Let friends in your social network know what you are reading aboutTwitterGoogle+LinkedInPinterestPosted!A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Exclusive: Everything Is Awesome in Legoland's new Lego Movie 4DLast SlideNext SlideDefying conventional wisdom, The Lego Movie has proven to be enormously popular and wildly funny -- not just among the toy brand's target audience of children, but for adults as well. Released in 2014, the quirky movie generated north of $450 million at the box office, earned glowing reviews, and bestowed a hip cachet to the line of plastic figures and snap-together bricks.On January 29, Legoland Florida will debut a sequel of sorts when it opens The Lego Movie 4D A New Adventure. Developed exclusively for the toymaker's theme parks (it's set to open February 6 at Legoland California and at all Legoland Discovery Centers soon after that), it's really more of a mini reunion. The 12 ½-minute film brings some of the movie's key characters and voice talent back together for a story set at Brick World, a shameless knockoff of Legoland.Rendered in glorious CGI animation, the unlikely gang of returning do-gooders includes leading lady Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), the pirate with the oversized, weapons-packed body, MetalBeard (Nick Offerman), spaceman Benny (Charlie Day), and unicorn/anime kitten mashup with serious anger management issues
, Unikitty (Alison Brie). Instead of Chris Pratt, voice actor A.J. LoCascio takes over the role of everymini hero, Emmet. Also MIA is Will Ferrell. The Lego Movie 4D introduces Risky, the brother of Ferrell's character, President Business. (Yup, that makes him Risky Business).As with the theatrical movie, the new film simultaneously succeeds on two levels. Your children will love the fizzy action and silly antics. You will love the sly, laugh-out-loud, meta dialogue and absurd plot developments that will sail right over kids' heads. How sly and absurd? Upon meeting Risky, not-Chris-Pratt Emmet remarks that Business' "voice sounds so much less expensive" than his brother's. Played by comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, the megalomaniac replies, "Indeed. And with the millions I saved on voice talent, I made something truly spectacular – a magical, fun-tagical place with rides based off of your adventures in The Lego Movie!" The nonstop stream of self-aware lines like those is hilarious – and sometimes bordering on mildly subversive.
And this is at a Legoland theme park, no less.In order for Brick World to work, Lord Business needs to subdue the protagonists and incorporate them against their will into the park's shows and attractions. Will evil and corporate profits triumph over the earnest, if hopelessly overmatched Emmet and pals? Did we not learn that everything is awesome in the original movie?To help thwart the baddies, the Master Builders enlist the help of the audience, thereby making them part of the action. The "4D" effects also immerse guests in the attraction. Shot in 3D, the fourth "D" includes sensory enhancements such as water spritzes and wind blasts.The New Adventure has the same delightfully off-kilter sensibility as its predecessor. There are even some subtle – and funny – digs at the Disney parks (the President Business to Legoland's more ragtag Emmet). But underneath all of the shenanigans, there are some heartfelt human feelings that resonate (well, as human as CGI renderings of plastic figures can be, I suppose).
Given its much shorter run time and its theme park setting, the Legoland film doesn't have the ability to go as deeply as the original movie. But the qualities that first endeared us to the characters are bubbling just beneath the surface.Helming the new film is Rob Schrab, who also co-wrote the script. Known for his work on smart, celebrated TV shows such as Community and The Sarah Silverman Program, he brings a deft touch to the proceedings and maintains the tone of the first film. "We only spotlight [the characters] for a fraction of the amount of time," Schrab said, "so it's important to get to the fun as soon as possible."But he'll have plenty of time to go deeper when he takes over the director's chair for The Lego Movie sequel, which is in production and is scheduled for a May 2018 release. "The events of the first movie will push the second chapter forward and upward," said Schrab. "[We have] written a lot of funny stuff for Emmet and Wyldstyle, but there’s a deep, emotional message at the core of the story."
Until then, you and your kids can check out the awesome and fun-tagical Legoland 4D movie.The Lego Movie 4D A New Adventure is included with admission to the Legoland theme parks and Leogland Discovery Centers.On February 10 2017, audiences around the world will be sitting down in cinemas to watch the much anticipated LEGO: Batman movie. 48 days later, Australians can do the same. Village Roadshow is repeating history, making the same mistake it made with The LEGO Movie. A five million dollar mistake. A mistake co-CEO Graham Burke said the distributor would not be making again. @BrickingAround LEGO Batman will be released in Australia on 30th March, 2017. — Roadshow Films (@RoadshowFilms) December 5, 2016 Piracy of The LEGO Movie cost Village Roadshow "somewhere between $3.5 and $5 million in sales" Burke revealed at a government-led Copyright Forum back in September 2014. "We made one hell of a mistake with LEGO," Burke said of the decision to delay The LEGO Movie's release in Australia by 54 days.
"We'll now make all our movies day in date with the US. I know 20th Century Fox are and Universal are too." Adding insult to injury both films were created here by Animal Logic, and the CEO Zareh Nalbandian has spoken out about piracy in the past, expressing a wish to teach kids about the impacts of piracy on creators before they become teenagers and stop caring. So why, two years later, is this happening again? Expect to hear reasons like "school holidays" and "maximising audiences" being floated, but we've reached out to Village Roadshow for an official comment. This story originally appeared on GizmodoThis post discusses the plot of The LEGO Movie in extensive detail.At the beginning of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 21 Jump Street, their 2012 cop comedy that was a repurposing the television show that ran from 1987–1991, Deputy Chief Hardy (Nick Offerman), explains to two young cops (Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill) that they’re being assigned to a unit in which they’ll be impersonating high school students to investigate drug crimes.“
We’re reviving a canceled undercover police program from the ’80s and revamping it for modern times,” Hardy says. “You see the guys in charge of this stuff lack creativity and are completely out of ideas, so all they do now is recycle shit from the past and expect us all not to notice.”It was a very funny acknowledgement of the main objection that most people had posed to the very concept of a 21 Jump Street. But Hardy’s grumpiness also set a bar for the movie so low that Lord and Miller could leap over it with even more glee than an apocalyptically high Channing Tatum diving through a gong. If 21 Jump Street was proof that Lord and Miller could make a terrific, funny movie within the confines of Hollywood’s constricting business model, their follow-up, The LEGO Movie, released last weekend, proves something more ambitious: that the two men can take their industry’s obsession with pre-existing properties, sequels, Chosen One narratives, and overhyped emotions and make a surprising soulful movie out of all these tacky little pieces of plastic.
The plot of The LEGO Movie is as follows. Emmet Brickowoski (Parks and Recreation’s Chris Pratt) is a happy, brainwashed construction worker LEGO who lives and works in Bricksburg, a city run by President Business (Will Ferrell). Business is a dictator who has homogenized culture to the point that there’s only one television show, an idiotic sitcom called Where Are My Pants, and a single hit song, the admittedly amazing “Everything Is Awesome,” made conformity the norm, and reduced his citizens’ identities to their interests, be it in cats, surfing, or sausage. He also happens to be a super-villain who’s stolen a secret weapon called the Kragle, over the objections of a stoner-sage wizard with the evocative name of Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), and plans to freeze his entire society in place, thwarting a secret society of LEGOs known as the MasterBuilders, whose wild creativity threatens Business’ vision of perfection. And Emmet is unwittingly drawn into this conflict when he comes into contact with the Piece of Resistance and meets another LEGO named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a pretty, creative MasterBuilder who, along with her boyfriend Batman (Will Arnett), is part of the resistance.
But it has another layer as well: the movie shifts into live-action when Emmet’s story turns out to be the creation of a little boy whose father (Ferrell) has created an exquisite LEGO universe in the basement and forbidden his children to play with it. The Kragle is actually the Krazy Glue the man plans to use to cement his creation into place, ending the possibility of infinite rearrangements that are exactly what make LEGOs so endlessly amusing. President Business is a stand-in for the boy’s father, whose appropriation of children’s toys and determination to strip them of their anarchic creativity is actually a kind of death.As much as President Business stands in for industry, it’s not for capitalism in general, but for the movie business in particular. The LEGO Movie never pretends that the products of mass media aren’t outrageously entertaining — that would be a willful denial of reality. Instead, it asks us to consider what we’re losing out in that homogenization.
Almost everything in The LEGO Movie functions on multiple levels. “Everything Is Awesome” is genuinely a beautifully-constructed earworm, made lovely by Tegan and Sara, and funny and silly by the Lonely Island. But as many times as it’s possible to listen to the song on a loop, it feels like an awful waste that this is the only song we’ll ever get to hear by these collaborators. Who wouldn’t want to hear more of what they could do together? And finally, the song is a perfect expression of the formula that’s subtext in so much Hollywood advertising and text in internet-optimized headlining style: if every possible thing elicits the same reaction at the same pitch, how can we have meaningfully different experiences? Awesome isn’t the only thing to value.Similarly, it’s highly entertaining to have Batman bopping around Emmet’s quiz, showing up with conveniently-timed Batmobiles, and tossing Batarangs at strategically placed buttons. But The LEGO Movie’s version of Batman reminds us of just how much our tonally homogenized superhero movies and their failure to move beyond origin stories have cost us.
This Batman has all the same attributes as Christopher Nolan’s or Tim Burton’s, but in different quantities: he’s an arrogant showboat who composes “deep” metal tracks for Wydstyle, even though he doesn’t actually know her real name. When, at one point in the movie, Batman seems to ditch Emmet, Wyldstyle, Vitruvius, and the mission against President Business to go hang out with Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, it’s entirely keeping with his character, and it’s the gesture that follows that reads as a surprise. Superheroism is a small part of The LEGO Movie’s pastiche, but their interpretation of Batman is the freshest we’ve seen on the big screen in several years.And even its larger narrative, The LEGO Movie casts a gimlet eye on the Chosen One stories that have so dominated both young adult literature and the big screen in recent years. In these stories, young people tend to be targeted because they possess special powers, or to discover, once they’ve been chosen for a school or a contest, that the abilities they’ve previously applied to normal tasks are actually a portent of something larger.
But Emmet, after accidentally discovering the Piece of Resistance — or not really discovering it, it gets stuck to him after he falls down a hole — doesn’t turn out to be the Special, as the Chosen One in Vitruvius’ prophecy is called, or even particularly special at all. He’s a bit of a bland guy with some silly dreams that turn out to be useful in an emergency. And Vitruvius ultimately confesses that the prophecy is bunk, a propaganda tool he dreamed up to keep his cohorts going in the fight against President Business. When he’s freed up from the burden of being highly unusual, and singularly responsible for Business’ defeat, Emmet actually becomes a more productive member of the team. And his fellow questers are freed up to use their talents without feeling like their skills are somehow inferior or getting in the way of Emmet realizing his greatness. The abilities that Emmet eventually learns are available to all LEGOs, and the citizens of Bricksburg eventually rally in defense of their city, unleashing joyful, creative chaos in the fight against President Business.
It’s a nice inversion of the idea that the super-villain advances The Incredibles that “When everyone’s super, no one will be”: in The LEGO Movie, when creativity is available to everyone, the things they create turn pleasure and joy into a kind of infinitely renewable resource.In The LEGO Movie, that conflict plays out on two levels. In the LEGO world, Emmet’s adventures bust President Business’ monopoly control of creativity, and blows up the idea that you have to have any particular abilities to become a MasterBuilder. Given the opportunity, everyone is awesome. In the live-action segments of the movie, the young boy reminds his father that they’re both capable of building extraordinary things, and that his father’s static vision of his dream universe isn’t the only way for something to be exceptional and fascinating. In a nice twist, and an important comment on the terrible state of gender equality in the entertainment industry, the father tells his son that he can’t just give the little boy a chance to play.
They have to invite his younger sister down into the basement, too: the movie ends with her creations from the Planet Duplo mounting an invasion of Bricksburg.And on a third level, Lord and Miller are almost certainly talking about themselves. Working together, they’ve produced three delightful franchises from unexpected places: their surprisingly good 2009 adaptation of the essentially plotless picture book Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, which earned a sequel last year, 21 Jump Street, which they’re reprising later in 2014, and now The LEGO Movie. But for all the box office success of these projects — the first Cloudy made $243 million, 21 Jump Street brought in $200 million on a budget of just $42 million, and The LEGO Movie made $69 million in North America this weekend — it would be easy for Hollywood to treat Miller and Lord as an exception to be tolerated, rather than as a potential business model to be emulated. It’s true that it’s hard to recreate wildly singular visions: Pixar’s present struggles are evidence of that.