Review: The Lego Movie – Everything is Awesome

The Lego Movie is about your favorite building toy. We’re in a world on interconnecting colored bricks. Our protagonist is Emmet, a lonely mini figure construction worker in a Lego City. Emmet then has the prophecy of the “special” thrusted upon him, he meets a collection of characters on his way to thwart our antagonist, President Business. Can they defeat the bad guy and build a bigger, better, brighter future?

The good; the animation is great. While being entirely computer generated, the animators found a great mid-ground between the stop motion quality of fan-made Lego movies, and totally fluid cg. The limitations in the articulation of mini figs was used amazingly well for comedic effect, while the action scenes could rival that of any live action movie today. It was nice to transition from the rigidness to the completely fluid, great choice!

The writing is amazing. The writers did a bang up job in capturing how I imagine the Lego world would be. This utopia of timeless yellow smiley faces atop perfectly placed bricks mirroring our own world, a “what if” type of reality frozen in time.
Then we get to explore other worlds/realms in the Lego land, granted we didn’t get all the world but we got enough. We get to visit these worlds; western, castle, pirate and a crazy colorful Cloud Cuckoo Land.
The humor is jammed packed in to this movie, I couldn’t believe how many funny lines there were in the first ten minutes, and it kept going till the end.

We also get one of my personal favorite theme lines from Lego, Classic Space. An unnamed Blue Astronaut that just wants to build space ships represents that era.
There’s also bits from other inherently Lego brands; Octan, Blacktron, Forestmen… it’s nice to see these childhood staples of mine being utilized in a movie made for this generation.

The bad; if I have to put anything here… it’d be the nature of film itself. There’s a lot going on in this movie, it felt like a feast for my eyeballs, I wanted to take it all in, but the nature of film and camera movement doesn’t all of that at times. This is especially true for the action scenes, so many moving pieces, and not in the bad way like king crap Michael Bay’s craptacular Transformers movies, that I missed out on the details.

Overall, a lot of fun. At first I thought… this movie is ten years too late (if not more), but after watching it I am glad to admit that my initial thoughts were wrong, this is one for the ages. Especially anyone who’s played with Legos and built imaginary worlds of adventure.

 

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