The Lego Movie rose to the top of the box office again this past weekend sitting in the number one spot for the past two weeks, since it’s opening. Even surpassing a rom-com released specifically for Valentine’s Day on the 14. The movie earned back it’s budget of $60 million within it’s first weekend of release and earned twice that with $129 million in total in it’s second weekend. Currently, the profits sit at a whopping $202 million and are expected to rise exponentially for the next few weeks with all the buzz the movie has caused.
The movie’s extreme popularity comes with good reason, nearly every aspect of the film is stellar, and enjoyable for every age. Nearly all of the humor is just good clean fun, and the heart-wrenching moments aren’t too cliche or played out. The pacing of the movie kept you on the edge of your seat, it was near impossible to rip your eyes from the screen, a ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ case. Which was perfect for a theater experience, there weren’t any bored children, everyone was completely captivated by the scenes playing out on the big screen. The movie was an enjoyable trip from start to finish, definitely a movie you have to pay attention to.
Artistically, the movie was stunning, while it was completely made from CGI technology, you wouldn’t be able to tell. Every block in the movie is individually rendered and textured, creating a stop-motion look to the movie. I had expected the movie to be stop-motion, considering all the stop-motion Lego shorts released over the years by bored teens. It might as well have been stop-motion, the animation style was meant to look blocky and jerky, creating sometimes hilarious movements for the figures and a unique artistic style for the environments. Where the real credit goes is the care put into the environments and effects, every single explosion, wave of water, or dust cloud was made of digital Lego blocks. This movie isn’t anything like I’ve ever seen before, I wasn’t expecting a movie about little bricks to be so artistically impressive, but it turned out to be beautifully unique.
Overall, the movie might as well be considered as innovative as the Toy Story movies were. A great message, laugh-out-loud gags, and an interesting story were all packed into the movie, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Already my favorite movie of the year, and I doubt any other movie of the year will overtake that for a long while.
