Why The Lego Movie Is Fucking Awesome
Prior to viewing, you may have thought that this movie was made by a bunch of bros indulging a masturbatory boyhood fantasy to make a full-length Lego film. “Legos?” you may have said. “Yeah cool, but whatever.”
Stop right there cowboy. Because this movie is fucking awesome.
The plot: When Emmet Brickowski, construction worker superlatively ordinaire, accidentally finds the prophesied “piece of resistance,” he gets confused for “the special” — the most important, most talented, most interesting person of all time.
With his team of legendary “master builders,” average Emmet must wield the piece of resistance to prevent the evil Lord Business from using the Kragle to freeze Legoland. Glossary of terms: the “Kragle” is a bottle of Krazy Glue with certain letters rubbed off, and the fabled “piece of resistance” is the bottlecap. That alone would be a fantastic premise for a movie, and for the first two thirds of it, that’s what it is. But the third act turn sublimates this movie from what would have been a perfectly hilarious and charming romp through Legoland into a profoundly resonant cinematic tour de force.
Emmet, it turns out, exists inside of a young human boy’s mind — a boy named Finn playing with his OCD/perfectionist father’s Legos without permission. The father has meticulously separated Legorealms (a metropolis with office buildings and luxury condominiums, The Old West with saloons and cacti, a fantasy land with dragons and castles, etc.) onto different tables, and he plans to use Krazy Glue to fix everything in its proper place forever. In a private attempt to deal with his father’s controlling nature, Finn has imagined the entire movie plot.
It is hard to imagine any story that could be as good as this one for a Lego movie. Thank God for the scriptwriters, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who realized that if you’re going to make a story about Legos, then the Legos themselves must be the building blocks for the story (puns puns puns). Lord and Miller did just that. They really considered Legos — saw what they are capable of, how people play with them, the culture surrounding them — and they built the story from those observations. But of course, even an awesome story can sometimes not be enough. It’s in the details and the execution. On that front, Lord and Miller hit it out of the park.
First, the obvious choice of Emmet’s last name: Brickowski. Cool. So are little conversational nuggets like when one character yells “Rest in pieces” as he’s trying to blow someone up. Details like that peppered throughout the script connect the characters to the Lego universe they come from and convey the writers’ awareness of their choice of medium. But it goes much deeper. What do you do with Legos? You build things. So naturally, Emmet is a construction worker.
Like many boys who play with legos, Emmet needs his instructions. But certain characters have freed their minds and achieved the title of “Master Builder.” They are capable of using their imaginations to build whatever they want with whatever happens to be lying around — e.g. “We’ll build a motorcycle out of the alleyway,” says Wildstyle to Emmet on their first encounter. Because the “set” is made of Legos, anything can be taken apart and reassembled. This incredibly creative idea gets featured quite a bit — master builders drive the many action sequences by reassembling their environment into weapons or cars or get-away planes, and important plot points hinge upon features unique to the Legouniverse. For example, when a wheel pops off of Wildstyle’s make-shift car, Emmet has his first original idea — he realizes that because he’s a Lego-man, his head spins all the way around. So he affixes the wheel to his head and saves the team.
One other detail too great not to mention: remember how some Lego heads have different facial expressions on the front and back? Enter “Good Cop / Bad Cop” for the win. What a fantastically clever plot device. And the way they milked it with the “No more Mr. Nice Guy” sub-plot… I mean… man.
Let’s go back to the fundamentals. The exposition is flawless. The writers and animators set up the major plot points (the Kragle, the prophecy, the master builders, Emmet’s instructions), demonstrate the qualities and capabilities of the Lego aesthetic (Lord Business’ dramatic entrance causes the ground to ripple like flames; Vitruvius transforms a walkway into attacking Lego-birds; for his morning stretch routine, Emmet rotates comically far backwards on his hip-hinges), and introduce the quippy one-liners (first line of the movie: “He is coming. Cover your butts.”), rapid pop-culture-references (vapid TV sitcoms, overpriced coffee, super-catchy pop songs), and meta-cinematic dialogue (the prophecy’s conclusion: “All of this is true because it rhymes.”) that define the tone of the movie all in the first 5 minutes. It’s a lot to handle, but relentlessly, the movie only speeds up from there. The one-liners and (meta-)references happen at such gatling gun frequency that if the audience laughs (which they did a lot, all 3 times I saw this in theaters), you might miss the next joke. Not to mention — the characters travel to different “realms” and add new members to their gang (Batman, UniKitty, Metal Beard, 1980-something spaceman) every ten or fifteen minutes. Things explode, get rearranged, and — wait… how did William Shakespeare, the Statue of Liberty, Wonder Woman, Gandalf, Dumbledore, The Ninja Turtles, Cleopatra, and Dracula all get here at the same time? Oh, they’re all master builders summoned from other realms to help Emmet defeat Lord Business? Makes perfect sense.
The blistering, borderline jerky pace (a quality intensified by the Lego characters’ intentionally boxy movements), the surprise visits from absolutely random fictional and historical characters, the Seth McFarland-style cutaways to space monsters eating the Millennium Falcon, and “10 seconds later” silent-movie style screens that accommodate quick scene changes can all have a disorienting effect, and they give rise to a potential critique of the film: that it’s such a frantic hodgepodge that it fails to have a consistent through line. It does almost seem like the writers are having an elaborate inside joke with themselves (Haha, we will confuse EVERYONE!). However, I think the writers defend themselves from that accusation rather elegantly by letting us in on the joke. They deliberately foreground the genre-splicing/hodgepodge-ing as a driving plot device and primary thematic concern. The characters themselves even comment on it during key moments when hodgepodge-inspired deus ex machina drive the story a little too serendipitously. For example, says Batman, “It’s not like a giant ship is going to come out of nowhere and save us” — cue giant pirate ship rescue; then again, says Batman, “These instructions say we need a hyperdrive, it’s not like a spaceship is gonna just — “ cue Millennium Falcon and crew.
The first time it happens, it arises somewhat organically from the story because we’ve already met Metal Beard and seen his ship. But the second time is such a delightfully egregious non-sequitur that we can’t help but laugh. We’re actually not even that surprised because it’s consistent with the hodgepodge randomness already established. Plus, the writers use the moment that Batman is gone to make progress with the Emmet/Wildstyle romance subplot, and the joke they squeeze in there — Batman is “as blind as a… guy who lost his sight…” is an appeal to the audience’s ability to keep up. It’s a: “You guys get what game we’re playing. Play along with us.” So while the writers indulge in moments of irony and meta-cinematic playfulness, they still manage to advance the story meaningfully and build more trust with the audience.
It’s not to say that the complaint isn’t valid. Because the film swerves rapidly through subplots, the through line can get lost every once in a while. But it does exist, and it’s pretty awesome. Basically, it’s the anti-hero plot. Just as the master builders dissemble and reorder their environment, so too do Lord and Miller rearrange generic conventions germane to their story, lovingly lampooning the hero plot formula and turning it inside out. Typically, a hero is an extraordinary person surrounded by ordinary people whom the hero leads and blesses with his or her heroism. Emmet is an ordinary person surrounded by extraordinary people, and he leads them with his mediocrity. (Even Batman — the extraordinary hero of another popular movie — is part of his posse, and the writers reduce him to a stereotypical douchebag. At one point he even reveals that he doesn’t know who Bruce Wayne is, so we’re led to believe that this Batman is actually just a dude in a bat suit.) The prophecy — a tried and true hero movie convention — is farcically hyperbolic and turns out to be fake. Anti-hero Emmet lacks so much individuality that his favorite TV show is “Where Are My Pants?”, his favorite restaurant is any chain, and his favorite song is the latest pop hit. He’s not even handsome — his face is so generic that Lord Business’ database matches it with everyone else. Whereas the stereotypical movie hero might be characterized as some combination of intelligent, suave, gifted, worldly, and confident, Emmet is lonely, unskilled, inexperienced, has deplorable ideas for furniture design, and makes bad speeches.
If there are any writerly inside jokes in the script, the speech fixation may be the subtlest one. Scriptwriting 101 says that a character is defined by actions, not words, but there is a Hollywood tendency for blockbuster movies to pivot on excellent speeches by charismatic hero-types. The writers think this is amusing, and they use it as an important plot device. “The special will now make an eloquent speech,” says Vitruvius at the master builder assembly, whereupon Emmet delivers the anti-speech, touting all of his faults and alienating everyone. But after his double decker couch saves the day, Emmet makes his first good speech about working together as a team (“Be a fine speech there, laddie,” says Metal Beard), redeeming himself, gaining the gang’s trust, and setting in motion his plan that drives the majority of the third act.
So what we have here is a movie that pokes fun at traditional Hollywood hero conventions, tosses zippy pop culture references out like confetti, and zigzags from realm to realm faster than you can blink… the idea to add one more dimension — a human one — to this lego story is audacious too say the least. It could have been the straw that breaks the camel’s back. But, far from it, it ends up being the grand loom that has woven the tapestry of the entire lego story in the first place.
If the film made no further attempt to reconcile the randomness with a more enveloping thematic thrust, it would still be fun and intelligent. But when we discover that a small boy with huge imagination has invented Emmet’s story to deal with his emotions toward his father, it retroactively infuses the Lego plot with tremendous depth. Lord Business’ micromanagers and the Kragle are no longer just cutesy Legoland weapons, but rancorous assaults on imagination, creativity, reinvention, and the infinity of childhood wonder.
Two writing choices are worth mentioning here. 1) The excellent (if obvious) decision to double-cast Will Ferrell as Lord Business and “The Man Upstairs” bridges the Lego-Human divide and unifies Finn’s and Emmet’s struggle. That way, when Emmet speaks to Lord Business, it’s like Finn is talking to his father. When both pairs hug, we feel as though father and son have had as meaningful a reconciliation as Emmet and Lord Business have, because the human story has given depth to the Lego story, and the Lego story has given breadth to the human one. Well done. 2) The more interesting choice of having Emmet move autonomously in the human world surprised me quite a bit, but it was the right move. We’ve already become so invested in Emmet that reducing him to a mere figment of small boy’s imagination might have unfairly compromised the impact of his much awaited confrontation with Lord Business and robbed the audience of that catharsis. But when he moves, he reestablishes himself as a character independent from Finn (it also helps that we hear him talking to himself, even though the humans don’t) and intensifies the gravitas of his dramatic situation. It was a delicate choice too — if Emmet had walked off the table and waved to Finn, it would probably have been too kitschy. Emmet’s small spasm to get himself off the table and capture Finn’s attention was just enough. So after Finn places the piece of resistance in his hand and reveals the “Believe!” cat poster for fresh inspiration, Emmet returns to Legoland ready to kick some ass with the audience cheering him on.
The human dimension is not only emotionally stunning, but structurally it explains a lot: the story jumps around as much as it does because it’s all in this boy’s mind. So when a pirate ship shows up out of the blue, it’s because Finn decided to walk over to the pirate Lego table and borrow one, and then bam, it’s in the story. So if we previously thought that the film was raising a flippant middle finger to the idea of strict genre lines and traditional, character driven plots, we were wrong — kinda. The whole thing is a story within a story, and the boy’s impulse to invent stories using only imagination and the materials around is the most revered quality in the movie. It also ties off all the loose ends — UniKitty finally cracks and beats up a bunch of micromanagers, retro 1980s space guy finally gets to build his spaceship, Batman finally realizes he’s a douchebag, and Emmet finally becomes a master builder and holds hands with Wildstyle. So when The Man Upstairs finds fault with Finn’s spaceship because it’s, in his own words, “a hodgepodge,” we’re like, “Who cares? It’s still awesome.”Ask me the question: Do you want to be a part of a world where Superman superhates Green Lantern, where pirates can be enormous dolphin-wielding cyborgs, where unicorns and cats breed inexplicably to birth mostly positive but occasionally apoplectic UniKitties, where Abraham Lincoln flies a rocket chair, where Batman installs shamefully douche-y subwoofers in the Bat Mobile and writes black metal music about being an orphan, where construction workers and Legowizards and the 2002 NBA all-star team and 1980-something generic spacemen hang out on double decker couches with swivel cup holders while listening to “Everything Is Awesome” on repeat? Dude. Who would say no to that? The boy is the master builder, wildly imaginative, inspired by his father’s meticulous craftsmanship, but not bound by his rules.
In conclusion, The Lego Movie is fucking awesome. Seemingly chaotic, everything fits together perfectly… dare I say it… like… small, interconnecting pieces. Without getting too academic, it’s the kind of film that breaks the fourth wall without actually breaking the fourth wall. Although no character ever speaks directly to camera, the film nevertheless appeals to our higher mindedness, the part of us that likes subtler things than “Where Are My Pants?”, and asks the question: who cares if a plot zigzags chaotically through genres, defies traditional conventions, and pokes fun at a bunch of movies that came before it? In fact, that’s the whole point. Using its ancestry as a creative springboard, the writers simultaneously spoof and pay homage to the recent history of Hollywood story telling. To their immense credit, they do so while also accomplishing the same goals that their predecessors had in the first place — to create lovable characters and compelling stories that will stay with us forever. With as cool an end result as the Lego Movie is, would could complain?
Two rigid Lego-hands without thumbs wayyy, wayyyyyy up.
Author’s Personal Note: It is true — while I wrote this review 4 years ago immediately after having seen the movie 3 times in theaters, I decided to publish this review of The Lego Movie only now. Why? Good question. I don’t actually know. Better late than never. Leaving it at that.
