Sunday, February 09, 2014
"The Lego Movie": can an ordinary guy master the universe (at least his own)?
For me, the best part of “The Lego Movie” occurs toward the
end, when the relationship between the “real world” and the toy world is
shown. There is a little boy, but the
Lego model city seems to be the work of his dad (Will Ferrell) who apparently
works as an architect and has a real-life project to complete and sell. The city rather looks like a model of
Dubai.
Inside the play world, perhaps the boy’s imagination (and
then the dad’s), there is a whole struggle.
An evil Lego dictator wants to glue all of the universe together,
transcending the speed of light barrier that keeps civilizations safely
separated. A lowly, humble construction
worker gets recruited, but decides he wants to shine and be “special”.
The “imaginary” world may start with Dubai (including the
Burj), but there are plenty of other lands, including the US Old West. It seems
you get to these through wormholes. It’s
hard to get a feel for what the real layout of the kingdom is, because it’s a
whole collection of galaxies. Is this a
Type 1 civilization?
Now, it is interesting to see a whole universe constructed
of discrete interlocking blocks, including the people. Call them quantum packets. Remember how we used to build cities of
blocks as kids?
There are lots of characters: Batman (Will Ammett), Abraham
Lincoln (Will Forte), The Green Lantern (Jonah Hill), Emmett Brickowski (Chris
Pratt, “Bright” from Everwood, the “Everyman”
construction worker who wants to play Clark Kent), the Good-Bad Cop (Liam
Neeson), Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), and Shakespeare (Jorma Tacone).
The Village Roadshow and Warner Brothers film was made in
Australia, and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, with story by Dan
and Kevin Hagerman.
The paradigm for the story is the retrograde of my own 2004 screenplay "Baltimore Is Missing", where the protagonist is abducted and finds himself living inside someone else's model railroad when the Earth is about to be destroyed by collision with a rogue brown dwarf star. Remember, a kids' movie like today's feature can have many layers of very adult meaning.
The official site is here Some of the clearest Lego work is at the end
credits, with the song “Everything Is Awesome” playing.
For today’s short film, there is a review of “Dispatches -
Hunted”, by Ben Steele and Liz Mackean, 43 min, British television, about
homophobia in Russia, on my TV Reviews blog today.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment