The Lego Movie: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller

[Spoilers Ahead]

Why did I give The Lego Movie a ten-out-of-ten score? Because it was a brilliant comedy, a touching family movie, and contains one of the darkest, most devastating sub-texts imaginable. The big reveal of the film is that its story, wherein a generic construction worker named Emmet teams up with "Master Buiders" to stop the evil Lord Business from freezing the universe in place, is actually being thought up and told on the spot by a real life boy playing in his father's basement with his massive collection of Legos. Emmet is the boy, Lord Business is his father, and his playing is in defiance of his father's wishes to use his Legos as stationary models instead of toys. In itself, this is a brilliant mediation on the nature and purpose of toys: they are meant to be played with, not assembled, put on a shelf, and admired. But here's where the subtext comes in: all of the dialogue, all of the characters are figments of the young boy's imagination. So when Emmet says that he is not special and that nobody likes him, that's the young boy saying that. When Princess Uni-Kitty says that you need to bury your unhappy emotions deep down inside, that's the young boy saying that. Notice how Lord Business only appears to his subjects via brief television broadcasts at the start of every day. As madcap, colorful, and purposefully irreverent as the film is, it is the inner projections of a child trying to make sense of living with a largely absent father. Suddenly, the child-like humor (a bomb countdown that starts at '100 Mississippi,' the female lead saying "see you later, alligator," and even the seemingly random mishmash of licensed characters) takes on a new meaning. Even the nonsensical lyrics to "Everything is Awesome" become meaningful because they sound like lyrics that a kid would improvise if they tried to come up with a song off the top of their head. I've read that a lot of critics didn't like the third act because it was so frantic and "generic." I would respond: how else would a child raised on Hollywood resolve a story? If the critics over at Slant Magazine can overlook the narrative flaws and bad writing in films like Showgirls (1995) and Starship Troopers (1997) because they are supposedly "satires" or "condemnations" of American culture, then you better believe that I will defend the last act of The Lego Movie as a brilliant piece of meta-narrative. It's only fair.

10/10