(This is part of the What to Watch With Your Kids series)
| Minimum Age: 7 | Maximum Age: None | Categories: Recent Good Stuff |
| Test drive: I watched it twice, which is rare for me. It became a favorite of my 11-year old boy, who eventually got the soundtrack, which he now uses to torture his sister. |
This movie is deceiving. It looks for most of its run as a pastiche, devised to sell sets from all LEGO collections while making better-than-average jokes about action-movie cliches. The adventure, set in a variety of LEGO worlds, is done with enormous talent, cleverness and attention to detail. It’s enough to make every kid (and a fair share of the grownups) laugh from beginning to end, with some wows! here and there.
But there is more to it than that. An unexpected, fantastic twist makes all the apparently chaotic silliness suddenly make perfect sense.
That’s all I want to say about it, else I’ll ruin it (“You’ve got to trust me on this one.”) If, like me, you are looking for wonder in all places, you won’t want to miss it.
Special mention deserves the theme song, Everything is Awesome! Engineered to be both insufferably catchy and obnoxious, the energetic lyrics (proclaiming, yes, that everything is awesome, and going through a hilarious list of awesome things) also have a deeper level (though this may have been unintentional). I, for one, used the above, fan-made video in one of my classes to comment on the Bible’s story of Creation. After all, “God saw that it was good” will be more readily understood by my young students as “God saw that everything is awesome!”
Alf the Red
*If you are already a fan, and are craving for more, check out this HISHE (How it Should Have Ended) clip.*
Curioser and Curioser! 