From: Silver Screen
"The Lego Batman Movie" teaches valuable lessons in a fun way
The Lego Batman Movie stars Will Arnett and Michael Cera as Lego Batman and Robin respectively, and is the follow-up to the well-received and highly rated The Lego Movie from 2014. This film follows Lego Batman (Will Arnett) on his journey to overcome his fear of having a family and opening up to other people, as well as his duty to defeat all of the movie villains locked in the Phantom Zone.
Similar to The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie is a film made up of what you’d expect a child’s Lego fantasy campaign to be. The film starts with The Joker (Zach Galafianakis) assembling all of Batman’s villains and dictating them to blow up Gotham City, to which Batman arrives and foils his plan just like every other occasion. The film then cuts to Bruce Wayne’s mansion where Batman celebrates defeating The Joker in the narcissistic way you’d expect from the Batman introduced in The Lego Movie.
Batman is then shown arriving at Commissioner Gordon’s retirement party where his daughter Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) takes over as the new commissioner and introduces a plan to actually lock up Gotham’s criminals instead of just letting them go every time like Batman does. She calls this plan “It takes a village, not a Batman.” While at the party, Batman also accidentally adopts a young Dick Grayson (aka Robin) in the middle of thinking about himself and not paying attention.
After this, the villains all show up to surrender, and this leads Batman to steal the Phantom Zone projector in order to lock The Joker up for good. This plays into The Joker’s plans to release all of the villains in order to wreak true havoc on Gotham city and get back at Batman for not recognizing that he has an exclusive hero-villain relationship with The Joker.
I know this sounds like a lot, but the best way to think about this movie is to imagine a little kid playing with Legos and pretending that these characters are real. And when you think of it like this, it becomes a laugh out loud marathon for both children and adults. The best thing about this movie is the way it caters to both demographics without dumbing anything down.
The entire film has so much attention to detail in the way it portrays the characters. The film makes jokes about Batman getting his computer privileges taken away and lots of other things that kids can relate to, but it also makes jokes about older incarnations of Batman and some of the nerdier things that older kids and adults get, and I could see how this kind of movie could create quality time between kids and their parents.
More importantly than the humor, this movie also teaches kids a really valuable lesson like The Lego Movie did. The Lego Movie taught kids that they can do anything they put their mind do and that they shouldn’t let anything stop them, and they taught that in a way that was really easily digestible without making it overly simple. The Lego Batman Movie teaches kids that trusting people is okay and that it’s alright not to be able to do everything yourself, which is something I could see a lot of kids having trouble understanding. It’s a really good next step for someone who was maybe 7or 8 years old when the first Lego movie was released and is now ten or eleven and is having a hard time finding the line between being self-sufficient and admitting they need help.
At the end of the day, The Lego Batman Movie isn’t just an excellent movie, but it’s another perfect example of what a children’s movie should be. When I first saw The Lego Movie, I thought it was just going to be another cash in to sell more toys, but it wasn’t and The Lego Batman Movie completely follows suit. This film is really mature and treat kids the age they actually are instead of dumbing the plot down for them.
On top of all of this, I still can’t get over how funny some of the jokes and references were. I may see this movie a hundred more times, and I will always laugh when a character shoots a gun and you literally hear them say “pew pew pew” for the sound effect, or how Barbara Gordon went to Harvard for Police (I’m not kidding, that’s what they called it). This movie made the inner nerd in me really happy, and I could definitely imagine sitting my future child down to this movie and watching their face light up as one of the most iconic comic book super heroes stars in one of the most genuinely hilarious movies I’ve ever seen.
Grade: A
