The Lego world finds itself under threat from bizarre invaders from another realm. These attacks leave great devastation, and the realm of Brickburg has become "Apocalypseburg", a ruinous, devastated wasteland populated by grim, hard-bitten survivors.
Well, by grim, hard-bitten survivors and Emmet, who somehow still manages to stay upbeat. Possibly because he hasn't quite grasped the seriousness of the situation. Certainly, that's everyone else's perception.
Even Emmett's positivity will be tested, however, when the invader General Sweet Mayhem kidnaps all of Emmet's friends, including his love interest Lucy, and takes them to the shape-shifting empress of the "Systar System", Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi.
Emmett sets out in pursuit, but is knocked off course and nearly killed. Only the last-minute intervention of the rugged adventurer Rex Dangervest saves his life. The duo team up, determined to thwart whatever evil plan the Queen is hatching.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first Lego Movie. I thought it was a very clever, and a huge amount of fun. This sequel is ... okay. I didn't dislike it, but it didn't quite hit the same heights, for me. While it did feature plenty of clever jokes and exciting adventures, there are a couple of flaws that detracted from it, for me.
One of these is that the setting of this film is much less grounded in Lego itself. I loved the original film's use of both Lego's infinite capacity for reconfiguration, and its fundamental abstractions from reality, to create the literal 'building blocks' of Bricksburg and its inhabitants' lives. This second film uses lot of other kinds of toys as well, all of which are significantly less versatile. As a setting, this melange is technically more varied, but to my mind less interesting.
This film also includes many more 'real world' elements and footage included here than the first film; we're regularly reminded that the characters are experiencing the 'in fiction' version of real world events. I'm not a huge fan of this. It's a risky thing to remind the audience that what they are seeing is not real, and I really don't think I have ever seen it pay off. Reminding the audience 'this is all toys' does tie in to certain specific plot elements later, but it also underlines that certain other plot-points make no sense if the Lego world is not real. You can't have it both ways, movie.
Ultimately, I thought this was decent, but I did not like it anywhere near as much as the first.
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