The Lego Movie (2014)
Directed by Phil Lord
An ordinary Lego mini-figure, mistakenly thought to be the extraordinary MasterBuilder, is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil Lego tyrant from conquering the universe.
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According to an ancient prophecy repeated by Vitruvius, one day a “Special” will arise to dismantle the rigid conformity that governs the Lego universe — a concept that echoes Warners’ own “The Matrix,” albeit with none of that film’s self-seriousness of tone.
It focuses on a himbo construction worker named Emmet (Chris Pratt) who’s mistaken as a savior akin to Neo in The Matrix.
Movie nerds will delight at the smorgasbord of cinematic snippets sampled in this silly saga: "Star Wars," "The Matrix," "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter" lead the list of referenced works that probably made licensing the biggest portion of the "Lego Movie" budget.
(The film’s nods to Star Wars and The Matrix are more than just pop-culture asides.)
Taking inspiration from a grab bag of pop culture detritus — The Matrix and Toy Story among the key influencers — The Lego Movie follows ordinary Joe protagonist Emmet (Chris Pratt), a cheerful chap whose daily routine includes stretching, watching a dopey TV show called Where’s My Pants? and trundling off to work singing his favourite song: EVERTHING IS AWESOME .
The audience sided with the rebels against Lord Business, against his mono-minded robots, and against his frightful tentacle-splaying drones called Micromanagers (which look a lot like Sentinels from The Matrix ).
The picture looks good, it has some yuks, and there are even early hints of an Idiocracy-style satire of a lowbrow culture — the most popular show on TV, Where Are My Pants?, is a PG version of Ow! My Balls! — but the overlong Lego Movie collapses in the third act, finally becoming an overt commercial for the toys while getting existential in a way that unfavorably parallels the Toy Story movies.
It’s not the second coming of Toy Story , although it does echo Toy Story in notable ways.
Taking inspiration from a grab bag of pop culture detritus — The Matrix and Toy Story among the key influencers — The Lego Movie follows ordinary Joe protagonist Emmet (Chris Pratt), a cheerful chap whose daily routine includes stretching, watching a dopey TV show called Where’s My Pants? and trundling off to work singing his favourite song: EVERTHING IS AWESOME .
On one hand, “Toy Story” had long since cornered the sincere ode-to-childhood-playthings approach, while the “Transformers” and “G.I.
You’ve seen this all before — it’s Toy Story meets The Matrix — just not done in Legos.
In the other corner are the countless specialized puzzle sets of officially licensed tie-in product, like the pirate ship set or the gender-constructed, pink-bricked Disney princess sets or, guessing, eventually, the The Lego Movie set or, on a more adult level, the hot-hot-hot $400 Star Wars Death Star set, meant to be enjoyed by anyone with the patience, instruction-reading ability and disposable income to burn.
A quartet of Star Wars characters also makes appearances: C3PO, Chewbacca, Han, and Lando.
The animation was largely handled by Animal Logic, an Australian company that had been responsible for some of the Lego-branded "Star Wars" specials and who bring this universe to life using an uncanny combination of stop motion animation and computer generated imagery.
Instead of capitalizing on a beloved toy, The Lego Movie uses the popular children’s building blocks and miniature figures for something far more ambitious: A manic and surprising comedy that has more imagination and creativity than all the Transformers pictures combined.
This is, after all, a movie that is based on a popular line of building block toys, and one that, unlike big screen adaptations of things like "Transformers" or "Battleship," actually retain the original toy's childlike designs.
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Feeling directly lifted from the prologue of Julie Taymor's Titus (or maybe "St.
Just as they did with “21 Jump Street” and “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” before this most ambitious undertaking, co-helmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller irreverently deconstruct the state of the modern blockbuster and deliver a smarter, more satisfying experience in its place, emerging with a fresh franchise for others to build upon.
I would like to nominate the screenwriting team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ( "21 Jump Street," "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs") for the Nobel Peace Prize , even though very little about "The Lego Movie" is peaceful.
Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller have made big business out of revamping seemingly tired or uninspired properties into fresh comedic fodder – first turning kiddie book “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” into a cross-generational winner packed with jokes for the entire family, before deciding that “21 Jump Street” was the perfect big screen outing for a self-reflective gag fest starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill – and they’re up to their usual tricks with “The Lego Movie.”
In the film’s best moments, writing-directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (also the team behind “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” and “21 Jump Street”) convey a freewheeling, almost libidinal energy that really does fit the open-ended spirit of those venerable Danish interlocking bricks.
Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who gave us “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “21 Jump Street,” and they bring their irreverent brand of humor to the film.
The Lego Movie was written and directed by the team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who previously collaborated on the inventive storybook adaptation Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009) and the goofball TV-to-movie parody 21 Jump Street (2012).
Co-directors and writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, whose growing collaborative résumé includes the movies 21 Jump Street and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and TV’s How I Met Your Mother and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, weave themes of creativity, independence and cooperation into a story that runs on a crazy rail of nearly nonstop pop-cultural riffs and satirical references, understated comedic nuance as well as explosively absurd visual magic, and just the right tones of subversive cool for a movie that needs to appeal to children as well as parents.
Thankfully, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have created a film every bit as imaginative, colourful and cleverly constructed as their plastic inspiration.
Typical of Lord and Miller (whose previous outings including adapting a much-loved children’s book with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and updating a cult television series with 22 Jump Street), The Lego Movie is packed wall to wall with wicked one-liners, cracking visual gags, loaded pop culture references and a plethora of cameos.
Sight gags, pop-culture references and inside jokes zing by lickety-split, a problem with Lord and Miller’s first feature, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.”
A movie based on LEGO building blocks seems like a far-fetched premise for a feature film - but thanks to the imaginative powers and heart of directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord ( Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs , 21 Jump Street ) The LEGO Movie is one of the most clever, original and fun adaptations of a toy or game ever put to screen.
That can be attributed to the vision of the directing and writing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, probably best known for the two Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs films.
Ambitiously channelling The Truman Show and Brazil , the film switches gears into Matrix territory with the arrival of Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) and Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks).
Like Truman in The Truman Show , he’s a smiling citizen, going through the motions of a typical Bricksburg day: he wakes up like everybody, stretches like everybody, eats a complete breakfast like everybody, watches the same sitcom that everybody watches — and heads off to work.
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Why are they so popular?" and proceeded to answer those questions with a story built on thoughtful symbolism, crammed with eye-popping imagery, and populated (a la Who Framed Roger Rabbit ) with familiar characters.
Talking about plot specifics, including a third act twist that takes things into decidedly more meta-textual territory (further advancing the movie's "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"-ness), would be to spoil the exploratory fun of watching "The Lego Movie," a movie that takes some very strange zigs and zags throughout its brisk 100-minute running time.
Yeah, it's fun and an impressive feat of corporate synergy to watch the intermingling of characters from different franchises (in this respect, The Lego Movie is Who Framed Roger Rabbit for a new era); Lord and Miller deftly lampoon the brooding essence of Batman and skewer the unfashionableness of Green Lantern, who to Lego Superman's chagrin won't leave him alone.
Though it never quite reaches the lunatic levels of Who Framed Roger Rabbit , it has that film's same hellzapoppin' zeal, that willingness to go anywhere for a joke and that absolute insistence that it must never, ever slow down.
In the case of the exceptional “The Lego Movie,” from directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, getting to see their pyrotechnic computer-animated fantasia with a packed, thrilled, paying audience was a sweet treat, especially since its wall-to-wall Mad-magazine-like visual tapestry also draws subversively on any number of movies that would include but hardly be limited to the epic paranoia of John Carpenter’s “They Live” and “The Matrix,” as well as the Wachowskis’ most-misunderstood carpet-bombing of form, “Speed Racer.”