show up over 60 times. Here's one we actually missed, but according to Deadline there's a shout-out to Jeffrey Robinov. The legendary studio head was working at Warner Brothers and greenlit "The LEGO Movie," before abruptly leaving the company. Perhaps he's mentioned on one of the many, many billboards in Brickington at the beginning of the movie? We'll just have to go watch the movie a few more times to find out... "The LEGO Movie" is currently in theaters.With the success of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “21 Jump Street,” both Phil Lord and Chris Miller have out done themselves again with “The Lego Movie.” As both director and writer, Lord and Miller have crafted another cleverly written comedy. “The Lego Movie” tells the story of Emmet (Chris Pratt), an everyday construction worker who lives his life according to instructions.
After finding a strange object buried underground, Emmet finds himself involved in a diabolical plot that threatens the existence of his world. Together with his rag-tag group of friends— including his love interest, Wildstyle (Elizabeth Banks) and Mentor Vitruvius, (Morgan Freeman)— Emmet will have to stop Lord Business (Will Ferrell) from unleashing his doomsday device on Taco Tuesday. Ferrell puts on a spectacular performance as the movie’s main antagonist. He spews out hilarious one-liners and mispronounces real world objects like Band-Aids and Krazy Glue. Other notable performances include Will Arnett as the self-centered Batman, and Liam Neeson as the conflicted, but obedient Bad Cop/Good Cop. Going beyond a simple form of entertainment, the film presents an interesting clash between the different play styles of people who play with Legos. The conflict between those who do and don’t follow the instructions, leads to some of the most comedic and heartfelt moments in the movie.
While the film appears to be marketed towards children, most of the humor will appeal to adults. However, the flashy set pieces and fast pace will keep the younger audiences entertained. Through digital animation, the filmmakers have created a vibrant world filled with Lego people whose awkward movements only add to the credibility of the Lego environments. Practically everything that’s presented appears to be made out of Lego bricks and pieces. The laser blasts and elemental effects like fire and water, never deviate from the film’s style. “The Lego Movie” was released on Feb. 7 and is currently playing in theatres everywhere. Unlike the recommended age group for a Lego set, this film is intended for all ages.This post discusses the plot of The LEGO Movie in extensive detail.At the beginning of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 21 Jump Street, their 2012 cop comedy that was a repurposing the television show that ran from 1987–1991, Deputy Chief Hardy (Nick Offerman), explains to two young cops (Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill) that they’re being assigned to a unit in which they’ll be impersonating high school students to investigate drug crimes.“
We’re reviving a canceled undercover police program from the ’80s and revamping it for modern times,” Hardy says. “You see the guys in charge of this stuff lack creativity and are completely out of ideas, so all they do now is recycle shit from the past and expect us all not to notice.”It was a very funny acknowledgement of the main objection that most people had posed to the very concept of a 21 Jump Street. But Hardy’s grumpiness also set a bar for the movie so low that Lord and Miller could leap over it with even more glee than an apocalyptically high Channing Tatum diving through a gong. If 21 Jump Street was proof that Lord and Miller could make a terrific, funny movie within the confines of Hollywood’s constricting business model, their follow-up, The LEGO Movie, released last weekend, proves something more ambitious: that the two men can take their industry’s obsession with pre-existing properties, sequels, Chosen One narratives, and overhyped emotions and make a surprising soulful movie out of all these tacky little pieces of plastic.
The plot of The LEGO Movie is as follows. Emmet Brickowoski (Parks and Recreation’s Chris Pratt) is a happy, brainwashed construction worker LEGO who lives and works in Bricksburg, a city run by President Business (Will Ferrell). Business is a dictator who has homogenized culture to the point that there’s only one television show, an idiotic sitcom called Where Are My Pants, and a single hit song, the admittedly amazing “Everything Is Awesome,” made conformity the norm, and reduced his citizens’ identities to their interests, be it in cats, surfing, or sausage. He also happens to be a super-villain who’s stolen a secret weapon called the Kragle, over the objections of a stoner-sage wizard with the evocative name of Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), and plans to freeze his entire society in place, thwarting a secret society of LEGOs known as the MasterBuilders, whose wild creativity threatens Business’ vision of perfection. And Emmet is unwittingly drawn into this conflict when he comes into contact with the Piece of Resistance and meets another LEGO named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a pretty, creative MasterBuilder who, along with her boyfriend Batman (Will Arnett), is part of the resistance.
But it has another layer as well: the movie shifts into live-action when Emmet’s story turns out to be the creation of a little boy whose father (Ferrell) has created an exquisite LEGO universe in the basement and forbidden his children to play with it. The Kragle is actually the Krazy Glue the man plans to use to cement his creation into place, ending the possibility of infinite rearrangements that are exactly what make LEGOs so endlessly amusing. President Business is a stand-in for the boy’s father, whose appropriation of children’s toys and determination to strip them of their anarchic creativity is actually a kind of death.As much as President Business stands in for industry, it’s not for capitalism in general, but for the movie business in particular. The LEGO Movie never pretends that the products of mass media aren’t outrageously entertaining — that would be a willful denial of reality. Instead, it asks us to consider what we’re losing out in that homogenization.
Almost everything in The LEGO Movie functions on multiple levels. “Everything Is Awesome” is genuinely a beautifully-constructed earworm, made lovely by Tegan and Sara, and funny and silly by the Lonely Island. But as many times as it’s possible to listen to the song on a loop, it feels like an awful waste that this is the only song we’ll ever get to hear by these collaborators. Who wouldn’t want to hear more of what they could do together? And finally, the song is a perfect expression of the formula that’s subtext in so much Hollywood advertising and text in internet-optimized headlining style: if every possible thing elicits the same reaction at the same pitch, how can we have meaningfully different experiences? Awesome isn’t the only thing to value.Similarly, it’s highly entertaining to have Batman bopping around Emmet’s quiz, showing up with conveniently-timed Batmobiles, and tossing Batarangs at strategically placed buttons. But The LEGO Movie’s version of Batman reminds us of just how much our tonally homogenized superhero movies and their failure to move beyond origin stories have cost us.
This Batman has all the same attributes as Christopher Nolan’s or Tim Burton’s, but in different quantities: he’s an arrogant showboat who composes “deep” metal tracks for Wydstyle, even though he doesn’t actually know her real name. When, at one point in the movie, Batman seems to ditch Emmet, Wyldstyle, Vitruvius, and the mission against President Business to go hang out with Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, it’s entirely keeping with his character, and it’s the gesture that follows that reads as a surprise. Superheroism is a small part of The LEGO Movie’s pastiche, but their interpretation of Batman is the freshest we’ve seen on the big screen in several years.And even its larger narrative, The LEGO Movie casts a gimlet eye on the Chosen One stories that have so dominated both young adult literature and the big screen in recent years. In these stories, young people tend to be targeted because they possess special powers, or to discover, once they’ve been chosen for a school or a contest, that the abilities they’ve previously applied to normal tasks are actually a portent of something larger.
But Emmet, after accidentally discovering the Piece of Resistance — or not really discovering it, it gets stuck to him after he falls down a hole — doesn’t turn out to be the Special, as the Chosen One in Vitruvius’ prophecy is called, or even particularly special at all. He’s a bit of a bland guy with some silly dreams that turn out to be useful in an emergency. And Vitruvius ultimately confesses that the prophecy is bunk, a propaganda tool he dreamed up to keep his cohorts going in the fight against President Business. When he’s freed up from the burden of being highly unusual, and singularly responsible for Business’ defeat, Emmet actually becomes a more productive member of the team. And his fellow questers are freed up to use their talents without feeling like their skills are somehow inferior or getting in the way of Emmet realizing his greatness. The abilities that Emmet eventually learns are available to all LEGOs, and the citizens of Bricksburg eventually rally in defense of their city, unleashing joyful, creative chaos in the fight against President Business.
It’s a nice inversion of the idea that the super-villain advances The Incredibles that “When everyone’s super, no one will be”: in The LEGO Movie, when creativity is available to everyone, the things they create turn pleasure and joy into a kind of infinitely renewable resource.In The LEGO Movie, that conflict plays out on two levels. In the LEGO world, Emmet’s adventures bust President Business’ monopoly control of creativity, and blows up the idea that you have to have any particular abilities to become a MasterBuilder. Given the opportunity, everyone is awesome. In the live-action segments of the movie, the young boy reminds his father that they’re both capable of building extraordinary things, and that his father’s static vision of his dream universe isn’t the only way for something to be exceptional and fascinating. In a nice twist, and an important comment on the terrible state of gender equality in the entertainment industry, the father tells his son that he can’t just give the little boy a chance to play.
They have to invite his younger sister down into the basement, too: the movie ends with her creations from the Planet Duplo mounting an invasion of Bricksburg.And on a third level, Lord and Miller are almost certainly talking about themselves. Working together, they’ve produced three delightful franchises from unexpected places: their surprisingly good 2009 adaptation of the essentially plotless picture book Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, which earned a sequel last year, 21 Jump Street, which they’re reprising later in 2014, and now The LEGO Movie. But for all the box office success of these projects — the first Cloudy made $243 million, 21 Jump Street brought in $200 million on a budget of just $42 million, and The LEGO Movie made $69 million in North America this weekend — it would be easy for Hollywood to treat Miller and Lord as an exception to be tolerated, rather than as a potential business model to be emulated. It’s true that it’s hard to recreate wildly singular visions: Pixar’s present struggles are evidence of that.