If DC’s “expanded universe” continues to struggle – and this week saw upcoming movie The Flash lose its second director – studio Warner Bros might want to consider shrinking its entire roster of colorful crimefighters down and just make Lego superhero movies instead. For there is more joie de vivre in the new three-minute trailer for The Lego Batman Movie than there was in the entirety of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – and I’m including the extended edition in that equation. Here are five takeaways from our latest look at the tiny, plastic plaything who’s fast making Batfleck look like yesterday’s dark knight. This caped crusader has had a personality upgrade The Batman we met in The Lego Movie aways seemed an unlikely candidate for his own solo film, a pompous jerk who was more Flash Thompson than Bruce Wayne. But this time around, despite his vast wealth and playboy lifestyle, our Will Arnett-voiced caped crusader is being painted as a far more sympathetic superhero.
It appears a life lived all alone in one’s echoing mansion, eating cordon bleu TV dinners and trying to get all your gadgets to sync properly is a rather lonely one. Hence, The Lego Movie looks like it will focus on Batman’s transition from solo operator to leader of an extended family of masked vigilantes, with Robin and Batgirl also pulling on their costumes for the first time. Yes, it’s the plot of Batman & Robin all over again, but without the Batnipples and painful script. Some serious synopsizing of typical Batman mythos has gone down Barbara Gordon, AKA Batgirl, AKA Oracle, has been through almost as many alternate versions as the dark knight himself over the years. The Lego Batman Movie pitches a new iteration of the superhero who is both Batgirl and Commissioner Gordon, the role usually played by her father James. (The 2007 comic Batman #666, which imagined a future dystopian Gotham, pulled the same trick.)Gordon appears to be set on dropping the Gotham City police department’s traditional public opposition to Batman’s activities in favour of working alongside the dark knight.
Has she got the hots for the caped crusader? At least, this being a kids’ movie, we can guarantee they’re not about to go all Killing Joke on us. Michael Cera’s Robin is an eye-poppingly irritating riff on the boy wonder’s reviled status Given Cera often pops up on mean lists of actors who Hollywood forgot about, you might think he’s being rather brave taking on the role that killed Chris O’Donnell’s career. But rather than trying to rehabilitate Robin – a character who comic book fans famously once voted should be killed off – The Lego Batman Movie seems more than happy for us to carry on hating him. This particular boy wonder, resembling the Carrie Kelley version from The Dark Knight Returns, is an eye-poppingly irritating creation whose sole purpose seems to be to wind Batman up with his perky overenthusiasm and skimpy outfits. The new Joker is a lovesick puppy From The Killing Joke to The Dark Knight, Batman stories have often hinted at the symbiotic connection between the caped crusader and his green-haired nemesis – remember Heath Ledger’s spiky nod to Jerry Maguire?
But The Lego Batman Movie seems to be taking the twisted love-hate thing to a whole new level. Informed that Superman is the dark knight’s true enemy – a neat Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice reference – the villain finds himself unexpectedly reduced to tears, his cackling exterior ripped away to reveal the soggy little puppy dog beneath. Might Batman come to regret such coarse and casual contempt further down the line? It doesn’t matter that this is the second Batman film in as many years If this new trailer shows us anything, it’s that the world needs a little more meta-fuelled superhero satire. And with more than half a century of movies, comic books and TV shows to riff on, Batman seems to be the perfect target. Warner Bros might be responsible for having turned the caped crusader into a gun-toting, knuckle-headed bore, but at least the studio knows how to have a joke at its own expense. If Chris McKay’s film registers with audiences on the level that The Lego Movie did, one imagines they’ll be laughing all the way to the Gotham National Bank.
The new movie has already been a huge hit but does a Lego Jurassic Park game, that coves all four films, really make sense? Last year three separate Lego games were released: Lego Movie, Lego The Hobbit, and Lego Batman 3. That’s not the first time three have been out in the same year, and this year there’s actually four: this, Lego Dimensions, Lego Marvel’s Avengers, and Lego Worlds. That’s the kind of release schedule that makes Call Of Duty and Assassin’s Creed look conservative with their sequels, and yet such are the charms of the Lego games that nobody really seems to mind. But that doesn’t mean that every game deserves a free pass… There are several obvious reasons why these games get away with so much: there’s the enduring popularity of Lego itself, the strength of the various movies they’re based on, and the simple fun of the games themselves – particularly in terms of co-op and the fact that they’re amongst the few family friendly games around of any merit, especially on non-Nintendo consoles.
But the quality of each game can vary quite a bit, primarily depending on how well the licence fits the existing gameplay formula. What you first need for a good one is a strong and recognisable brand, which Jurassic Park certainly qualifies as. But it also needs a good supply of cannon fodder enemies and a certain degree of background violence to the whole setting. That’s something that franchises like Star Wars and Marvel can deliver in spades, but we’re not sure that Sam Neil or Jeff Goldblum ever punched or shot anyone in any of the films. This immediately puts Lego Jurassic World at a disadvantage, and instead of action it’s forced to concentrate on puzzle-solving. That actually worked out perfectly fine for the Lego Harry Potter games, and this follows a similar path of sign-posted puzzles and smashing up lots and lots of Lego objects. Occasionally you get to punch a Compsognathus or Dilophosaurus, and the hunter characters do have tranquilliser guns, but the majority of the action comes in the form of chases and simple QTE sequences.
But the other problem for Jurassic Park as a franchise is that only the first film is a recognised classic. Opinions vary on the other three, but if you can name any of the characters that weren’t in the first film then you’re a bigger fan than us (and no, ‘Chris Pratt’ doesn’t count). Not only does that mean that the scenes the game recreates are less iconic, but there’s less fun to be had in reusing the dialogue. While in the other games unlocking new superheroes or bounty hunters made getting a 100% completion rating irresistible it’s very hard to get excited about unlocking random security guards or whatever Vince Vaughn’s character was called in The Lost World. And yet despite all these intractable problems Lego Jurassic World does its best. The open world hub world is the park itself and Site B from the second film, which is filled with secrets and sub quests. But unfortunately the game’s unique selling point, that you can play as dinosaurs, is badly mishandled.
They’re actually quite a bit of fun when you get a go on them, with their own unique attacks that are also used to solve several otherwise impossible puzzles within the game. But the game gives you very few chances to play as them in the story mode and we ended up beating the majority of the game before we’d unlocked any of the good ones, by which time our interest in the game had started to wane considerably. And while we know that’s how the toys are, the dinosaurs aren’t actually made out of real Lego bricks. They’re just composed of four or five pre-moulded parts. That really spoils the fun for us, and we’d much rather have seen something like this. There are other problems too, and inevitably one of those is bugs and glitches – which the series has always been riddled with. Lego Jurassic World comes somewhere in the middle, in terms of their severity, with the larger dinosaurs often not interacting properly with the backdrop. And more than once our human character or their vehicle got stuck behind scenery, that then necessitated us restarting the checkpoint.