The LEGO Movie Review

After suffering through the rather painful month of January in terms of movie selection, February looked much more hopeful. Especially since first up on the docket was a movie that I was completely sold on from the very first time I saw the trailer. LEGOs!!!! Many hours of my life have been spent putting those amazing little blocks together. And even now if you put a package of LEGOs in front of me, I will be perfectly happy sitting down and spending my evening putting them together. No shame at all. Thus the idea of having a full feature length film of LEGOs was like the greatest idea ever in my opinion. I was completely sold the second I saw the trailer for the first time. Each additional piece of footage that came out made me even more excited. And finally my level of excitement hit an all-time high as reviews came in extraordinarily high (it currently holds a 96 percent on RottenTomatoes and a 8.9 on IMDb). I am happy to report to you that my extremely lofty expectations for this movie were met and even exceeded.

So what is The LEGO Movie about? How can they make such a good movie based on LEGOs that has a good plot? Well, unfortunately I'm going to mainly leave that up to you to find out. I will say that the basic story is about a LEGO construction worker named Emmet who lives life by the book. Literally. He carries around a LEGO instruction book that he follows to the t. One day, though, Emmet gets sucked into a high-powered adventure that turns him from being an unnoticeable construction worker to being the chosen one who is supposed to save the world from the evil President Business. Seem like a generic and cliche plot? It's not. It's actually a plot that is smart, moving, and full of nostalgia. The ending of the movie was a complete shock to me and actually blew my mind. I have a lot more that I could say about the story, but I'm not going to. I'm going to let you discover it for yourself.

In addition to a surprisingly good plot, there are many things that led to the awesomeness of the movie. And I will try to move briefly through them so that you aren't here reading a blog post for the next year because there are so many things that make this movie great. First off is the brilliant voice cast. And there is a ton of amazing voices. In fact because there are so many, I'm going to let you go to IMDb to figure out all of them yourself. Our main gang consists of our hero Emmet (Chris Pratt), the main girl Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), the Unikitty (Alison Brie), Benny the 1980 something space guy (Charlie Day), and the wise old man Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman). Our team of villains is headed by President Business (Will Ferrell) and his main pawn Bad Cop (Liam Neeson). All these characters, along with all the minor characters, mesh together perfectly to make one of the best voice casts for an animated movie I've seen. Along with that, the humor is excellent. I was laughing my face off the for the entire movie because of all the different gags and jokes in the movie.

The next thing I will bring up is the animation. All the trailers actually led me to believe that they did this stop-motion style with actual LEGOs that they were zooming in on for the movie. Turns out I learned before going in that it is actually mostly pure computer animation. Knowing this doesn't make me think any less of the movie, though. In fact, it makes it super impressive. The animation is so good that you wouldn't even know that it's animation. It looks like actual LEGOs. I don't know if I've ever seen an animated movie where the animation was so good that I couldn't actually tell it was animation. 

And finally, talking about the animation leads to possibly the best part of the movie for me. It's what I have decided to call LEGOisms. And of course I mean all the attention to detail. Detail that perfectly encompasses the whole LEGO culture and is rather brilliant. Emmet takes a shower. Water falling on him is little blue LEGO circles. Emmet bends all the way backward right around his waste, right where the LEGO people always bend and in a way that we all bent them. Emmet takes off his hair and puts a wheel on his head. Emmet rides a LEGO horse, one that I swear was taken from my LEGO set back home. Said horse moves in the way I would've moved that horse. When Bad Cop knocks over Emmet's cup of water, a little blue LEGO circle falls on the ground representing the water. And of course everything is done with LEGOs, including but not limited to explosions, laser beams, water, scene introductions, etc. LEGOisms. And these LEGOisms were all over the place in every scene of the movie. I loved it.

In wrapping up, The LEGO Movie was everything that I was hoping for. Brilliant story, brilliant voice acting, lots of humor, lots of LEGOisms, and of course nostalgia through the roof that was reminiscent of the Toy Story movies. The movie is creative, groundbreaking, and original. Yes, it deserves to be mentioned right up in the conversation with Toy Story. It is that good and that nostalgic. The LEGO Movie is sure to be a future classic, one that I will own and watch many times over throughout my life. Because of all this, I am giving The LEGO Movie my prestigious grade of 10 out of 10.