Does ‘The Lego Movie’ Have A Political Message?
For the second week straight families enjoyed The Lego Movie. A huge destiny placed upon the shoulders of an unlikely but lovable Lego man, Emmet, was a good draw for audiences, as well as its large ensemble cast including Morgan Freeman, Chris Pratt, and Will Ferrell. While there are plenty of pixar films that hold strong messages for parents to teach their children, did The Lego Man get too political on its audiences?
Fox Business infers that The Lego Movie has an unsuspecting anti-capitalist message. While films like Wall-E focus more on environmental issues, apparently The Lego Movie focuses in on an anti-corporate messages, which is odd considering the characters are inspired by LEGOS.
The Lego Movie’s plot is as follows:
“An ordinary LEGO minifigure (Emmet), mistakenly thought to be the extraordinary MasterBuilder, is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil LEGO tyrant from gluing the universe together.”
Due to the hypocrisy Fox Business has decided to fire back at the film’s premise and how the film teaches children that conglomerate companies are bad.
Fox takes aim at the villain named “President Business” and shows a clip of featuring the villain voiced by Will Ferrell. The clip features President Business ordering his Lego employees to cancel his 2 pm meeting because his other meeting, “may get a little bit deadly.” As he says the last word his face is suddenly beamed by a red light symbolizing his inherent evil.
President Business is described as someone who came up through the history books, voting machines, dairy products and the coffee industry.
Host Charles Payne ponders:
“Hollywood has its own agenda. It feels a little bit more threatening when they push this out to our kids over and over. Why is the head of a corporation, where they hire people, people go to work, they pay their rent, their mortgage, they put their kids through college, they feed their families, they give to charities, they give to churches — why would the CEO be an easy target?”
His guest senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian takes a more diplomatic approach:
“The head of a corporation is an easy target. It’s a simple way to make a villain out of somebody who has power and money. When you look at the history of film you see this happen all the time.”
Although the analyst didn’t seem to have an answer for Payne, who also noted the Lego character looked like Mitt Romney, he did say that it might open discussion in households for children to start thinking about businesses.
Another release RoboCop was brought into the conversation as another anti-business film. It’s described as being “all about the corporation taking over for evil purposes. At the end of the day these are big corporations that are producing these movies. And at the end of the day they’re making a lot of money off of these movies.”
Do you think Lego is promoting an anti-capitalist message to children or is Fox Business reaching?
