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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 01/20/2024 [TheJamesMadison]

Everything is Awesome

Remember about a decade ago when everyone was all in on this new animated movie from Warner Brothers, a glorified toy commercial titled The LEGO Movie? Remember how it just came out of nowhere, how it was quickly followed up by two films, a spinoff and then a direct sequel, and then it simply...disappeared? Have you ever wondered why?

Well, I don't have a full answer other than the direct sequel, The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part underperformed at the box office leading to Warner Brothers relinquishing control of its license to the LEGO brand in movies (which then was sold to Universal), but it is curious how a movie that just blew up so uncontrollably and out of the blue disappeared so quickly. Well, aside from any business concerns, I've come away with some thoughts about the pair of direct films and their thematic focus (if I felt like I had enough room in these things to tackle it as well, I'd also include The LEGO Batman Movie, but CBD has already chastised me for these posts being too long, so I'll leave it at just the two films, making this post merely too long rather than absurdly long).

You see, I'm a father of young boys, and for about three months, the younger of my two boys was obsessed with these films. I've seen them all, paying full attention, at least two times each, and then I've been in the room while they've been on at least a dozen times for each of them. I've been exposed to them quite a bit, and after the repeated viewings I think I have a clear idea about why, creatively, the first seemed to connect so easily with audiences and the second did not.

Boys will be boys

So, to really dig into the two films and their differences, I have to dig into the films themselves, starting with the first from 2014. I have a meatspace friend who, after watching the film with his young children, came out elated, calling it one of the best films he'd ever seen. I personally consider that hyperbole (I think the movie is pretty good), but I think I get it. You see, if you had to boil the point of the first LEGO commercial in feature film form into a message, it would be this: individuality and creativity are good.

The story follows the generic everyman Emmet who accidentally falls into an adventure that pits him against the evil Lord Business. He allies with a series of Master Builders whom he helps to fight the central antagonist. The secret behind it all is that the LEGO action is just the manifestation of the a young boy who is playing with LEGOs that belong to his father who is the real version of Lord Business. The actual plot is that Lord Business is going to use the Cragle (Crazy Glue) to freeze the world (keep them in place forever to never be played with) on TACOS Tuesday (the S is silent). On the one hand is Lord Business, the corporate manifestation of conformism that started in American cinematic culture with things like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, who rules a places called Bricksburg. On the other are the Master Builders, most perfectly encapsulated by Unikitty, a being of pure chaos who barely keeps her negative feelings in check while dominating a place called Cloud Cuckoo Land.

The basics of how to read the plot is that the main character has to overcome the strict conformism of Bricksburg by finding a middle ground between that and the undirected creativity of Cloud Cuckoo Land. His double-decker couch is derided as unimaginative by everyone, including the Master Builders, but it helps them escape an attack. He gets the Master Builders to use instructions to build typical delivery vehicles to sneak into Lord Business' tower instead of their crazy ideas that would easily stick out (and failed previously). Emmet essentially represents some kind of ordered liberty, where there's creative impulse but the understanding of how to navigate rules to survive.

Everything's Not Awesome

The second film, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is, essentially, the exact opposite. Where the first film was a celebration of the individual, of creativity, the sequel is a celebration of conformism. It's easy to see if you track the dramatic arc of the main character, Emmet.

In this sequel, the brother and sister of the real world have been forced to play together, but it's not working. Every time the boy tries to build something new, the younger girl invades and destroys what he's built, creating this hellscape called Apocalypsburg, in the middle of which is perpetually upbeat Emmet. He builds a new house for him and Wildstyle which invites the childlike toys, leading to the kidnapping of Wildstyle and Emmet needing to go off on his own quest to save her. He gets the help of Rex, a mysterious and super cool dude with a time-travelling spaceship piloted by velociraptors.

Where things turn weird is with the dual introduction of Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi and the visiting of her planet. The Queen has an air of being evil but ultimately only wants everyone to get along. The planet has all of the heroes (the Master Builders) who have disappeared living in suburban harmony, but glittery and girly, including Superman and the Green Lantern who were antagonistic in the first film and just chummy now. What changed? Well, I can tell you it's not breaking the ground.

The first film's finale began with Wildstyle begging the people of Bricksburg to literally break the ground to make something new in order to fight Lord Business. One of the turning points for Emmet in the second is when he breaks the ground on the queen's planet to escape, and it's an action that builds thematically as the film reaches its own conclusion with the central plan to undermine Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi and the upcoming events of Armomageddeon by breaking the giant cake on which her wedding to Batman will take place (these movies are...manic). It turns out that breaking the cake, the action of breaking something which had a positive connotation in the first film, is now a full bad thing in the sequel.

The problem is that Rex is actually Emmet from the future (Radical Emmet eXtreme) who was abandoned by his friends under a dryer on accident, watched them move on, and then cannibalized a bunch of time machine sets to build his time machine to go back and set things right. You see, Rex is an incel who has no friends so he wants to return to the backwards time when it wasn't run by a woman and the culture wasn't all pink and sparkly, therefore he is a bad guy. He wants to destroy things and not build anything in its place (regaining what was lost is a form of building, but the movie doesn't seem to agree), so therefore breaking things is now bad.

The second film now presents breaking things as purely bad. The reaction to an established order, the reign of Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi, is to accept it. If you don't like it, then you are wrong. If you don't like it, you are the bad guy. You must like it, and you must...conform.

A Baseless Theory

I have done zero research into the background of the making of the two films, so this may be completely wrong. However, I did come up with a theory about what happened between the two films. The first was a relatively inexpensive movie (the estimated budget is between $60 and $65 million), a glorified toy commercial where the creatives (namely the directing pair Phil Lord and Chris Miller) were given a relatively free hand by their producers at Warner Bros. who kept them relatively in check (them out of control is their last movie, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse), and the pair made a film that was in line with the basic idea of a building block toy: have fun with this toy. It manifested in a way that embraced this middle ground between following sets of instructions and building something new.

That film was a runaway success, making nearly half a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, receiving very good notices from critics and audiences, and Warner Bros. had IP on its hand. Valuable IP that they could exploit. The LEGO brand had its share of straight to video content, but this broke into the mainstream and was one of the most important franchises in popular animation overnight. You can see some of the changes through The LEGO Batman Movie (the reliance on Barbara Gordon and debasement of Batman most prominently), but it largely sidestepped the larger problems that the full sequel fell into so completely.

I suspect that the sudden success brought more attention to the franchise from the more politically and socially minded producers within Warner Bros. leadership who decided that (ugh, I'm going to have to do the Critical Drinker thing) The LEGO Movie needed "THE MESSAGE". That message is essentially that the proper middle ground between boys and girls and boys...becoming girls. The "middle ground" found between the boy and girl at play isn't the boy having some boy-like things in the way they play. It's using his boy-like toys (the superhero toys and such) to play girlie games. Boy-like things, even the boy-like things of construction in the first film, are cast off as not worthwhile in the sequel. I should note that the sequel does have a new writer (Matthew Fogel) and new producer (Jinko Gotoh) who were not attached to the first film.

It was such an odd direction for a sequel to take, though it's not entirely unique. One day, I may write a similar post about Wreck-It Ralph and its sequel.

End of a Franchise

I don't completely attribute the end of the franchise to this change. In fact, I don't think I attribute much at all directly. I would say it's an underlying reality that made the sequel less appealing to people in ways that they couldn't quite put their fingers on. The two films have very similar manic energies, though the music is pretty obviously better in the first ("Everything is Awesome" became a meme while "Catchy Song" did not for a reason). There are very similar surface appeals between them, but the storytelling between the two is extremely different. Aside from the weird thematic whiplash from the first to the second, the second is this back and forth and almost structureless series of events. It even includes a fake ending! This is a movie for the five to ten year old set?

Whatever the reason, though, the film simply did not make that much money, just about $200 million worldwide off of the increased budget of $100 million (Hollywood math says that the studio only got about $120 million of that $200 million and the budget cost doesn't include marketing which was probably almost as expensive as the film's budget) meaning that it probably lost Warner Bros. money. The studio ended up forfeiting the rights to the property which was then picked up by Universal who has done nothing more with it yet than a Jurassic Park streaming show (I suspect they'll hand it off to Illumination at some point who will make something of it eventually, perhaps in a crossover with Mario or something, I dunno).

Did that box office failure come from its twisting of the first film's themes? Themes that won over not only children but their parents as well (remember that one friend gushing about it upon its original release, calling it one of the best movies ever made because it had such a positive message for his children)? I think so. I don't think many people would point it out, merely saying that the sequel just wasn't as good as the original, but with a message at such odds from the first one, I don't think it can be brushed away. There simply wasn't the enthusiasm anymore from the same people with the same kids.

Warner Bros. took an unexpectedly popular IP with brand recognition and intentionally changed it to the opposite of what it had originally meant to people. The people simply lost interest and moved on while Warner Bros. lost money and let the property go.

If that's not a microcosm for some factor of our cultural battles today, I don't know what is.
Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Anyone But You

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Power of the Press (Rating 3/4) Full Review "His storytelling is rougher, but his technical skills are surprisingly adept (there are some tracking shots in here that are really quite fun). It's him in proto-form, and it's nice to see him continue to change and grow as an artist." [Library]

Ladies of Leisure (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Anyway, it's a pretty good little predictable romance. It's well-performed, has some very nice moments, and it shows Capra further reclaiming his technical prowess with some fun tracking shots that he had been doing in the final films of the silent era." [Library]

Dirigible (Rating 3/4) Full Review "The third of Frank Capra's military themed romantic triangles, Dirigible is the one that addresses my issues with character that happened in both of the earlier films, Submarine and Flight, and it ends up working better than either of the previous two." [Library]

Forbidden (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "This is Capra's best film up to this point, but it also shows that he has some place to go upwards. That he was steadily getting better while working so quickly is one of those wonderful quirks of the studio system." [Archive.org]

American Madness (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This is a triumph of a film, the kind of thing that Capra would become known for, and I think it's deeply underknown. More people should discover it. It's a film brimming with warmth, comedy, humanity, tension, and joy." [Library]

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "So, I admire the film but don't really connect with it. It's an admirable effort from Capra as he stretches Columbia resources, but it's something of a disappointment after the raging success that was his previous film." [Library]

Lady for a Day (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Capra wove a nice little fairy tale of a beggar woman getting all of her friends together to help her manage a complicated situation that's deeply important to her. It's largely unchallenging and nice, and I enjoyed it as it played out." [Library]

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's fun, funny, touching, and it has a great message. That I have these niggling issues with it bothers me. I want to love it more fully. Oh well. It's still really good." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 2/10, and it will talk about the directing career of Frank Capra.