Do you remember when Batman was fun? You know, back when he was all about the BAM!, POW! and the Batusi, and not so dark and brooding and trying to kill Superman. It seems like forever ago when Batman was actually having a good time taking on Gotham's worst. Back when he was both moody and zany, making you laugh as he took on ridiculous villains who seemed straight out of Scooby-Doo. For those who wish Batman was funny again and aren't interested in checking out Ben Affleck's oh-so-serious take on the crime fighter in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, there is a Batman movie for you. It's The LEGO Batman Movie, which, by the looks of its trailer, will be spoofing the self-serious bat and letting us know the laughs we've been missing since Christopher Nolan reinvented the Dark Knight for the big screen. Voiced by Will Arnett, this teeny, tiny toy Batman is the perfect answer to the latest iteration of the superhero, who seems to take himself just a little too seriously. LEGO Batman, as previously seen in The LEGO Movie, is still battling his inner demons, but he's doing so by laying down dope tracks and showing off his wicked beat-boxing.
Arnett's Batman is one that will make you laugh, even if he's not exactly in on the joke. This Batman doesn't have a sense of humor about himself, but he sure can't help but be funny. In the short sneak peek of the movie, out February 2017, Batman is seen hanging out in his Bat Cave all alone after a hard day fighting crime. "I saved the city again," he says to his Siri-fied cave before heating up the lobster thermidor his butler Alfred left for him. The trailer hinges on this one joke of Batman, still in his suit, microwaving his dinner. Like many of us non-superheroes, Batman has trouble setting the timer and impatiently waits right in front of the microwave for his meal to be done. In this new more animated take (both figuratively and literally) on Batman, he's still in the shadows brooding, but now he's writing emo songs about it. He's the equivalent of a tortured artist, who wears the mask to cover his sadness. Unlike the aggressively un-fun and unfunny recent takes on the aging Dark Knight, the LEGO Batman Movie is leaning into all the criticisms of recent franchises by breathing a bit of fresh air into a character that has, at this point, become a parody of himself.
So what better way to poke fun at the persona by being a parody of the parody? Instead of being a hero we all relate to, the LEGO version is the one you can't help but roll your eyes at. He's a misanthrope, a Debbie Downer who offers up the comic relief with how much he seems to hate his life. Nolan and Snyder's Batmans were saddled with emotional baggage, but LEGO Batman's problems seem to stem from living IRL. Hence, the spot-on microwave joke. He can save Gotham, but he can't save himself for the mundanity of actually living. His goal now is to find his happiness, a pretty great premise for a children's movie that adults could also learn a few things from. And after watching Batman get his back broken, lose everyone he loves, and decide the world doesn't need a Man of Steel, it's just nice to see the Dark Knight finally lighten up a little bit and give Alfred the night off. Image: Warner Bros. Pictures/YouTube; How did movies survive, or even begin, before LEGO was invented?
Cecil B. DeMille had to construct sets out of horsehair, plaster and tree bark; Hitchcock experimented with crafting actors out of the same materials. But the wildly popular LEGO Movie of 2014 showed that all you need for both is a generous supply of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene polymer bricks.The LEGO Batman Movie is, in fact, a computer-animated affair, though like its predecessor it mimics the look and feel of the toy, as well as the imagination unfettered in many of its young users. Best of all, the film is never brought to a grinding halt by the inability to find that one blue two-by-10 beam needed to complete an incredible racing vehicle – sorry. Flashbacks to one’s own LEGO youth are a hazard of this movie. But there’s little else to worry about. As voiced by Will Arnett, LEGO Batman gives the least bleak portrayal of the Dark Knight since Adam West donned the cape and cowl for television 50 years ago. He tries mightily, growling and pontificating and sulking and posing, but when your movie’s hero is only four centimetres tall, gravitas is the first thing to go.
The clever, original storyline, directed by Chris McKay (Robot Chicken) and scripted by too many writers to list here imagines a kind of hero/villain bromance between the caped crusader and the Joker, voiced by Zach Galifianakis. When Batman refuses to acknowledge these feelings, the Joker decides to play hard to get, ironically by playing easy to get. He turns himself in to Gotham’s newest police commissioner, Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson), and is incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, which in this movie features an Ark-Ham eatery. That’s just the start of the many cornball jokes awaiting fans of Batman, LEGO and both. Take the pre-launch Batmobile banter, lifted from the ’60s series; or the movie marquee listing “Two shades of bley,” which even this LEGO nerd had to Google to figure out. (Don’t worry; it’s not dirty.) And surely Hitchcock would be amused by the fact that the story opens with the hijacking of a jet owned by MacGuffin Airlines. There are a host of secondary characters in the film, among them a panoply of heroes led by Superman (Channing Tatum), and a bunch of villains including one who should really be voiced by Ralph Fiennes, except that he’s busy as Alfred Pennyworth, butler and foster father to Batman.
Some get more screen-time than others, but it’s often fun just to watch them arrive. The story features a subplot about Batman’s fear of intimacy. He spends most nights alone in front of a TV, watching such canine-themed rom-coms as Marley & Me and Must Love Dogs. (Can’t you just imagine a superhero struggling to say that title? “Must … love … dogs!”) Things change when he accidentally adopts an excitable orphan named Robin, played by Michael Cera. There’s even a modicum of real-world relevancy, as when new commissioner Gordon reminds Batman that great power requires operating under the rule of law, guided by ethics and accountability. She deserves that bricker-tape parade thrown in her honour. But no need to write a thesis about the protagonist’s tiny, clawed hands. The LEGO Batman Movie is funny, frantic entertainment that zips along for 104 minutes and won’t leave you humming some dreadful earworm of a song. I reluctantly joined my friends to see The Lego Movie in New York City a few days ago, assuming it would be the equivalent of watching the Lego battles my little brother used to have with his friends.
By the time it ended, I not only wanted to see it again to examine any subtle nuances I missed, but I was also grappling with several central questions of human existence -- mainly, how I, one human being in this world of millions, can contribute something important. This is not just a movie for children who want to watch a bunch of plastic toys battle for their universe. Of course, it contains all of the great components of a children's film: adventure, catchy music and amazing visual effects -- every single inch of the Lego world, down to the roaring ocean, has been manipulated to appear Lego-fied. Everything about this new world makes us feel like we have been skyrocketed into a child's imagination. But beyond all of that, this movie contains intelligent intrigue and sophisticated humor, the kind that will leave you laughing out loud because it so wittily points out universal truths. The story becomes a quest for individuality in a world of conformity, and I would go so far as to say it becomes an allegory for communism versus democracy.
It opens on a world full of ignorant Lego people who wake up every day with a rulebook on how to live their lives. Most of them are ignorant to the point where they don't realize they are being oppressed and have been manipulated into believing they are happy. Each Lego person has the same favorite song and television show and are convinced by their evil ruler, President Business, that order, uniformity and repetitiveness is the key to success. Innovation is against nature in the world of President Business. The citizens live blissfully unaware of other Lego worlds beyond their own city limits, and they do not realize that, beneath their propagandized desire to sing "everything is awesome" for five hours while they work, they each possess repressed individual qualities. The main character, Emmet, has the least individuality of anyone. His co-workers express that each of them has something specific about themselves, such as liking chicken, whereas Emmet has never once expressed something about himself that makes him unique.
When he discovers that he is "The Special," and is destined to fulfill a prophecy that we learn is ultimately made-up, the story becomes about Emmet's discovery that he truly does have unique qualities. The fact that the prophecy is fake serves to show Emmet that he had this "specialness" inside him all along, that everybody has specialness inside them and that each person's unique ideas bring greater contributions to society as a whole than does the standardization of human existence purported by a communist society. Only when each Lego brings his own creations to the table are the people able to rise up against their oppressive regime and find true happiness. From a child's perspective, this movie is about creativity. It is about allowing your imagination to run free and allowing order to sometimes descend into chaos because that is how great discoveries are made. But from a broader perspective, this is an Orwellian movie about rising up against big brother. This movie has a remarkable amount of layers and sophistication, and it presents these layers to its audiences in an exceedingly entertaining way -- through a hilarious cast of characters that include Lego Batman, Dumbledore, Gandalf and a heroine named Wyldstyle.