Those Magical Bricks
Welcome to
The Lego Movie. In a collective rush to the box office, audiences
have fueled a record breaking $200,000,000 in ticket sales during the opening two
weeks. Why?
As
co-directors and writers, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have had the great
good luck to grow up during the glory years of computer generated animation when
anything is possible. What’s possible is that animators can now grab the
supremely clever, sublimely nutty contents of those two minds and wrap it all in
an avalanche of verbal and visual surprises. How is it possible, we wonder, that
little plastic puppets can seem so human? You might think a tiny yellow round
face with button eyes and a line for a mouth can’t show emotion. You’d be wrong.
Emmet (Chris
Pratt) is an ordinary guy who wakes up each morning and consults his book of
instructions on how to be happy. After following his boring morning ritual, he
steps outside into a world of Legos where everything we see – water, deserts,
cacti, trees, are made of those incredible little bricks. It’s further proof
that those simple pieces can and do become anything in the hands of someone who
imagines them as something other than what they actually are. Score one for the
most appealing feature length commercial of all time.
Ordinary
Emmet teams up with Wyldstyle/Lucy (Elizabeth Banks) to stand up against CEO,
President Business (Will Ferrell) who wants to force the world to operate
entirely according to his instructions. When everything is in his control, he
will glue the pieces of the world together with Drazle so they can live in
unchanging, perfect order just as kids once did with their Lego manuals. But
when they started building from their imaginations, everything changed. Enter
Lucy and Emmet.
Bad Cop/Good
Cop (Liam Neeson) is the enforcer of rote behavior. Lucy assumes the burden of
encouraging Emmet to seek the special powers that will allow him to defeat
President Business by leading the world from conformity to creativity and
spontaneity. Ordinary construction worker Emmet will now combine the bricks of
life in any way he wants. No Kragle glue for this Master Builder. He is, after
all, is the guy who, even when he was ordinary, designed a double decker couch
so all his friends could watch TV together.
The whole of
it is a colorful explosion of the Lego world against a loud soundtrack. The
sophistication lies in the adult voices discussing big life issues. Until you
see it, you won’t believe that a dark, threatening ocean made of Legos can be
made to undulate. It can. No brick is made to bend or twist, but together they
become a fluid whole.
There is
something quite wonderful about a product so simple that it has become a wildly
creative tool of the imagination over the years, and something equally so about
a movie that recognizes that and says, “Go for it, no limits here.”
Film title : The Lego Movie
Distributor : Warner Bros.
Running Time : 1:40
Rating : PG
Copyright (c) Illusion