When I was young I lacked the patience and fine-motor skills to do much with Lego, but I spent a lot of time with friends whose bedrooms and basements bristled with elaborate, snapped-together spaceships and skyscrapers. There was always something of a gap between the care and imagination that went into the constructions and what you did with them after the building was done. Those intricate structures became, like just about everything else, stages for car crashes and action-figure duels. Now and then there would be a pause for an argument about who was the bad guy and what the rules were, and then the battle would resume until it was time for a snack. “The Lego Movie” captures both the delight and the frustration of this kind of play. The visual environment created by the filmmakers (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of “21 Jump Street” wrote and directed; the animation is by Animal Logic) hums with wit and imagination. Although the images are computer generated, they move, for the most part, according to the pleasingly herky-jerky logic of hand-guided stop-motion.
You are always aware that you are looking at a world of interlocking plastic blocks, an illusion enhanced in the 3-D version of the film. Smoke, sand and water are all made out of Lego, as are high-rise cities, pirate ships, mountains and a zone of free-form fantasy called Cloud Cuckoo Land.The story is a busy, slapdash contraption designed above all to satisfy the imperatives of big-budget family entertainment. There are fiery chases and hectic brawls, and a crowd of famous voices simultaneously enacting and lampooning the standard cartoon-quest narrative of heroic self-discovery. Pop-culture jokes ricochet off the heads of younger viewers to tickle the world-weary adults in the audience, with just enough sentimental goo applied at the end to unite the generations. Parents will dab their eyes while the kids roll theirs. The hero is a generic figurine named Emmet (Chris Pratt), who lives in a smiling conformist dystopia where the population follows the instruction manual, watches the same dumb television shows and listens to a peppy pop song (by Tegan and Sara) about how “Everything Is Awesome.”
Not unlike reality, you might say, and there are a few mild, and mildly hypocritical, satirical darts thrown at the mind-controlling tendencies of the corporate media-marketing-entertainment complex.There is also a stew of kiddie-action elements: an ancient prophecy involving a wise wizard (Morgan Freeman) and a scheming supervillain (Will Ferrell); a plucky rebel (Elizabeth Banks) who recruits the baffled Emmet into the resistance; and a whole lot of chases and fights interspersed with jokes. Many of those also provide moments of whimsical brand extension, celebrations of the synergy embedded in the film’s title. Movies are one of the vehicles that bring children into the universe of modern entertainment, a place where merchandising, franchised intellectual property and archetypal narrative flow together endlessly. Lego is another such delivery system, where you can play with cowboys, ponies, Batman, Harry Potter and the whole “Star Wars” crew. Binding “The Lego Movie” together is a “Matrix”-like conceit that turns the whole thing into an allegory about the nature of creativity and the meaning of amusement.
As such, it encounters an obvious contradiction, one that bothered the 10-year-old Lego maven who accompanied me to the press screening. The overt message is that you should throw out the manuals and follow the lead of your own ingenuity, improvising new combinations for the building blocks in front of you. But the movie itself follows a fairly strict and careful formula, thwarting its inventive potential in favor of the expected and familiar.But of course that tension lurks in every box of Lego. Sometimes you want to execute a perfect copy of the thing depicted on the box; sometimes you want to challenge the laws of physics, aesthetics and common sense. Sometimes you want to pull it all apart and throw it on the floor. And sometimes you want to read a book.“The Lego Movie” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). A few almost-scary moments and almost-naughty words.The Piece of Resistance Our community, 1124 want it Our community, 1237 want it Super Secret Police Enforcer
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