The Lego Movie
I saw this today, it's been advertised for about a year but I think everyone forgot about it when it didn't come out for Christmas, so despite it being half-term I don't think anyone knows it's come out, as there were only nine people in the cinema, although we did go to the teatime showing. It's frenetically-paced and a lot of fun for adults and kids, mashing up nostalgia and sentiment like
Toy Story and
Wreck-It Ralph before it but I'll talk about some of the technicalities before moving on to the theme. (hint: the theme is
Lego)
Mechanics
It's all CG of course - because it's rather more easy to light and direct a CG actor than a plastic one that keeps falling over - but (almost) everything in it uses renderings of real Lego blocks, and it stays true to the actual (or lack thereof) articulation of Lego people's joints, mimics the stop-motion seen in Adam & Joe and the White Stripes video and pulls focus cleverly in a way that suggests they really are filming miniature figures.
This, while great does have it's downsides. The stop motion effect seems quite jarring at the very start of the film, like it is a sort of homemade trailer for the film proper, but they either dial it down or you get used to it, because you don't really notice it that much after a while apart from in a few specific instances. A lot happens pretty much all the time, but often this means the background is blurred (the pulling focus thing) to make it appear more filmographic - I get why they've done it, but since you just
know they've gone to the effort of making that background explosion or whatever be actually made of real Lego pieces it seems a shame to blur it out. The adherence to the mechanics though doesn't have a downside - while the faces are obviously more animated than real Lego characters, they somehow manage to convey proper personality even through the limited body movement and of course the great voice acting.
The quick pace also means it's difficult to see fine detail, kind of like how you would have to buy the BluRay and frame-advance Transformers to see what was happening when they transform. There are complex models you'd really like to inspect more closely, but even on the big screen you don't get a clear enough view of them. We saw it in 3D, and to be honest it didn't benefit much from that - which is pretty lazy in my view for a CG film - there were only a couple or three of stand-out 3D moments, compared to the very many in say
Frozen or
Madagascar 3. 3D as it stands is a bit of a dead-end gimmick really isn't it? Ideally you could choose to focus your eyes on those background events as if you were actually there, couldn't you? As it is with current tech the 3D effect only works from a fixed camera(s) perspective and focus.
That said, all the action scenes, endless battles and effects were glorious - the way they show water, smoke and fire is inspired and you won't have seen the best of them in the previews. A couple of pre-film adverts even joined in the fun, with Lego versions of the BT Infinity and Confused.com adverts actually managing to hit the mark for once.
Scope
Worth mentioning, as unlike the aforementioned
Toy Story and
Wreck-It Ralph which had a select few licenses they were able to use, the Lego Empire is utterly huge. The bricks along with the videogames give them rights to use with impunity stuff from
Star Wars,
Harry Potter,
Lord of the Rings,
The Simpsons,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and superheroes from both camps - although as it's a WB film they stick to DC ones. It rather highlights how you can do pretty much anything you can think of in Lego - if you want to take Spider Man, Indiana Jones and Hello Kitty for a trip in the Batmobile to visit the Thundercats (not
actual Thundercats), meet King Arthur and battle Minecraft Creepers in Hogwarts and Isengard, then none of those presents any significant problem - and they're just some of the
licensed options, never mind what you can build yourself.
Content
Well, if you've seen both the vids posted in the trailers thread, then you've heard a lot of the jokes (albeit cut to pieces and not where they sit in the film), and mostly those with the biggest set-up. But since they come thick and fast, with plenty of pop culture references and nodwinks to the adults, there are still a few corkers sprinkled in there. The big question is
whether this is just a 100-minute long advert for Lego, or not? Well, yes obviously...or maybe not, or maybeperhapsnotprobablyactuallyyes. I shall try to elucidate.
Theme
The sentiment section feels a little unwelcome and awkward at first but as it's the big thing in the story I won't spoil it, but it gets blown away by what follows so stick with it. Some (amateur) reviewers seem to have misinterpreted the message and it's probably best you don't read their reviews, as the main thrust of the plot (which they miss) is to encourage originality (and teamwork).
Any further comments refer more to the real world rather than the fiction of the film.
So, is it actually a bit...subversive?
A lot of pro reviewers have suggested that it is. It encourages original thought, yet has the full backing of a company which seems increasingly to produce kit models, with highly customised parts only really useful for their intended use. The film seems to be targeting with mild scorn what you'd imagine are the most lucrative areas for Lego - the kids who buy the many expensive boxes and just build the thing on the box and play with it, and the what can in all likelihood only be adults who buy the £300-plus
Star Wars ship replica kits and so on.
Why it's not actually subversive
I think the pro reviewers also miss the point. Check out the Lego shop. Flying totally in the face of the message of the movie are kits to build models featured in the movie. However, side-by-side to them, and featuring much more prominently than I remember in a long time are basic brick sets - encouraging you to build what you want. They are marketing the shit out of both ends - hardly subversive.
I remember as far back as my childhood that my sister's Lego Café and so forth had special custom blocks which could mostly only build...a café, whereas I'd mainly only got boxes of blocks inherited from others. The colourful awnings from
Pâtisserie-da-la-pouffe would have had no place on my
Mega Tank of Accidental Death to all Barbies as the eagle-eyed
Action Man pilot would have considered that they would make him look a bit soft had he plundered them from the smoking ruins of the rather unfortunate
Pâtisserie-da-la-pouffe which happened to be in the way during particularly vigorous tank manoeuvres.
The point being that the custom-styled "special" blocks are in no way a recent trend because I'm talking the
70's, and that I suspect the negative feelings towards them have initiated a shift in the company's marketing towards a more prominent view of the brick sets, but also the message that both builder types can live and play together in (relative) harmony. It even sub-subversively demonstrates that you can use the supposedly single-use special blocks to create even more madly creative combinations, demonstrating a longevity to toys which might at first appear to only have a single purpose. Clever marketing.
Conclusion
Toy Story - be nice to your toys
Toy Story 2 - take care of your toys
Toy Story 3 - don't forget your toys, they want to played with
Wreck-It Ralph - toys have feelings, too
The Lego Movie - play with your
toys Lego
So, a great big advert then?
Actually, yes. But how is that such a bad thing because, now I'm going to play with some Lego, because it's the greatest toy ever invented and this film has inspired me to create something
wonderous?
I think that's a good thing.
