Everything is Awesome

I didn’t know I was going to The Lego Movie until the very last minute. It was a weekend afternoon and I really wanted to Get Stuff Done, like move in more, sort through the garage, set shit up, who knows, moving-in stuff. Or fix my Jeep, that was it. Whole nother story. But alas! I submitted to the entreaties of a woman under compulsion to take her teenage son to the movies and that’s what he wanted to see. She knew it was going to be stupid and didn’t want to suffer alone. I am not one to make a woman suffer alone. Hey, I stayed married to one for a long time.

Legos have changed a lot since I was a kid. Then it was just red and white bricks. Now they have all sorts of pieces and characters, configured to fit purposes from construction sites to Star Wars battle cruisers. This movie opened with the start of a construction worker’s morning, through calisthenics and overpriced coffee, a schmuck who’s too dumb and happy to be unlikeable, and spends his day with a collection of like-minded Lego-bots building and building and building. Their cheerful wise-cracking mindlessness segued so well into the stupid catchy soundtrack about how “Everything is awesome!” that by the time armies of Lego-bots were goose-stepping to their jobs in a vast Legopolis I was giggling and spilling my popcorn.

“Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you’re part of a team!” It’s so goddam catchy I still want to overdose on Pepsi and Vyvanse and spend the weekend building plastic highrises.

Of course, pretty soon something unexpected happened and a plot appeared and off we went into Lego-adventure-land, full of smart heroines and Morgan Freeman’s voice characterizations and a growling Batman figure and a script full of obscure verbal and visual jokes. Who wouldn’t get that an old used Band-Aid would become a priceless Artifact in the toy box world of Lego? Who also wouldn’t get that amongst all the Legolized celebrities from the Green Lantern to Abraham Lincoln there would be a scuffed and scarred old character known simply as the nameless astronaut guy? And then, after all the chases through Pirate-themed and Star Wars-themed and Western-themed worlds, my head exploded. Never did I expect a romp through the World of Lego would wind up at Burning Man.

Looked like it anyway to us. It was the secret refuge of the oppressed Master Builders, they whose world was under threat from the ultimate weapon, a weapon that would change the universe as they knew it forever, bringing an end to all freedom and creativity: A tube of Krazy Glue. Their secret world was a riot of bright colors and impossible creatures, a place where there were no rules and everyone was happy, a place where the music sounded like dubstep and the dominant personality was a very sparkly pony.

Of course, Bad Cop put an end to that, and the adventures rocked on, and the movie wound up as movies will, and the big song will become a relentless earworm and destroy middle-aged brains everywhere it goes. I give this movie and A for Awesome!