A Fun Movie, but With an Ambiguous Message

Rating: 8/10 (7 April 2014)

From a visual perspective, "The Lego Movie" is spectacular. The computer animation seems flawless, and the depiction of the Lego World was amazing. This film's second positive attribute is its clever writing and humor. I loved that the Lego people placed supernatural power on everyday household items that wandered into their world. This film could have been absolutely terrible. It, like "The Transformers" of the '80s, or its predecessor "Gobots: Battle for the Rock Lords," could have been panned by anyone over 13 as just a cash-in to sell more Legos. This film does have adult sensibilities, and the screenwriters envisioned a movie that had an actual message worth saying. For cynical parents, this movie is *not* merely a cash-in that will have your children screaming tantrums for an Emmett and Lord Business Playset; this movie has fully-fleshed-out and funny characters. Chances are you, the grownups, will be laughing and even empathizing with Emmett and his other plastic friends.
Now on to this film's themes, which may leave some parents puzzled. On the surface, this movie is about the conflict between creativity and strict obedience to sets of rules, mostly in the realm of art (I suppose you could say this conflict applies to all aspects of life, but "art" is the subject that came to mind first). Strangely, I think this film is morally ambitious as to its message, though that does not seem the case at allat least, not at first. The villain is, for lack of a better word, an "aesthete": he has a vision of perfection and beauty for the world that others may see as too strict and rigid; he literally wants to glue his subjects in place so that everything in the Lego World will be "perfect" as he sees itor "awesome", as the film's main song suggests. He is opposed by a group of subjects who refuse to ascribe to his vision of "perfection" and instead emphasize free thought and wild creativity over *any* order. On the surface, the film may be a parable about the struggle between democracy over fascism, but I don't quite see the film's message as being on that large of a scale. The message is about how best to create works of art; and, odd as it seems, I can see Legos as a medium through which artistic expression can come alive. This film has two extremes: there's the fascistic world of LegoTown, where everything is to be done according to specific sets of written rules; and there's the colorful, psychedelic Cloud Cuckoo Land, where there is no order at all: cynics would say the Cloud Cuckoo Landers live a life of anarchy and chaos, and it would be a wonder that things get done at all. The rebel Legos' devotion to extreme creativity has its limits, and this is shown in the film. It's up to Emmett, the protagonist, to find a compromise between extreme order and specificity and extreme creativity. He is, indeed "The Special"; the bridge that leads to a path of moderation between two extreme views of expression.
This film gives the grownup viewer a lot to wrap his or her mind around. The ambiguous tone will also confound those who think they have this movie's message pegged down. It's not just a kid's movie: it's a clever manifesto about the nature of the creative process! And it offers no easy answers! This message is wrapped around clever humor, silly characters, and excellent animation. By all means, take your kids to watch this film; but don't offer them easy answers about the film's moral, either.