Bob Chipman - The Lego Movie (Escape to the Movies) lyrics

Watching The Lego Movie is akin to seeing some kind of daredevil high wire act happening before your eyes. It's not just unbelievable that these maniacs pulled this off, it's unbelievable that they've been allowed to. How did anyone, regardless of how much money their last two movies made, convince a major studio AND a global corporate brand with everything and then some to lose on a misfire and absolutely zero good reason not to play it safe to throw their weight behind something so specific and bizarre as this movie. At times it feels like we're watching a practical joke in progress, as though some mischievous film school anarchist snuck into the projection booth and swapped out whatever bland, flavourless movie one has every right to expect from a Warner Brothers toy property at this point with their own devilishly-goofy fanfilm. It's not shocking that you can make a good movie out of Lego - I've always said you can make a good movie out of anything. I'm just amazed that anybody got away with it. And if I could end this review right there, I would. Any further discussion on what madness has been smuggled into theaters as The Lego Movie has the danger of giving away the game. So if you just wanted to know if The Lego Movie is good or not, you have your answer - it's f**ing terrific, and if you want to stop right there and go see it without any further details known, I'd say you're making a good call. If you do want to stick around for the rest of the review, great - just don't blame me if you guess some of the film's well-hidden surprises from the discussion. Deal? Ok, then. Alright, so the key to The Lego Movie's brilliance is that its title is entirely literal. This isn't a movie borrowing the Lego aesthetic - it's about Lego and its place in the modern pop canon, beginning with a staggeringly-detailed animation approach designed to create an entire universe not simply made of Lego parts, but Lego parts whose smudging, wear, mold marks and feather-like physics call constant attention to their plasticene origins and climaxing with a slow-build reveal to the very nature of its universe so flawlessly-executed that I'm convinced its third act will be cited as a lightbulb moment turning point in the understanding of cinematic narrative for a generation that sees it today as unsuspecting children. Our hero for the piece is Emmett, a nondescript Lego construction worker with no real defining traits living in an intricately-ordered Lego city, where that makes him a kind of ideal citizen according to the city's unctious overseer, President Business. But his existence is upended when he stumbles head-first into a purposefully-obvious parody of The Matrix where an archetypical action girl Wyldstyle and sagely wizard Vitruvius reveal to him the hidden truth. Namely that his city is just one of many themed Lego worlds that once co-existed in mixed-up harmony, but have been segregated into dreary regimentation by the mechanical armies of instruction-obsessed President Business, in reality, the supervillain Lord Business, who schemes to use a legendary evil arifact to make his vision of a perfect Lego universe whole. He is resisted by an underground league of master builders, who believe they can check his power with a fabled weapon called the "piece of resistance", which has been stuck to Emmett's back and marks him as a messianic figure. That the storyline sounds like every other tiresome "chosen one" routine we've gone through ever since Hollywood mistook Joseph Campbell's studious examination of the human psyche as reflected through the recurring mythic narratives throughout human history for a lazy screenwriting shortcut- WHY THE fu*k IS EVEN PETER PARKER NOW GENETICALLY PREDESTINED TO BE SPIDER MAN, HOLLYWOOD? THAT UNDERCUTS THE CENTRAL POINT OF THAT STORY AND CHARAC- *beeeeeeeeeep* *ahem* Sorry. Anyway, it's all part of the joke. Calling attention to its artifice as surely as the animation and even environmental details like water and fire from Lego bricks wants you to sn******g at how much it resembles a stop motion homemade Lego fanfilm blown up to cinematic proportion. And for a moment, it almost feels like it's going to be too much, too frontloaded with anarchic hell's-a-poppin' gags within gags to still be capable of earning emotional investment once the actual plot gets going. But then The Lego Movie tips its hand, and while older audiences will almost certainly figure out the secret well before its revealed, the real secret is just how far they're willing to go with it. The film's closing moments feel like something you'd come up with on a dare, but never actually try to pull off. The film seems to find its center, unbelievably, in Batman, who shows up for what seems like a one-joke cameo, but instead tags along as one of the main supporting characters in Emmett's ragtag hero team. For a moment, it feels like just so much cynical levering of the only DC Comics property Warner Brothers seems to know what to do with, but he quickly upends that expectation in the same way the whole film upends its seemingly similar stature as a pumped-up toy commercial angling for nostalgia dollars. As voiced by a perfectly-cast Will Arnett, Lego Batman's note-perfect and unbelievably brutal slapdown of the gritty, grumbling, allegedly-mature "grown up" cinematic Batman we've been saddled with for over a decade, and his innate absurdity as a children's funny-book superhero turned SUPER SERIOUS DARK KNIGHT goes from hilarious to poignant once it becomes clear that the film has the misappropriation of childhood by adults very much on its mind. If the film has a secondary heart, it's Charlie Day as the later-arriving Benny the spaceman, but you've kind of gotta see it to grasp exactly why. The Lego Movie is a minor miracle. It savagely mocks cliché'd "chosen one" narratives, but comes out as its very own special snowflake of a saviour. Not simply one more big-budget nostalgic toy commercial of a movie, but one that stumbled into enlightenment and crashes through the fourth wall to address Hollywood's entire ocean of big-budget nostalgic toy commercials, pleading with them to just get over themselves already. It should be an impossible paradox - a film that revels in but also argues against its own existence, but it pulls the trick off with the same effortless confidence Phil Lord and Chris Miller brought to their other sneak-attack masterworks and once again begs the orignal question - how do they keep getting away with this? See you next time!