Type “Lego movie trailer” into YouTube and you’ll be presented with an avalanche of teasers for The Lego Movie, as well as individual scenes, foreign language versions and special publicity promos. What you won’t get – surprisingly enough – is a Lego recreation of The Lego Movie trailer, something reserved for the most-loved and most-watched regular teasers that aren’t already made out of bricks. Here are just twelve of our favourites, with particular attention going to community stalwarts Antonio Toscano and Brotherhood Workshop. The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug Best bits: There’s so much great detail, it’s almost impossible to pick. The butterflies, the barrels, the splash of the water, the bricky intertitles, and a little wyrm called Smaug. Captain America: The Winter Soldier Best bits: Cap’s shield in bricks, the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy-referencing 42s in bricks and imagining what Steve Rogers’ barbershop quartet would look like in bricks.
Best bits: The size of the ruby Pepper Potts is given, and the thought that somewhere out there is a Lego version of Trevor Slattery. Guardians Of The Galaxy Best bits: The haircut on Glenn Close’s beautiful plastic head, as well as that Lego cassette player you definitely, definitely want. Best bits: That GARGANTUAN cigar, the bottle and chair slicing in twain and the delightful R2-D2. Avengers: Age Of Ultron Best bits: It has to be the hulkbuster suit and the broken shield, right? Best bits: The fisherman! Or Amy Adams’ brick smirk! Or the clever work getting the cape to flap! Best bits: Just how old-school that car is. That, and the skeleton zombies. Best bits: Not the raptors, not the poor shark, but... Captain Sparrow visiting the park. Even pirates need holidays.Has to be Gollum. Star Wars: The Force Awakens Best bits: As with the original teaser, when the Millennium Falcon swoops up and down and around, the TIE fighters shoot, and, and, and… why isn’t it December yet?
Best bits: Slo-mo mid-air gun-catching-then-firing, as well as the little bricky oxygen masks that drop down. The best part of The LEGO Movie was, obviously, Batman. Will Arnett gave us the version of the Dark Knight we never knew we needed, but oh man did we need him. Angry, brooding, and wonderfully self-involved, Arnett’s Batman was quite possibly the greatest cinematic version of the character ever. He had a charm about him that few Batmen have ever captured. Also, he was a total dick. It makes sense then that the Warner Bros. would give us a full length LEGO Batman movie. So far, our hopes have been high, as the teasers that have been released so far have been pretty good. Well, hold on to your butts, because the wonders of Comic-Con have given us a full length trailer that is a work of pure magic. It’d be easy to miss this one, what with Warner Bros. unleashing a Justice League trailer AND a Wonder Woman trailer yesterday. Oh, and there we trailers for Kong: Skull Island and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, too, plus some pretty big Marvel announcements.
It was big day at Comic-Con, in other words, but The LEGO Batman Movie definitely deserves some attention, because it looks absolutely hilarious and all kinds of amazing. This trailer gives us a better idea of what the movie will be about, namely Batman taking on his young ward and training the kid to become Robin. There’s jokes about how Robin’s costume comes to be, and lots of amazing Batman and Alfred interactions. The best bit comes when comes Robin points out that the Batcave is hidden below Wayne Manor. Batman, with frustration replies, “No, Bruce Wayne lives in Batman’s attic.” The LEGO Movie really was beyond anything we had expected from a film about a bunch of toys. Charming, heartfelt, and exciting, The LEGO Movie really turned out to be something special. The question is, can The LEGO Batman Movie capture that same energy and audience? Can Arnett’s Batman be as funny when he’s delivered to you nonstop instead of same, comedic doses? Warner Bros is hoping so, and judging from the trailer, it looks like they might have nailed it.
We know we’ll be checking this one out. Featured Image: Warner BrosThe LEGO Batman movie gets a brand new trailer Many great men have called themselves Batman. David Jason in that Only Fools & Horses episode. But we would argue none are as great, or indeed as gravelly voiced, as Will Arnett, who returns to voice the Caped Crusader in blocky form for The Lego Batman Movie. Our theory continues to seem correct in this brand new peek at The Lego Movie's first spin-off. Watch the latest trailer below. There’s been a couple of very entertaining trailers already (including this rather brilliant one from Comic-Con), but this gives us our best look yet at the first of several new films in the Legoniverse. We catch our diminutive hero at a lonely time in his life, accompanied only by his loyal butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes). It’s not until excitable sidekick Robin (Michael Cera) comes along that Bats learns to spread his hi-tech wings. Along the way, he’ll do battle with classic foe The Joker (Zach Galifianakis), and be forced to work with Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson), who appears to be in Commissioner Gordon’s role, rather than her usual Batgirl/Oracle incarnation.
Directed by Chris McKay, expect The Lego Movie’s deft balance of knowing witty comedy (did you spot those signs at the beginning?) and colourful stop-motion-inspired CG animation when The Lego Batman Movie arrives in UK cinemas on 10 February, 2017.The Joker posed that question in “The Dark Knight,” and even in the context of the greatest (and the most serious) of all Batman movies, it carried the unmistakable sting of a self-critique. If there was anyone who could stand to lighten up a bit, it was surely the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, who gave us a masked superhero so heavy with existential doom-and-gloom, even some of his admirers couldn’t help but wonder when the fun was going to start.You never wonder in “The Lego Batman Movie,” an impish, big-hearted parody that also happens to be the best Batman movie since “The Dark Knight” in 2008. That may not sound like high praise coming so soon after “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” but it’s no small accomplishment when the latest contribution to our collective superhero fatigue instead reveals itself as a possible cure — or a tonic, at the very least.
In its best moments, this gag-a-minute Bat-roast serves as a reminder that, in the right hands, a sharp comic scalpel can be an instrument of revelation as well as ridicule. That’s true even when Gotham City is a brilliantly hued wonderland assembled from miniature plastic bricks and presided over by a Batman who looks like a raw cocktail weenie garnished with cape and cowl — an impression that doesn’t really change when he opens his mouth. You probably remember this Batman (hilariously played by Will Arnett in a voice so gravelly, he must have been coughing up rocks for weeks afterward) from his scene-stealing appearance in “The Lego Movie.” That 2014 hit ably demonstrated that, the “Transformers” movies be damned, a popular toy line could serve as the building blocks of a wickedly sophisticated popular entertainment, and that the causes of good moviemaking and effective merchandising need not always be at cross-purposes.Partly because it enters theaters facing high expectations — and partly because the earlier Lego film’s inspired writer-directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, are back in strictly a producing role this time — “The Lego Batman Movie” doesn’t sustain its creative lunacy as consistently as its predecessor did.
The focus on a well-known comic-book mythology forces even the script’s cleverest jokes into a narrower, more homogeneous register, and not even Batman’s love of angry, brooding hip-hop (listen closely and you’ll hear a riff on Neal Hefti’s original 1960s TV theme) can hide the absence of a song as catchy as “Everything Is Awesome.”Still, if not everything is awesome this time around, much of it comes appreciably close — especially in the giddy first half-hour, which gleefully spoofs every live-action Batman movie ever made while briskly dispensing with some of the origin story’s familiar beats.Rather than replaying the tragic loss that set Bruce Wayne on his vigilante path, the movie gives a melancholy nod to a portrait of his parents (who are shown posing right next to “Crime Alley”). And rather than climaxing with a tortured disquisition on the duality of heroes and villains, the script includes an early, knife-twisting breakup scene in which the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) is heartbroken to learn that Batman doesn’t even consider him his “greatest enemy.”
Truth is, this Batman doesn’t really consider much apart from his fame, his wealth, his solitude and his fragile yet overinflated ego. This has perhaps always been true of the character, his do-gooder streak notwithstanding, but “The Lego Batman Movie” is the first Batman movie I can recall that really grasps the character’s all-consuming narcissism — and proves willing to call him out rather than coddle him for it. To that end, the busy, eye-popping action sequences are sandwiched between regular interventions by the key supporting cast, which includes the loyal Alfred (Ralph Fiennes), showing more spine and fighting moves than the past several Alfreds combined, and the new Gotham City police commissioner, Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson), who refuses to follow her dad’s policy of hitting the Bat-signal at every moment of crisis. And of course, there’s Robin (squeakily voiced by Michael Cera), the alter ego of Bruce’s eager-to-please, accidentally adopted son, Dick Grayson, who can strip down to his costume so deftly, he’d be a shoo-in for the Lego Chippendales.Together, Lego Batman and Lego Robin are more than merely a thumb-sized rehash of a classic hero-and-sidekick duo.
Think of them as two very different behavioral models for the pint-sized Lego player: Robin is the delighted kid whose wide eyes can scarcely take in this lavish new playground while Batman is the spoiled, preening master of his domain, the one who warns his friends not to touch any of his toys and clearly never learned the importance of sharing.In this way, “The Lego Batman Movie” offers a less conceptually daring version of the framing device in “The Lego Movie,” in which every inspired flight of fancy turned out to be grounded in a real sense of child’s play. If anything, first-time feature director Chris McKay (who previously worked on “The Lego Movie” and Cartoon Network’s “Robot Chicken”) pushes the brick-by-brick world building to even more inventive extremes: It’s dazzling, if a tad exhausting, to see how a few thousand toy pieces and a herky-jerky stop-motion aesthetic can effectively simulate an exploding fireball or an icy blast from Mr. Freeze’s ray gun.Mr. Freeze isn’t the only old-school Batman villain to make an appearance;
there are also brief appearances by Two-Face, Clayface, Poison Ivy, Bane and even the Condiment King. And because the Lego universe is one of relentless cross-branding and mash-up merchandising, Gotham City is soon invaded by a host of other supervillains who conveniently fall under the Warner Bros. umbrella, including Lord Voldemort, King Kong and the Eye of Sauron. Not that corporate synergy isn’t thrilling and all, but it’s here that the movie’s gleeful sendup of the entertainment-industrial complex begins to wear a bit thin — right around the point when a Wicked Witch turns up with her winged monkeys but no Winkies or Munchkins in tow.Or should I say Mnunchkins? One of the executive producers of “The Lego Batman Movie” is secretary of the Treasury nominee and Donald Trump presidential campaign supporter Steven Mnuchin — all of which casts a fascinating new light on a movie about a billionaire playboy megalomaniac who dwells in an impregnable fortress, undermines his closest allies and has to be reminded, repeatedly, that not everything is about him.