02819: Everything Can Be Awesome


So we just got home from The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, which on the whole was nicely enjoyable. It didn't quite have the punch of the first movie, but it's hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice, if one were to mix metaphors. But for a sequel it's a great continuation of the story of the first movie particularly on the whole human family aspect that fueled the first movie.

The basic premise of the movie was pretty much set up at the end of the first movie - after the boy finally got through to this father and was allowed to play with his beautiful LEGO city, his younger sister also gets involved and is allowed to play with them (hence the Duplo creations). And that's a classic sibling story - the older sibling needing to figure out how to integrate their younger sibling into the play experience and the inevitably conflict that ensues.

How they chose to develop that basic concept into a story on two levels - that of the real world and the LEGO world - is really where the fun is. Beyond the sight gags and timely jokes, there were also a lot of clever callbacks to aspects of the first movie along with a twist on the intentionally annoying song from the first movie "Everything is Awesome".

In the first movie the song was representative of the sort of forced Utopia of their original world and it was unintentionally ironic how the lead character honestly loved the song despite how it represented conformity to the regime of Lord Business. In the second movie the versions of the song represented different themes, but primarily that of the innocence of childhood and later hope for things to be awesome again after all the gritty messiness of sibling rivalry.

It's a great message for the kids that get to grow up with this movie franchise. They're taught to believe in the purity of creativity and fun and then the sequel tries to temper things with a little reality as they grow into adolescence. But through it all one can't lose hope that things will work out or to stop believing in the joy that comes with having fun, even with supposedly childish things.

Everything is awesome indeed. Or in most cases, it eventually will be.


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