Wednesday 8 March 2017

Lego; The Adventures of Clutch Powers: Expect alot of Lego movie comparisons here

I'm not kidding by that title, as the comparisons are pretty easy to make. Yet, there is a reason why one is a cinematic darling to the masses, and the other is a Direct to DVD special I saw in supermarkets and Target. And trust me, it shows, it really shows.



So, for a plot, stop me if you've heard this one before. A team of rag tag heroes each with their own special skillsets, are forced to work together to stop a new villain who wants to take over the world. Sounds simple, right? Well, thanks to the magic of plotholes and the thought of getting a sequel, even something as simple as that becomes a confusing mess when you start to question it. So, Clutch Powers, Peg Mooring, Brick Masterson and Bernie von Beam, only one of them confirmed to be a solo explorer, are tasked to work together to recapture the three most dangerous villains in the universe... We only learn the names of two, one of them is captured. The villain that is the actual point of the story is Mallock the Malign, an evil magician from the land of knights, and he wants to take over that land, which is its own planet. Again, it sounds simple enough, but they make it complicated thanks to lots of different things. So lets run down the list

  • We start the story in a Power Miners section, which only serves as a way of saying Clutch works alone, and that the concept of creation, destruction, and recreation, works in this universe, however aside from that, it does nothing else for the story. In fact, it creates a plot hole because while The Lego Movie had a world made up of Lego, here, they're more of a material because there is the concept of things like dirt, regular trees, and water. So where do the Lego bricks come from in this universe? Is the concept of plastic a thing? Why wasn't the mine a plastic mine then instead of Power Crystals? Not to mention Clutch makes it sound like he's getting the crystal for Lego City, when it turns out it was for a computer at the place where he works?
  • Clutch drives a car from the Lego Agents line, which would help confirm that the bricks are scaled to a real world minifig. But not only would the car not be allowed in the city by real world standards as it takes up both lanes of the road, we later find out that size doesn't mean much in this universe because we see sets scaled in a way that makes the minifigs the size of real world people, and two by fours the size of Stone Henge, and a NXT robot the size of a minifig. Sizes, how do you work? 
  • Going back to the point of where these bricks come from, we see a small medieval bridge get destroyed and then somehow turned into a Tower Bridge look alike? Where do these extra pieces come from?
  • To mash the last ones based on product placement together, we have a universe where modern age technology, Space age technology, a universal police station, and medieval knights can co exist. For the Lego movie, their explanation was "Its all in the mind of a child". Ok, fair enough, I'll give them that... what's this movie's excuse? Especially when they start to conflict with each other, like how would the magician know how to fly a spaceship? Why is it that a magic spell preventing futuristic technology working on the planet effect the laser guns and not the rocket ship? Wouldn't the futuristic technology effect the natural progression of planets not as technologically advance like the knights planet?
  • Why does the movie bring up all these different things that go nowhere, like "My dad may have died to this Omega guy", so why aren't we fighting him? "Their evil plan is to unite all the forces of evil", no its not, the wizard wants to take over a planet, and we don't even see the other two. What's the point?
I could go on, but I think I've made my point.

Honestly, I've got nothing to say about the characters because nothing about them stood out to me other then the fact that they're standard caricatures for a team who needs to learn how to work together. Even the villain's kinda meh. It also goes to the presentation because it looks like generic Lego animation. Not stop motion, CGI animation where its a mix of bricks and supposed to be real world material. It has style as its a movie out of lego, but when compared to other lego animations, there's not much here. Maybe this could have worked as a game? Maybe. If it had some more polish, then maybe this could have been good, but as it stands, its pretty generic for a D2D movie. Up next its back to the world of constraction, looking at the start of G1 BIONICLE's replacement, Hero Factory: Rise of the Rookies.

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