"The Lego Movie" Is Awesome

The main protagonists in The Lego Movie recall those in The Matrix.

The Lego Movie is the best film based on a toy or game since Clue. In and of itself, that doesn't mean much – the likes of Battleship, Dungeons and Dragons, and the Transformers and G.I. Joe franchises don’t set the bar very high, and stretching the concept to include films based on video games doesn't help raise it any.

It’s more telling to say The Lego Movie is a good film period, but it’s worth comparing the film to these other toy-based entries. Doing so helps spotlight the accomplishment of writer-directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street), two guys who have made a habit of churning out the unlikeliest of good movies.

This could’ve easily been an awful endeavor, but Miller and Lord clearly put a lot of thought and hard work into making a movie that doesn't just feature Legos, but that gets at exactly what makes them so popular and then develops a worthwhile story around that. Lego sets come with directions, but anyone who played with them as a kid knows the best part was mixing up the pieces, joining pirates with knights and star fighters and using your imagination to create something original. The Lego Movie starts with that idea and then expands upon it.

As odd as it might seem to believe this, The Lego Movie is a film with a lot on its mind. Overall, it’s a critique of everyday fascism and a treatise against conformity, a film that stresses individualism, creativity and thinking for yourself. At the same time, it functions as a critique on counter culture movements, suggesting that individualism doesn't mean isolationism, that marching to the beat of your own drum is great but that teamwork is needed to affect change.

I know it sounds pretty heady for a kid’s movie, but there’s also a lot of fun to be had here. The film has a very witty and funny script, and the main story is the type of adventure a child might dream up. It focuses on President Business (Will Ferrell) and his evil plan to end the world with the help of an overzealous henchman Bad Cop/Good Cap (Liam Neeson, having a blast) and a weapon known as The Kragle.

Batman is Emmet's romantic competition. He's also a bit of a douche. 

Lacking an understanding of imagination and creativity, President Business has slowly indoctrinated the masses in his town of Bricksburg to always follow the directions, using mindless entertainment like the hit tune “Everything is Awesome” and the hit TV show “Where Are My Pants?” to lull the populace into becoming complacent consumer drones not that far removed from the characters in The Stepford Wives or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Standing in opposition to President Business are the master builders, Lego people who believe in freedom, being unique and using your imagination to build whatever you want. They are led by wizard Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) and badass babe Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), but their numbers also includes Batman (Will Arnett), Unikitty (Alison Brie), and countless pop culture references like Shaquille O’Neil (Shaquille O’Neil). They wait in the shadows for the emergence of The Special – the smartest, most talented, most interesting person in the world – a Lego person who will find the mysterious object known as the Pièce de résistance and defeat the evil overlord once and for all.

Stumbling into the middle of all of this is Emmett (Chris Pratt), a mediocre, run-of-the-mill schlep who gets the Pièce de résistance stuck to his back and is assumed to be The Special. Parents will be reminded of The Matrix (comparisons between the two films can be found here), but kids may be thinking more about Kung Fu Panda. Either way, the film turns the whole “chosen one” trope on its head, suggesting anyone who believes in themselves can be special, that there is no one chosen one.  For a great examination of this idea and the troubling gender politics of it all, check out this thought-provoking read.

As if the film wasn't already overflowing with ideas, a third act twist that recalls a similar development in Happy Feet adds even more thematic dimension. (If you are the type who doesn’t want spoilers, it’s best not to read the next three paragraphs).

Professor Business means business.

After Emmett sacrifices himself to save the master builders, the film transitions to live action, and it is revealed the entire adventure has all come from the imagination of a little boy who is playing with his toys.

Scratch that; he’s playing with his dad’s toys. Ferrell plays the dad, and if that doesn't make it clear enough that he is the boy’s inspiration for President Business, the father’s insistence that his son keep away from his toys and not imaginatively build whatever he wants certainly does. To the father (known to Emmett as The Man Upstairs), Legos are not toys, they are a “highly sophisticated, interlocking brick system,” and he is in the process of gluing them together like he would model planes (The Kragle is actually a tube of Krazy Glue with a few letters scratched off). The entire thing plays like an indictment against a generation who look at toys as collectibles to be looked at but not played with.

This section also flirts with some interesting notions about imagination and creativity, about how stories and characters can begin to take on a life of their own. Although most of the film would seem to take place inside a child’s head, there is the fact that Emmett jumps off the table. It’s all very Pirandello, and while it’s not the focus of the story (as it was in the wonderful Ruby Sparks), it is in there.

Serving this many ideas so well goes a long way toward making me, as a viewer, OK with the fact that the whole movie is basically one long commercial. I’m naturally inclined to dislike this type of all-consuming product placement, but when woven so well into the fabric of the story, it’s hard to be all that annoyed. Plus, I mean, come on. Lego’s are super fun.

I’ve gotten this far into this review without mentioning the zippy animation, and that’s just ridiculous, because as dense as this film is thematically, it’s even more so visually. The frame is constantly packed with visual splendor and the animators have a lot of fun populating the world with all sorts of nostalgic nods. Of particular note is the way this team has so hilariously rendered Lego water and fire.

In addition to being the best toy-based movie since Clue, The Lego Movie is the best animated film since Wreck-it-Ralph, and flat out one of the best films of 2014. It’s really funny, crazy beautiful and absolutely brimming with inventiveness and ideas. I’m tempted to say those adapting toys to movies should take note, but really anyone making movies should do that. This is great entertainment for all ages. A  

Oblivion Plays Like a Decent Enough Mash-up of Other, Better Sci-Fi Films

There's some pretty remarkable sets in this film.

Note: This review has heavy spoilers.

There are several things I like about Oblivion, the Tom Cruise sci-fi movie from earlier this year that focuses on a pair of humans charged with mop-up duty on Earth in the aftermath of a major alien war. But there’s also a lot of cliché riddled crap and shortcut taking that makes the film play like an inferior mash-up of a dozen better examples from the genre, particularly The Matrix, Wall-E and Moon.

On the plus side, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Writer/director Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) has a background in architecture, and he puts it to good use here, crafting sleek visuals and eye popping production designs that do a great job of rooting the film in a specific aesthetic.

It also plays with some interesting ideas related to the nature of identity and how concepts like cloning and memory play into that. Is there something tangible about our unique individuality or are we just a collection of our thoughts and memories? This stuff is nothing new, but the film takes an interesting stance that reminded me of my favorite line from Danny Boyle’s Trance (my review here) – “To be yourself you have to constantly remember yourself.”

I was particularly intrigued by the notion that Cruise’s Tech 49 Jack feels a pull toward his previous life, while Tech 49 Victoria (Andrea Risborough) is totally content to be oblivious. T49 Jack dreams of the real Jack’s experiences with wife Julia (Olga Kurylenko) and says it feels more like memories, but it is implied that T49 Victoria is living out the dream of the original Victoria (who makes eyes at the real Jack during a late-in-the-game flashback).

Oblivion wastes a couple of good actors in nothing parts.

But, despite these elements, there are times when the whole enterprise is just too lazily derivative. While I can live with working with the same central themes and even plot points of countless other science fiction movies – most specifically Moon, which also involved a series of clones who were duped into doing a maintenance job for an off-planet entity – there’s a throw paint at the walls approach to this thing that make it ultimately feel trite and unimaginative.

Take, for instance, the rebel forces led by Morgan Freeman’s Beech. When you’re already evoking The Matrix by including an underground rebel force fighting against an alien enemy that’s basically feeding off our planet, is it really necessary to make the leader look like a Morpheus doppleganger? And if you’re going to go down this road with these rebel forces, couldn’t you do anything to flesh them out if even just a little bit?

As great as he is on Game of Thrones, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is utterly wasted here as Beech's second-in-command. He may have more than three or four lines of dialogue, but it doesn't feel like it. Bob, the bobble head figurine glued to the instrument panel in T49 Jack's bubble ship, seems a more fully rounded character. Freeman doesn't get it much better, but he does get more characterization than Bob, so that's something.

The bonus features show a deleted scene in which Beech tells T49 Jack that the real Jack (who was an astronaut) was his hero as a boy, which made me realize there could’ve been some interesting grace notes about how it psychologically played on the human race to have an American hero become the face of their oppressor for 60 years. But nope; not even that one scene makes it in the film, let alone an expansion of its potential implications.

I’m also at the breaking point when it comes to climaxes like this. Why do so many world bad guys have infrastructures that can be totally wiped out by attacking one central location? As in Independence Day and Stars Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, this movie has the hero destroy something, which then renders all the subordinate drones useless. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. And this overused trope is made worse by two, hard-to-ignore annoyances – 1) Why do the aliens even let T49 Jack in with the cargo when they know he’s gone kind of rouge, and 2) Why does exploding a little drone demolish a gigantic alien space shape?

Cruise transcends the script, providing a character
worth caring about.

Thankfully, the film has a dynamic lead in Cruise, whose grounded intensity and a committed physicality does a lot to smooth over the rough spots. He overcomes a thin script to give us a character worth caring about through sheer force of presence alone.

Thinking on the film now, my main thoughts drift mostly to Cruise in favor of the actual film. I’m sometimes a little sad about the trajectory Cruise’s career has taken since all that couch jumping crap eight years ago.  Up until that point, he had proven undeniably adept at humanizing pricks. Sure, there was the occasional Ethan Hunt, but more often than not, he was flawed and complicated like Charlie Babbit, Jerry Maguire or Frank Mackey. Cruise was always a pretty boy, but he brought a real edge to his roles, and his willingness to be borderline unlikeable despite being the biggest star on the planet was always the biggest draw for me.

Lately, Cruise has shied away from these types of characters. Outside of the occasional eccentric supporting performance (the great Tropic Thunder, the horrible Rock of Ages), he’s basically opted to play the genial inoffensive hero in a plethora of action movies. In other words he’s become Will Smith, going for safe pop corn flick after safe popcorn flick. It seems an atpyical thing for a movie star of his stature to do as he delves deeper into his 40s and 50s, particularly in today’s movie landscape. Most (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Hanks) tend to stretch and tackle more interesting fare, but Cruise has instead opted to go all Liam Neeson.

Coming out of the 90s, if you would’ve told me Cruise still wouldn’t have an Oscar by 2014, I’d have been shocked. His star power was too big and the net he cast when working with all-time great directors was too wide to think he wouldn’t have gotten that recognition by now. But, 2014 is upon us and Cruise hasn’t even given a performance worthy of such consideration since Collateral, which was nearly a decade ago. And he’s not likely to do so any time soon given his next five movies are all firmly planted in the popcorn realm.

Cruise always brings his A-game, so it’s hard to fault him for doing something he does well, but it does sometimes feel like this is an adult playing kids games. Still, despite the rant, he’s a definite asset to this film, which, for all its faults, is a pretty solid entertainment. B-