Film Summary DCCLXXXV (The Lego Batman Movie)

 


Sweet Lord above this movie is gorgeous. The Stellar colours, the surprisingly smooth animation for such a blocky universe. The phenomenal set design, immense detail and overall high quality production. It's been years since I've seen a 3D movie legitimately impressed me. 
Yeah Toy Story 3 or the original Lego Movie look good. All these movies look freaking great. I'm sure even that 'Good dinosaur' movie looks wonderful. But it's just not that impressive anymore. But my God if they don't make it work here.

Does the story live up to the hype of the animation? 
No not really. 
It's a very self-referential comedic Batman movie. In where Batman is portrayed in such an angsty and silly manner that he often reminded me of Shadow the Hedgehog. He's enjoyable as he was in The Lego Movie. However an entire hour and 40 minutes dedicated to Batman is a little much. 
I felt like the story could have gone in so many interesting directions, but then just didn't. 

You've got this weird framework involving Batman and The Joker having this really one-sided antagonistic relationship that The Joker Is heartbroken by, when he discovers that Batman really doesn't care about him but that's all. 
Just a big setup to having a bunch of media references purposely thrown out to be needlessly ridiculous (though admittedly fun action set-pieces) with zany one-liners. 

The continuity in World building is very Deadpool in its approach and it's technically fine. I just think there is better potential here. 
You have Barbara Gordon not playing Batgirl or The Oracle, but instead being the future police commissioner with an actual plan to clean up Gotham City and make Batman redundant. 
I was really hoping for a more antagonistic morally evolving character dynamic between her and Batman. Especially given Batman's 'romantic' interest in her that doesn't go anywhere.*

At the end of it all Barbara turns into Bat-girl anyways and the whole Commissioners subplot is just thrown out the window. 
Now I know it's a kids movie that aims super young. So of course they weren't going to do a story like that. But it's still something I wish they could have given a little bit more attention to. 
Though it's not a legitimate problem of course. 

No my only honest criticism about the story is that I didn't like Batman ends up utilizing all of his former super villains as a makeshift battleforce to fight the Joker and his army of pop culture antagonists. I honestly thought they'd support that whole subplot given that Batman was making fun of that very thing only 30 minutes earlier. 
Pointing out how utterly stupid it would be to try and use a group of villains who have been nothing but trouble to you for the last seventy years. 
Honestly I thought they were going to bring in the Justice League because they showed them earlier purposely avoiding Batman because he's a social recluse.

I will say Batman may have nothing that interesting but I absolutely adored Robin. 
I thought he'd be a super annoying character but he's just so sweet and genuine. 
I think it helps that Batman is such a childish over-the-top caricature of his comic book counterpart. 
It just makes the sweetness of Robin all that better. I'd be pretty happy if he got his own little movie. 
Maybe a really short movie that's less than an hour long but you know something.

To conclude the Batman movie is a lot better than I was expecting it to be. It's gorgeous to look at. The story and pacing is okay.
It should have been about 20 minutes shorter. Not just to help with the story but I think it's too long for its Target demographic. 
You don't want kids sitting in a movie theatre for that long.

*Am I the only one who found Batman drooling over Barbara Gordon in a romantic Montage to be really creepy. 
Like I get this movie doesn't have any legitimate continuity and she's not actually a child but it's still super icky to me. It's made worse giving that there's been other Batman movies that have legitimately had a relationship between them. It just comes off as Wrong

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