All It Takes To Build A Better Batman Is Will Arnett & A Shit-Ton Of Lego

the lego batman movie

The Lego Batman Movie is the natural corrective for the idiotic Snyderverse, that DC cinematic branding exercise that’s only resulted in fans, film critics, and Ben Affleck being very sad. A spin-off from the unexpectedly, um, awesome The Lego Movie, it’s a satirical take on the familiar Batman mythos: the brooding, the branding, the Republican billionairism, the ultra-slow-motion shots when something dramatic is happening, the blowing up of stuff.

It begins mid-parody of the otherwise-sacrosanct Nolan trilogy: a mid-air hijacking of an airplane; an "overly complicated" bomb with a ticking-clock countdown, set to blow up Gotham City, the most crime-ridden place on the planet; that Bane voice. After the best roll-call of ridiculous villains since The Powerpuff Girls Movie, a wild, action-packed, over-the-top opening culminates with Batman saving the day, only for ol' Bruce to return to sad, lonely, empty Stately Wayne Manor, friendless, parentless, joyless.

As goes the lesson for any team-up movie, our hero has to learn to share crime-fighting duties. So, Will Arnett’s vain, idiotic Batman is set against his former Arrested Development co-star Michael Cera, who delivers a wide-eyed orphan Robin full of aw-shucks enthusiasm; Ralph Fiennes, a duly sigh-filled Alfred; Rosario Dawson’s go-getting’ Babs Gordon; and a Batcomputer that’s actually just the voice of Siri. The film throws out constant gags, the stratospheric levels of in-jokery making it play just as well for comic-book fanboize as, say, the Suicide Squad haters happy to hear it mocked herein.

The plot is a duly-ridiculous pile-up involving not just the Dark Knight and the Joker, but every Batman foil, the Justice League, and, then, in an audacious gag, every cinematic villain you can imagine. Like some wet-dream of an IP-worshipping Hollywood stooge, the prison of the Phantom Zone doesn’t just hold Zod, but the Wicked Witch, the Daleks, Agent Smith, Voldemort, the Gremlins, Jaws, the Kraken, King Kong, Dracula, the Mummy, the Jurassic velociraptors, and, most hilariously of all, the giant glowing eye of Sauron (voiced by Jermaine Clement!).

It's all played for the lulz, sure, but the film, unexpectedly, works as a somewhat straight super-hero film. After all, comic books have long been comic, and the Marvelverse has succeeded by adapting characters with wryness, not reverence. So, the fact that The Lego Batman Movie is essentially a parody of a genre shouldn’t disqualify it from working within that genre. Especially given that its Lego source literalises what comic book movies really are: grown men playing with toys.

life

When your old homezzz Film Carew sat in the cinema to see Life, it was —amusingly— preceded by a trailer for Alien: Covenant. It almost seemed like a projectionist’s in-joke, the equivalent of that British cinema comically playing La La Land in place of Moonlight. As, few original — or, maybe, we should say ‘original’— Hollywood films of recent have been so singularly indebted to a film as Life is to Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien, and all the varying iterations that've come since.

Not to be confused with 2015’s Life —the Anton Corbijn-directed, Luke Davies-penned film about the photographing of ascendant James Dean— this Life takes us to a space-station hovering just above the Earth, ready to intercept a haul of soil samples taken from Mars. An opening shot gets its Gravity on, staging a pseudo-single-take as we swim through the vessel, following after the various members of the multi-national crew: Russian rulebook-follower Olga Dihovichnaya, English science guy Ariyon Bakare, Japanese no-way-he’s-going-to-survive type Hiroyuki Sanada, Yankee cowboy Ryan Reynolds, and a pair of doctors, Jake Gyllenhaal, all maternal concern and insecurity, and Rebecca Ferguson, ruthless demander of firewalls, protocol, and protections.

There’s foreshadowing from the get-go, as Gyllenhaal yelps things like "this was supposed to be routine!" and "we never trained for this!", Ferguson says her job is to "imagine the worst that could happen, then the worst after that", and Reynolds drops a Re-Animator reference. Yes, friends, we’re Playing God! And, thus, are due to be punished for our Hubris.

Going through the Martian soil, Bakare discovers that, yes, Bowie, there is life on Mars. But, though a single biological cell dug up from the dirt is cool and all –they even call it Calvin, which may or may not make this a colonialism parable— it just kind of sits there, which is totally boring. So, out to give it some pep, Bakare wisely feeds it oxygen, jolts of electricity, a pet Rat in a harness, and a few prods of his paternal, Creation Of Adam-esque finger. And when lil’ Calvin rises out of its petri-dish as a recombinant cavorting of CGI goo, surely nothing bad’s going to happen. After all, Sanada’s wife’s just had a baby! He can’t wait to get back to Earth and see her!

Soon, the primordial ooze is a dancing, cartwheeling starfish, as nimble as Hank the Octopus from Finding Dory, and as murderous as a horror-movie slayer. Once it starts strangling the crew, Life becomes a trope-laden, containment thriller, where the cast’re always just outrunning Calvin, closing hatches just in time to see the creature splat against the glass. It swiftly mutates from microscopic blob to monstrous super-villain —“it’s really gone beyond what any living organism should be able to survive,” offers Sanada, as if #wellactuallying internet commenter— out to find the flaw in every protocol, the crack in every hatch; its growing intelligence/monstrousness allowing it to constantly work around attacks on its life.

The early evocation of Gravity is, thematically, classic misdirection; as Life builds no shrines to human ingenuity or survival instinct. In fact, human arrogance isn’t just behind this man-made monster, but its evolution into unstoppable villain. Though there’s acts of noble sacrifice, no one thinks of protecting the planet below ’til its too late; the film full of facepalming moments in which Calvin’s demise is thwarted by one of the crew foolishly attempting to rescue one of their fellow humans, no matter the consequences.

That collective humanity is spoken of warmly, and there’s even some sentimentality via Goodnight Moon, but the film is, ultimately, a grim, satirical picture of hubris. You only have to take note of all the times someone says something like "we must never let this thing get to Earth" to know where it’s heading, in both this film and a hoped-for next.