“The Lego Movie,” well-reviewed and making money by the brickyard, builds its story upon religious and moral themes. They don’t all snap together securely, but that’s in keeping with the rest of the film. Spoiler alert: I’ll give away nothing that you wouldn’t get from the reviews. There’s a late plot twist, however, that affects everything we thought we understood about the story. Anybody who reveals that twist, at least in the first few weeks, deserves to be extruded in molten plastic. I’ll tip as little as possible. Right off the bat: It’s as good as the reviews say. The story takes elements from “The Matrix,” ‘’Harry Potter,” ‘’Kung Fu Panda,” ‘’Lord of the Rings,” the good “Star Wars” movies, “Toy Story 2&‥8243; and other recent cultural touchstones and blends them into plot slurry. Which is not all that surprising for a modern kids’ movie. But references to Aristophanes? To an architect who died more than 2,000 years ago? I guarantee you did not see that coming.
You’ve likely read a summary of the story: An utterly unremarkable construction worker figure in a Lego city literally falls into a tale where he discovers the “Piece of Resistance,” a plastic doodad that is the only way to stop a dastardly villain (modeled on 1984&‥8242;s “Big Brother”) from destroying the world. Our hero, who has never ever deviated from the “official instructions” for anything, has to discover what it means to be “the Special” and lead the battle. In his quest, he gains allies: A warrior-woman named Wyldstyle; her boyfriend, Batman (yes, that Batman); a half-unicorn/half kitty mash-up named, duh, UniKitty; and others, including a wizard named Vitruvius. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was an engineer and architect who wrote a 10-volume encyclopedia on architecture in the first century B.C. His work was so influential that Leonardo da Vinci used it 500 years later to help design his famous drawing of a man inside a circle, the Vitruvian Man. This Vitruvius is one of the film’s “master builders,” figures able to effortlessly construct anything out of the Lego materials.
“Master builder” may be a nod to Ibsen’s play “Master Builder,” about an architect who dies when he falls from one of his buildings. The hero of the tale, the anonymous construction guy, is named Emmet, or “truth” in Hebrew. I asked Lego director Philip Lord if this was coincidence. No, he replied in a Tweet: “’truth’ — was Greg Silverman’s idea at WB and we embraced it.” (Silverman is president for creative development and worldwide production for Warner Bros. Pictures.) Our plucky band ends up at one point in Cloud Cuckoo Land, a chaotic place where there are no rules. That’s an unambiguous nod to Aristophanes’ satirical play “The Birds,” written about 2,400 years ago, which included a chaotic realm called Cloud Cuckoo Land. Where are the religious and moral references? There are references to the Man Upstairs, the one really in charge of their world. So there’s your Lego God. There’s a prophecy, by Vitruvius, about that doodad called the “Piece of Resistance” (think “Holy Grail” or “Ark of the Covenant”) and “the Special” (the Only One who can use the Piece to save the world).
Which is something like any religious prophesy about a savior. Emmet also sacrifices himself for his friends, plunges through a tunnel into the Light, learns an unforeseeable truth about his world and is resurrected to return to the quest. That has echoes of Jesus and Guru Nanak, the father of Sikhism. The whole film turns on finding a balance between conformity and creativity. Vitruvius tells Emmet: “All you need to be special is to believe.” He’s not initially as creative as other master builders, but, unlike them, he understands how total freedom can fail without some rules. And that’s how he is “special.” This is a theme that plays out today in many houses of worship. In fact, the broad popularity of Pope Francis is exactly about the way he is redefining the balance of conformity versus creativity for the Roman Catholic Church. (And let’s deal with the canard you might have heard: There’s nothing anti-capitalist about the movie. True, the film is opposed to an externally imposed rigidity of thought.
And it’s against some of the degrading vulgarities of modern culture. But it’s emphatically “pro-entrepreneurship,” which is as pro-business as you can get. And at one level, after all, it’s a 100-minute ad. The Sunday I saw it at a local mall, there was a line afterward waiting for the Lego store to open.) But then there’s that plot twist at the end that I dare not reveal. It changes our perspective of most of the film. Some of what had been annoying randomness suddenly makes total sense. It also takes what seemed like a tale about imaginary beings and turns it into a story with a message that is both more specific and more universal. We realize, with perhaps a shock of recognition, that the tension between creativity and necessary rules is hardly limited to the Lego universe. And we get a lesson about how that strain might be resolved. There one more possible nod to faith: Like Frodo in “The Lord of the Rings,” Emmet’s heroic quest would fail except for an act of grace.
In this case extended by, ahem, the Man Upstairs. Are we supposed to understand any of it as real? As Vitruvius tells Emmet: “The prophesy is made up, but it’s also true.” Copyright: For copyright information, please check with the distributor of this item, Religion News Service LLC. Full Cast and Crew Contribute to This PageIf you watch The Lego Movie, you might realize there’s a God. And not just because what was initially an ill-conceived 90-minute ad for a toy everyone already knows about turned out to be awesome anyway. WARNING: Do not read this article unless you’ve already seen The Lego Movie, or have no intention of doing so because you hate fun. The article is very spoiler-heavy. And yes, I’m warning you about spoilers. In a movie about Lego. What are Lego spoilers, anyway? Is that like skipping to the last page in one of their instruction manuals?It’s going to be a fire truck!” Of course it is. When I was growing up, Lego came in boxes of random pieces.
I made a lot of multi-colored houses back then. Whereas nowadays, you can buy a package of pieces that will help you make an incredibly detailed pirate ship, but are not very well suited to building anything else. Just the pirate ship. It’s like doing a puzzle, or buying something from IKEA. You buy pieces for a dresser, and you can’t use your imagination to build, say, a sofa. These pieces build a dresser. So you build your pirate ship, and then what? Are you going to take it apart and put it back together again? The instructions were the first thing you lost! Maybe you should just glue it together, like a puzzle that you hang on your wall. This is a question posed in the movie. The movie centers around Emmet, a Lego mini-figure, who, like Lego, is always getting stepped on. No one knows he exists, and his best friend, who he drinks coffee with every morning, is a potted plant. And it’s not even a real plant. It’s made out of Lego, which, to be fair, is exactly what he’s made of.
Everything in this universe is made of Lego bricks, or, as the Lego people call them, bricks. The water is blue Lego bricks, the fires are orange, the smoke is grey. I don’t know what’s in the coffee mugs. But one day, Emmet comes across a mysterious rectangular prism that’s not of this world, meaning it’s not made of Lego. And it gets stuck to his back. This attracts the attention of the president, Lord Business (played by Will Ferrel), who kidnaps Emmet. Lord Business is into collecting strange artifacts, such as the Cloak of Bandai-eed, the Wand of Q-Teep, the Polish Remover of Na-eel, and various other gross things one might accidentally find mixed into a box of Lego. Even his cape is a clip-on tie. But his prized artifact is something he calls “The KRAGL” (actually a bottle of Krazy Glue with some letters rubbed off), and he plans to use it to glue the universe together so that no one can move at all, and he can have perfect order forever. Emmet is rescued by a girl named Wyldstyle, who claims that, having found the “piece of resistance”, Emmet is the long-prophesied “Special” who will save the universe.
Emmet has no idea what any of that means, but if it means that a girl wants to talk to him about it, then that’s okay with him. Wyldstyle takes him to the various realms and introduces him to a team of “master-builders”, including, but not limited to: Lego Batman, Lego Morgan Freeman, Gandalf, Dumbledore, 1980-something Space Guy, and a robot pirate with laser-shark arms. The master-builders can create anything they can imagine in a matter of seconds with no instruction manuals. (Meanwhile, I can’t even get two flat pieces apart without using my teeth.) Together, they need to get Emmet back to Business’s tower and put the prism – actually the cover to the Krazy Glue – back on the KRAGL. Because once you put the cover on an open Krazy Glue, it’s never coming off again. Do they have a plan? “That was a bat-pun,” Batman says.This all sounds like the kind of plot an 8-year-old would come up with. Or someone who’s been sniffing the glue. Eventually, they get into the tower, but Business captures everyone, and to save the day, Emmet hurls himself out the window and into the deep abyss below.
And when he gets to the bottom, he finds himself on… a carpet. And then he looks up and realizes that his entire universe – everything he knew – is all located on a table in someone’s basement. And all these artifacts everyone keeps finding are really items from this bigger world that they don’t even realize exists, where this creator that they don’t even realize exists – apparently a young boy – is in fact acting out the story that they’re experiencing – the kind of story an 8-year-old would come up with. But that’s not all. At this point, the kid’s father – the one some Lego characters think of as “the man upstairs” – comes down in his business suit and reprimands him for playing with the Legos. It turns out they’re mostly the father’s Legos. “They’re not toys,” the father argues. “They’re a highly-sophisticated interlocking brick system.” The father gets fed up and says he’s just going to glue everything down the way he wants it.
And it’s up to the kid to get Emmet back to his world to, um, turn the tables on Lord Business, and also to actually convince his father that the point of the Legos is creativity and imagination. Oh, and the father is played by Will Ferrel. SPOILER ALERT: There is a God. He’s the man upstairs. Some people think God is made up. They think there’s no higher power, because they’ve never seen it. Because in that limited window of time when they’ve been on this earth, God never came down to personally show them his hand. Well, except for the miracles he actually does perform every day, but those don’t count, because he does them every day. So okay, how often would you say God has a responsibility to come down and show you things? I’d argue that there’s evidence all around. There’s band-aids and krazy glue and neckties, and if you look closely at the spaceships, you can see strings. How closely do you look? Is it His responsibility to show you, or is it your responsibility to look?
God’s not going to hang out on the board with you. He created the board. Why on earth would he live here? If everything in our world – water, fire, smoke – is made of Lego, then the one who created the Lego wouldn’t exist here. He’s not made of Lego. Our Rabbis say that God is called “Hamakom – the place” because God does not live in our world, our world lives in God. We all exist on a table in his basement. Saying God doesn’t exist is the easy way out. It’s easier to believe that there’s no one out there demanding anything of us. But the job of a Jew is to see the evidence. That’s what makes us Special. God is in our everyday lives. He’s not just the one who performs the big miracles, he’s the one who made the building blocks with which we continue to build, and the one who moves things around. When you realize this, a lot of the randomness of our story makes sense. There is a saying that fiction is easier to write than nonfiction, because in nonfiction, not everything has to add up.