I’m “biast” (con): …but its treatment of female characters has left a lot to be desired
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
Previously on The Lego Movie: A young boy’s Lego fantasy playtime is threatened with ruination — utter destruction, I tell you! — by the arrival of his little sister and her pastel Duplo bricks. A fate worse than death! *fade to black*
Five years ago (five? really?) The Lego Movie overcame the lowest possible expectations to thrill us with its wildly inventive visual style, its mashup motifs, and its overall verve and humor. But the treatment of its female characters was all too tired and clichéd: Cool, calm, and capable Wyldstyle clearly should have been its protagonist, but in the infuriating tradition of far too many movies, she was forced to take a back seat to conformist doofus Emmet, who got to be the hero… though, naturally, he couldn’t have done it without her supporting him all the way. (This… is not the kind of Strong Female Character we want, Hollywood dudes.) And then, that ending! The utter disparagement of little girls, of the company of little girls, and of the things little girls love? This left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of women fans — even those of us who really loved the movie, for the most part. Like me. (The film got a really low score on my Where Are the Women? test.) I cannot even fathom how crushed I’d have been if I were a little girl thrilling to The Lego Movie only to be informed at the very end that my toy-ish fantasies and my imagination were the stuff not of fun and adventure but of horrors, that only the imagination of a boy was worth celebrating. This is the sort of thing we female movie fans are really good at looking past, because if we couldn’t, there’d be very few films for us to love. But we notice it — oh yes we do.
So The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part has a couple of strikes against it from the get-go. First, our expectations are a lot higher than they were for the first movie: we’re no longer dreading a 90-minute toy commercial but something infinitely bigger and smarter and better. Second — at least for some of us, who deserve to be treated with the same geeky esteem as certain others of us — we were waiting for a bit more respect to be paid us.
And what do we get? Early on in The Second Part, as danger strikes and life-or-death exploits are in the offing, someone comments to Wyldstyle (the voice of Elizabeth Banks: The Happytime Murders, Pitch Perfect 3) — who goes more by her secret identity, Lucy, these days — that it sucks balls (I may be paraphrasing here) that she has been forced to play sidekick to Emmet freakin’ Brickowski (the voice of Chris Pratt: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Avengers: Infinity War). Obviously, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — who return as screenwriters here (with Matthew Fogel), but not as directors — heard the howls of us angry chicks. Which is good. But the film goes on to once again center Emmet and cast him as the hero! *heaving sigh of disappointment but not surprise*
I was, therefore, a teensy bit cheesed with The Second Part as it unfurled, even as it was immensely clever and snarky about its setting: postapocalyptic, complete with collapsed and half-buried Lego Statue of Liberty (shades of Planet of the Apes) in the land of Emmet and Lucy; that Duplo invasion was no joke. And then it takes the movie a while to figure out where it’s going and what it’s going to be about. Or else the movie is being too sneaky by half in keeping the secrets about where it’s going and what it’s going to be about. Eventually, the shape of what it wants to say reveals itself… and it is, gloriously (and thankfully), a far bigger, much more positive and even downright feminist reaction to how the first film approached girls and women than a throwaway line about how Lucy was sidelined.
The joys of The Second Part are — eventually — many and manifold, in a way that is far too spoileriffic to get into too many details about. (I think I will need to do one of my in-depth Spoiler Alert posts about this one… after I see it again.) Of course there are many delightful pop-culture references, to everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Stargate and Back to the Future; there’s even more than a frisson of the best of what Toy Story has to say about our fantasy lives and our playthings, too. But this sequel is wittier and far more subversive than its original, in a way that digs deeper into how fandom elevates certain types of male characters and glorifies certain negative aspects of cinematic male heroes.
It doesn’t ruin the movie to note that Emmet — for whom not even the apocalypse can crush his good mood — just wants a quiet life in a little cottage with Lucy, even if it must be in a desertified afterscape, and that much of the action revolves around his interactions with classic bad boy Rex Dangervest. Rex helps Emmet with the task of rescuing Lucy and others from the fiendish talons of Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (the voice of Tiffany Haddish) and her enforcer, General Mayhem (the voice of Stephanie Beatriz: The Light of the Moon, Ice Age: Collision Course), of, *ahem,* the evil Sistar System. And that kind of sucks — what, another movie about how a man has to rescue a woman? *groan* But if The Second Part is about anything at all, it is about smashing tropes of toxic masculinity that infuse far too many movies. Even if it takes a bit too long to get there.
The Lego Movie 2 subverts many expectations — I like how the bit about Duplo glitter vomit suggests that little girls like gross stuff, too, just like little boys do — but mostly it asks us to reconsider that the absolute foundation of most action movies, the qualities that have been considered essential to a (male) action hero, are maybe not so essential after all. That maybe “sweet, innocent, kind” Emmet is more appealing than the likes of Rex. If centering Emmet was necessary to knock down such a fundamental trope, well, okay then, said the angry feminist film critic, grudgingly.
But next time, General Mayhem had better be the hero.
see also:
• The Lego Movie review: take the brick pill
There. Fixed it for you. :-)
Shall I criticize your comment for leaving out the LGBT community, the Deaf community, Muslims, atheists, wheelchair-users, and war refugees?
There was nothing in MAJ’s comment to “fix.” It wasn’t an all-inclusive statement about all the kinds of viewers the movies ignore; it was a specific response to how The Lego Movie actively disparaged a GENDER (not an ethnicity, religion, or other demographic) in its ending. You make a valid point about how the movies fail to celebrate the imagination of lots of kinds of people, but this wasn’t the best way to make it.
Okay.
What did you fix? I didn’t say “white girl” and I am, by no stretch of the imagination, an “ethnic” anything.
The first Lego movie disparaged all human girls. And yellow Lego ones, too.
Dang, I was definitely too charitable in my original take on that ending then.
(Paraphrasing my original reply, I felt the boy’s reluctance to let his little sister join in his world was a mirror to his father’s reluctance, and her way of playing both mirrored the celebration of anarchy in the film itself, and the way my brother and I would have acted at that age. I didn’t see her playing as ruining the fun, but adding to it.)
Having the Duplo invasion being an actual disaster in story torpedoed that. Nice to hear they took the criticism seriously though.
Having just seen the sequel, I think there’s some support for your original take.
When I was five years old, I was more interested in playing with the neighbor girls’ Barbie Dream Mansion than my own action figures. I also, infamously, embarrassed my older cousin at her gymnastic competition, dropping my pants and trying to jump onstage, exclaiming, “I want to do that!” Luckily, my mother was able to restrain me. My neighborhood was full of girls and girlhood was my highest aspiration. Yet, when my own sister came along four years later and wanted to play with my Construx (late 80s, early 90s competition to Legos), I banished her from the family room, which my brother and I treated as The Land of Boy. So, some two and-a-half decades later, watching the ending of the first Lego film, I was struck by these conflicting contradictions. It made me wish I’d been a better brother, both to my sister and, as a role model, to my younger brother. True, I am now married to the awesomest woman that ever was or will be, who is far smarter and cooler than I could ever hope to be, who I would be more than happy to let play with my Construx, if they hadn’t been obliterated from existence by the Lego juggernaut, so I have definitely matured a lot, but that first film did unearth some half-buried regrets and it sounds like this new film will too.
Your story unearthed some half-buried memories of Construx – in the early 90’s, I designed and built a full suit of futuristic armor out of multiple Alien Series Construx sets and walked down the center of our street wearing it. It was incredibly painful to wear and awkward to move in, but I thought I was the coolest kid ever (my eyes and hands glowed in the dark!). I was lucky no one ran me over. In the mid 90’s Mattel re-released Construx (the original 80’s sets were from Fisher-Price), and I was so happy to see them back in the store that I bought several sets despite being a high school student by then. I still remember the commercial, “To Build! Construx!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJmKJyPviEA
But yeah, it sucks that there were never any girls in those commercials or on the boxes. Lego sometimes had girls on the boxes though – crazy commie Danes. I’m glad these movies are exploring how fluidly and creatively a lot of kids were when incorporating toys intended for the opposite gender into their play. Walking down those two pink aisles in Toys R Us felt like visiting another universe when I was a kid – I used to wonder, “Why do boys get half a warehouse full of toys, but girls only get these two pink aisles?”
Thanks for the share. Remembering how fragile those Construx were, I cannot begin to fathom how you constructed a suit out of them. The most my brother and I managed were six-foot robots, which were technically robot-esque marionettes. As someone who works in the oh-so-glamorous world of retail, it is more than a little disturbing how static and genderized the toy department remains. Also, how every new toy seems recycled from the 80s and early 90s, from Ninja Turtles to Garbagepail Kids.
Even during the first 2/3 of this sequel, I have trouble seeing it as “another movie about a man who has to rescue a woman.” Emmet temporarily sees it that way, but he’s hardly reliable. And the audience sees that Lucy remains much smarter and more effective than Emmet (with less help), and I think she gets equal screen time.
THAT. IS. THE. ENTIRE. PROBLEM.
Explained here: https://www.flickfilosopher.com/2016/04/where-are-the-women-rating-criteria-explained.html#7
I read it when you first published it.
I agree that the first movie had that problem. Which this movie explicitly called out.
I disagree that, in this movie, Lucy’s competence exists primarily to support Emmet’s growth. That’s a different (male) character’s job. Lucy’s competence supports her own story (and growth). I see her as a full co-protagonist.
But it calls it out by centering male characters.
We’ll have to disagree on this for now. I do plan to see the film again, so perhaps I’ll feel different on a second watch.
I agree with much of what you say about the first movie, particularly about how it makes Emmet the hero while it’s Lucy that really is. I loved the way the new film addressed that.
One point I do see differently is related to the live-action characters. You viewed it as disparaging girls’ way of playing in favor of boys ways of doing so. I saw it more as age-related rather than gender-related. Older kids often want to build things in a structured, exact way, and younger kids bring chaos to the picture. (I say this as someone with two younger brothers. When I was growing up, I loved building models (usually the models of movie monsters, so my room had Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Dracula, et. al. were on display around my room. Periodically, my younger brothers would get in and want to treat them as toys, not the models I’d proudly displayed, resulting often in broken models.)
The older kid could have been a girl, and her little brother the annoying intruder. Why do you think that was not the case?
Add in how Lucy is treated… and yeah, it’s definitely gender related.
The movie had a about 5 good laughs … the last half I was yawning … super boring 2nd half