The LEGO Batman Movie 3D Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

The LEGO Batman Movie 3D Blu-ray Movie Review

Bigger, Bolder and Brick-ier

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 14, 2017

For its third feature film, the Warner Animation Group abandoned the avian creepiness of Storks and returned to familiar snap-together territory with The LEGO Batman Movie, a spin-off (of sorts) from its surprise 2014 hit, The LEGO Movie. Co-produced by LEGO Movie creators Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and directed by Robot Chicken alumnus Chris McKay, LEGO Batman cedes the spotlight to Will Arnett's growly Caped Crusader, who, in the LEGO Movie, was a supporting player to everyman Emmett Brickowski. McKay and his creative team have freely plundered over a half century of Batman films and TV shows (not to mention sources as diverse as Se7en and Passenger 57) to create an orgy of pop culture riffs and satirical sketches loosely strung together by yet another story about a super-villain's plot for world domination.

Despite declining 3D support among home video hardware manufacturers, Warner is continuing to release its A-list titles in 3D, including LEGO Batman, but it is also continuing its practice of crippling these releases with a lesser soundtrack. Further discussion can be found below in Audio.

Taking its cue from the Joker's mock testimonial to Batman in The Dark Knight —"You . . . complete me!"—LEGO Batman portrays Joker (Zach Galifianakis) as a spurned suitor desperate for affirmation that he is, in fact, Batman's greatest enemy. It's not as if Batman (Will Arnett) doesn't understand what Joker wants, because this LEGO version of the Caped Crusader spends his spare hours in Bruce Wayne's lavish screening room watching the Jerry Maguire scene from which Joker borrowed the line. (It turns out this version of the Dark Knight has a weakness for relationship comedies in general.)

But Batman won't give his arch-nemesis the satisfaction of being acknowledged as number one, which leads to ever more extravagant efforts by the Clown Prince of Crime to establish his supremacy. After Batman exiles the cackling criminal to the Phantom Zone with the help of a device stolen from Superman's Fortress of Solitude, the Joker returns with an army of Big Bads assembled from multiple franchises, including Harry Potter's Voldemort (Eddie Izzard), Lord of the Rings' Sauron (Jemaine Clement), King Kong (Seth Green), Doctor Who's Daleks, the gremlins from Gremlins and the Wicked Witch of the West with her flying monkeys. To save Gotham from this unholy confederation, Batman will eventually find it necessary to ally himself with a bevy of traditional enemies, forming an impromptu Suicide Squad from the likes of Bane (Doug Benson), Poison Ivy (Riki Lindhome), the Riddler (Conan O'Brien), Two-Face (Billy Dee Williams) and a host of others.

Big changes are afoot in Gotham, even as the Joker pursues his latest scheme. Jim Gordon (Hector Elizondo) is retiring as police commissioner, replaced by his daughter Barbara (Rosario Dawson), who graduated from "Harvard for Police" and wants to move the city's law enforcement into a new age of statistical analysis and cooperative effort. To Batman's consternation, the new Commissioner Gordon's vision for Gotham has no room for a freewheeling masked vigilante. At stately Wayne Manor, faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth (Ralph Fiennes) is pressing Master Bruce to renounce his self-imposed emotional isolation and finally, after more than fifty years, allow himself to form family attachments. The Englishman's efforts receive a boost when Bruce inadvertently adopts a precocious and eager orphan, Dick Grayson (Michael Cera), whom Alfred lets into the Batcave much as he did Vicki Vale in Tim Burton's 1989 movie. Before long, Dick has been transformed into Robin, although he has to work hard at persuading Batman to let him tag along.

Around this bare outline of a plot cobbled together from numerous prior Batman stories, McKay and his creative team (which includes five credited writers) have woven a thicket of gags, allusions and winking references, both visual and aural, to decades of Dark Knight lore. The detail is so dense that you may find yourself reaching for the remote to freeze a scene and study the numerous "easter eggs" stuck throughout the frame. Alternatively, you can just let the waves of Batmania cascade over you while enjoying Arnett's petulant and egotistical Caped Crusader or Cera's "gee whillikers!" Boy-Wonder-in-training or Dawson's prissy and officious Commissioner Gordon (who eventually becomes Batgirl). Galifianakis's Joker is also a hoot, as long as you don't try to compare him with previous portrayals. In the world of LEGO Batman, Joker isn't remotely creepy or scary. The Clown Prince of Crime is mostly a clown.

The one inherent limitation that McKay and his team can't overcome is the familiarity of the material. The LEGO Movie benefitted from the novelty of its artfully imagined universe (or, more accurately, multiple universes) and its goofy but lovable hero (voiced by Chris Pratt, who specializes in goofy and lovable). The world of Batman, by contrast, has been mined by Warner and DC Comics to the point of exhaustion, and even with the prodigious talent invested in the effort, LEGO Batman often feels thin and insubstantial, wavering uncertainly between stabs at genuine emotion and mockery of any such sentimentality. The film starts strongly, with an aerial sequence clearly inspired by the opening of The Dark Knight Rises, but it eventually loses momentum, settling into a jerkily episodic rhythm that will be familiar to any fan of Robot Chicken. At an hour and forty-five minutes, it's at least ten minutes too long. By the time the citizens of Gotham unite to save their city from (literally) cracking apart, the film's blend of silliness and CG fireworks has overstayed its welcome.

The LEGO Batman Movie 3D Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

(Note: Screenshots accompanying this review have been captured from the 2D disc. Additional images can be found here.)

The extras for The LEGO Batman Movie provide an informative overview of the painstaking animation process, of which one final step is "lighting" scenes in the digital domain to create the illusion of photography. The process even includes the addition of artificial "lens flares", and McKay confirms in the disc commentary that the number and placement of these manufactured artifacts were carefully considered, as was the style of the "lighting" applied to every scene.

A second final step is stereoscopic conversion to create the 3D image, and the process has been applied to LEGO Batman with obvious care (the stereoscopic supervisor is one of the participants in the group commentary included on the standard disc). Various items of debris periodically fly out of the screen toward the viewer, but LEGO Batman's 3D design keeps such obvious tricks to a minimum, preferring to utilize the third dimension to open out landscapes and cavernous interiors, lending the entire enterprise an even greater sense of scale than the already impressive 2D rendition. The Batcave is an obvious beneficiary, with its apparently infinite caverns filled with massive machinery, weaponry, costumes and equipment. Interiors of Wayne Manor feel even more gigantic, as do some of the outdoor spaces in Gotham where shifting alliances of combatants face off against each other. Even the Gotham City Airport, which figures in the opening sequence, looks more expansive and impressive in 3D. The 3D conversion also enhances the climactic sequence in which the Joker's scheme threatens to sink all of Gotham into oblivion. (The scene of a collapsing bridge is an obvious quotation from The Dark Knight Rises.)

Like the standard Blu-ray, Warner's 1080p, MVC-encoded 3D Blu-ray is a wonderfully colorful affair, filled with bright, saturated and varying shades of red, yellow, blue and, of course, green. Blacks are deep and solid, including both Batman's costume and the dark opening screen that, as Batman informs us in voiceover, is a requirement of all "important" movies. The digital lighting in numerous scenes has a deliberately harsh, and fluorescent quality, which the Blu-ray faithfully reproduces. Detail is good enough that you can make out both the individual LEGO constructions and the portions of the set design where the creators have departed from the "all-LEGO, all the time" approach of The LEGO Movie and substituted semi-realistic elements such as water or flame. A brief sequence is desaturated of almost all color to convey Batman's depressed and purposeless state of mind when it appears that Gotham's seemingly perpetual crime wave has finally been ended.

As with the standard Blu-ray, Warner theatrical group has left almost ten gigabytes of space vacant on the BD-50, but LEGO Batman's 3D presentation doesn't seem to have suffered from the studio's failure to maximize the bitrate.

The LEGO Batman Movie 3D Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As discussed in the review of The LEGO Batman Movie's standard Blu-ray, that disc's Dolby Atmos track is a relatively restrained presentation, but even its 7.1 Dolby TrueHD core provides a better experience than the DTS-HD MA 5.1 track that is the 3D disc's sole option. With only two rear channels instead of four, the sense of immersion is reduced and the front-facing orientation of the mix is more pronounced. If one has the requisite speaker array, plus a receiver (or processor) that can matrix the two rear channels into four, the situation is improved, but the sound field is muddier and less precise than with the Atmos track. The lossless DTS version is still an effective mix, and it's strong enough to provide a better overall experience than one is likely to find in many commercial theaters, but Warner should reconsider its approach to 3D Blu-ray soundtracks. Purchasers willing to spend the extra cash for 3D deserve to be treated as well as buyers of the standard Blu-ray (or the UHD, which also has Dolby Atmos).

For further discussion of the film's sound design, please see the review of the standard Blu-ray.

The LEGO Batman Movie 3D Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The 3D disc has no extras. The included standard Blu-ray contains the extras listed and described here.

The LEGO Batman Movie 3D Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It is a bittersweet coincidence that The LEGO Batman Movie is being released on home video just days after the passing of TV's original Batman, Adam West, who always maintained that his show was a comedy and whose tongue-in-cheek delivery epitomized a style of humor to which even the darkest iterations of the Dark Knight have paid homage. LEGO Batman is a film very much in the spirit of West's original creation, and it's loaded with invocations of his Sixties TV series, from visual references to music cues. Though unintentionally, the film's release is a fitting tribute to a true original, whose jocular incarnation of Batman rocketed the character to the lofty popularity we take for granted today. The 3D Blu-ray suffers from a sub-optimal audio presentation, but the quality of its 3D imagery makes the sacrifice worthwhile—and besides, we don't have a choice. Recommended, with appropriate caveats.