[Movie] The Lego Movie

Everything is Awesome! Especially this movie!

This delightful tale is about Emmit, a regular construction worker who lives in the world of legos; who finds the piece of resistance, and must decide what to make of his destiny.  This light hearted, but surprisingly deep animated feature is a must see for the whole family.  It features an excellent voice cast, fantastic animation, and a theme that is worthy for any to view.  Julia and I enjoyed it immensely.

[Spoilers]

Be warned that this movie is highly metafictional.  The first 80% of the movie starts out following Emmit as he learns about the terrible things President/Lord Business has done to the world; making it samelike without allowing the creative variance of the master builders.  Emmit is recognized as not ordinary in any way, but his ideas are so 'dumb' that the other Master Builders (creatives who can make anything that they need out of the legos around them) that President Business cannot seem to cope with them.

The "Everything is Awesome" song at the beginning is a pernicious little thing that will stick in your head for days at a time and can't help but remind me of Captain Awesome.  In fact, when I just checked that link to make sure it was working, Julia groaned because it had been stuck in her head for days.   Having said that, it's also a joyful tune that is put to very good use plot wise in the movie.

The standard theme might appear to be, like most Children's movies "Spend more time with your children" which of course applies but it has more than that.  It also speaks of the need to put things above solely profit, to tolerate differences, to embrace creativity, but also not to let that creativity overshadow practical necessity to get the job done when you have to.  The metafictional elements when Emmit...goes elsewhere are among the most interesting of the story and a lot of the plot makes sense at that point.  Let us merely say that the Man Upstairs Jr. is one creative kid! (I promised spoilers but I'm only doing some)

The characters are delight in this.  Emmit is the perfect everyman, whereas Wyldstyle is a strong postmodern female lead who holds her own.  There is much wizard confusion in this, but that is a good thing.  Metalbeard the pirate is "awesome" but also hilarious.  However, to me the show stealer was Batman.  This is not your "Dark Night Returns" Batman but a surly sarcastic caricature of himself as might be thought up by someone who watched 4-5 videos of him and decided that was the way he'd always been.  Will Ferral as the villain(s) is also quite well done as is Liam Nielson's voice of Good Cop/Bad Cop.

I can't recommend this movie enough.