Karen McCullough

Over the past couple of days I’ve talked about The Lego Movie and why it works, when a quick description – it’s a movie about a toy Lego(TM) guy who has adventures! – would make you think it couldn’t possibly.  But nearly every aspect of the production is done so well, that it adds up to an entertaining and surprisingly satisfying movie.

I’ve talked about the plot and characters. Today I’m thinking about the script.

I’m astonished at how often both movies and television studios hire high-priced talent, get great plot ideas, spend huge amounts on visual effects, but forget that the whole things starts with the script. If you don’t have a terrific one, the effort is doomed from the start. Since a script is mostly made up dialogue with some narration, that’s what I’m talking about today.

Don’t believe me on the doomed start?  Consider the second wave of Star Wars movies, particularly the second and third.  Fabulous special effects, terrific cast, lots of money thrown at it, even a good plot idea.  Yet none of that compensates for terrible scripts that feature logical inconsistencies and some of the clunkiest dialogue ever. Even excellent actors like Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman couldn’t sell some of the awful lines they were given. There are scenes where you can practically see them struggling with it.

The dialogue in The Lego Movie sounds so easy and natural, it seriously contributes to the illusion that these are real people. As any writer knows, dialogue is not as easy as it sounds. It has to sound natural without being really natural. It mimics the speech patterns of people like the person in the story it’s coming from, while leaving out much of the normal day-to-day interactions that would be excruciatingly boring on screen or in the book. It needs to be believable on both the personal and the social levels (would that person really say that in those circumstances?) yet move the story ahead at the same time. It also has to make your characters interesting and intriguing. That’s a tall order and the movie does it extremely well.

The script also has to movie the story forward, through both the dialogue, narration and action. Again the writers succeeded quite well. In a movie like this, the temptation to narrate parts would be almost overwhelming, but in fact, there’s very little and nearly all of it is done through realistic dialogue. Virtually every bit of the story is dramatized on screen, including back story. The script also maintains the tension through every scene, which includes admittedly a great number of chases of various sorts and lots of explosions.

And finally, it manages to include a wonderful bunch of delightful surprises, which I’ll talk about later.

One of the things that makes The Lego Movie work so well is its plot. Not just because it features lots of high speed chases in different sorts of vehicles, explosions, gun battles and hand to hand combat, but because it uses – and uses well – one of the standard plot formulas.

Like other noteworthy blockbusters, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and many others, The Lego Movie’s plot boils down to The Hero’s Journey, as outlined by Joseph Campbell in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces  and The Power of Myth, and refined for writers as The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Christopher Vogler and Michele Montez.

Boiled down there’s the plot outline of the hero’s journey: a (usually) young, untested, seemingly ordinary person has their normal life disrupted by some event that calls them to an adventure – something new to them, risky, with an uncertain outcome but the possibility of great reward for themselves and/or those they care about. They undertake the adventurous journey getting tried in small and then ever larger ways, winning some bouts, losing others, and learning from both. Along the way they gather allies, explore new places, learn about the enemy. Finally the hero, supported by his new friends and allies, has to face the ultimate evil or bad guy and find a way to defeat him.

In The Lego Movie, the normal person is Emmet, who is as average a Lego person as there is. He’s living the average, ordinary existence until he accidentally stumbles onto an object called “The Piece of Resistance” and meets Wyldstyle, drawing him into a conspiracy to overthrow the stifling, tyrannical rule of Lord Business.

Wyldstyle, Emmet, the wizard Vitruvius

Obviously, though the plot outline is just a bare bones summary of the structure of the movie. The hero’s journey is a story structure profoundly embedded in the human psyche. Storytellers having been using it since the dawn of civilization – think of the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Argonautica, Beowulf, Dante, and so on. It works, but it’s just a good start. It takes more than just a good plot basis to make a successful movie. Over the next few days, I want to look at some of the other things that make it work: the characters, the writing itself, the setting, and the wonderful detail the filmmakers use.

I’ve been re-reading some Georgette Heyer mysteries and marveling at the characters she creates.  I’ve done two blog posts on it that might be of interest to you.

At the Classic and Cozy blog, I did a post on why her stories appeal to me: http://classicandcozybooks.blogspot.com/2014/02/georgette-heyer-and-cozy-mystery.html

And today at Book Beat Babes, I talk about one Heyer’s most riveting characters and what authors can learn from the way she presents him. http://bit.ly/Md48dz

In addition, I’m running a special on A GiFT FOR MURDER, my mystery with romantic elements.  It’s $1.99 in the month of February.

Amazon: http://amzn.to/MLx6Rx
Nook: http://bit.ly/1bN8sGz
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/308556