The Bionicle Lore is NUTS

Let me take you back to the distant future, the year 2000. The LEGO company is losing money because they lost the Star Wars license, and they come up with an idea for an action figure line. Enter BONCLE, the Biological-Chronicle. So what they’re some kinda robot super heroes? Like a Transformer? No! They went so hard on the lore for this shit, way harder than they had to, and it is nuts. They’re robots, sure, but they have elemental powers. It's a mixture of magic and science which shouldn't work, but it does. The whole concept was based on this dude’s cancer treatment. He imagined that his pills contained a tiny warrior inside to fight the cancer, which is why the Toa, the heroes, arrive in capsules.

And the lore just gets more complicated and hard to follow from there.

So like in the 80s, Reagan made it so that you could make a cartoon that was basically just an ad for a toy, and the toy would be an ad for the cartoon. But the time we got to the early 2000s, that shit was on another level. Everything was just kind of everything. The post credits scene of Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed was a cheat code for the Gameboy Advance game. Remy Zero does the theme song for the TV show Smallville, and then they guest star in Smallville and play the theme song to Smallville. Yu-Gi-Oh, an anime based on a manga that all revolved around a Magic: The Gathering rip off trading card game, had a theatrically released movie, that if you saw it in theatres, you would get limited edition trading cards that were featured in the movie.

So Bionicle, had movies yes, but it also had video games, novels, comics, web games, cinematic trailers, All-American Rejects music videos. All telling the story. All part of the canon. So let’s get into it.

Movies - timeline

The Bionicle movie timeline is not the most convoluted timeline ever, but it is still confusing enough that it warrants an explanation.

So starting at the beginning we have the first movie, Bionicle - Mask of Light - The Movie. This one is sort of the culmination of the first wave of Bionicle figures with Tahu, Kopaka, Gali, all those guys. It tells the story of two Matoran, regular child-like citizens of the Bionicle universe, Jala and Takua, who discover the mythical Mask of Light. They are then tasked with bringing this magical artifact to a place. It's basically Frodo, Sam and the Ring. Meanwhile, the Toa face off against the Rahkshi, these little slug creatures that live inside of mechanical bodies. At the end, Takua dons the titular mask and becomes the 7th Toa of Light. The Tommy Oliver of the group, who shows up late, but becomes the most important character. He then defeats Mukuta, the main bad guy, and saves the day. This movie is not amazing. It's alright as a straight to DVD kids movie from the 2000s, but the animation can be stiff and clunky, and the writing isn't great. I do however like a lot of the world building elements. How you can see a Bohrok, this Droideka looking guy, frozen in ice. The Matoran have their own sport "Kolhii," a three team lacrosse type game. I like how the world feels like it has this vast history that we're only getting a small glimpse at.

Bionicle 2: Legends of Metru Nui. So this one is actually a prequel, taking place on the forgotten island of Metru Nui, not to be confused with Mata Nui, the island from the first movie. This is probably the best movie of the series, telling a more conventional story about a group of Matoran who become Toa, and go on an adventure, learning to use their powers and work together. They even decided to give the characters more of a personality, like Vakama the red one, being insecure at first but he learns to be courageous and grows into a leader. Or Matau the green one, who is the comedic relief, as well as being very overconfident and kind of an idiot. Not amazing, but a big improvement over the Mask of Light approach of 'Tahu is the fire Toa, so he’s hot tempered, and Kopaka is the ice Toa so he gives people the cold shoulder.' The animation is much better too, since they realized they can move the camera in 3d, so there’s some good action shots. However, one major flaw is that the main villain of the series, Makuta, is much less intimidating. In Mask of Light, he's big, almost always in shadow and has this threatening presence. But in Metru Nui, he spends a large portion of the movie disguised as an old man, so he's not really intimidating and he gets defeated really easily in a dumb video game boss fight at the end. At the end of the movie, the Toa rescue the Matoran from the bad guy and bring them to the island of Mata Nui, setting up the status quo for the first movie. This is where they reveal that the main characters of this movie, were actually the elders who appear in Mask of Light. If you were a fan paying attention to the character names like Vakama, you might have already figured that out. Either way, it's cool to see another part of the Bionicle universe, and get a better sense of how everything is connected.

Bionicle 3: Web of Shadows. Now this is where the timeline gets a bit confusing. Bionicle 3, is actually a sequel to Bionicle 2, which is a prequel. If you want to get even more specific, it actually takes place during the last 10 minutes of Bionicle 2. See, at the end of Metru Nui, the Toa actually had to go back and rescue the rest of the Matoran, and what you didn't know, was that there was this army of spiders in the way called the Visorak. The Toa then get cocooned and transformed into ugly versions of themselves. The characters then spend a large portion of the movie being sad that they are ugly, which isn't very fun to watch. I get that they are unappealing on purpose, but it just isn't very exciting. Vakama, the leader, then turns bad for almost no reason, and it takes only a speech from the green one to make him change his mind and become good again. This one might be the weakest of the series. It's also a side story inside a prequel that you already know the ending of, so it's hard to get invested in what's happening.

The main thing that makes this trilogy confusing is that the movies are titled Bionicle 1, 2, & 3, despite being a first instalment, a prequel, and then a sequel/side story to the prequel. Each movie doesn't exactly stand on it's own, but I still think it would've been better if the named them "Bionicle: Legends of Metru Nui" Etc.

Now there's a few years between the third and forth final movie. So what happened in that big gap?

Bionicle: Heroes. This time a video game does the job of adapting the story from the novels and comics. This is the Toa Inika and Piraka era, aka the All-American Rejects 'Move Along' era. What's cool about this era is that it focuses on Jala, or Jaller, as he is now called, and some of the other Matoran from the Mask of Light era, who are now as the early 2000s Rugrats would say, "all growed up." It's cool to see some of these characters who have been around since the beginning get the chance to be the heroes for once. The commercials of this era were also super cool and cinematic, and did a good chunk of the story telling. Also there was a video game, and it's fine.

Finally, we get to the final movie, Bionicle: The Legend Reborn. This one takes place towards the end of the Bionicle timeline. It's also helmed by a new creative team and has a different art style than the first 3 films. The character models are much closer to the actual toys, which is kinda cool, but they also move sorta clunky. So what's the story? Well, Mata Nui, essentially the God of the Bionicle universe, whom the island in the first movie is named after, turns out, he's a giant fucking robot that takes up the majority of the planet. The island they were on, that's just his mask. He finally awakens but, uh oh spaghettio, Makuta has taken over his body. So he puts his soul in the Mask of Life, another MacGuffin mask not to be confused with the titular Mask of Light, and rockets it into space. There he gets a new body and ends up involved in a gladiator plot. That's right, this is the Glatorian, the Planet Hulk arc. One of my all time favourite troupes. So Mata Nui does some gladiator fights and befriends some of the gladiator Bionicles on this new planet. This movie isn't amazing, (none of them are) but the first 3 Bionicle movies definitely felt like they were trying, whereas this one feels a lot more slapped together. At the end of the movie Mata Nui and company discover that there was also a giant robot that lived on this new planet. But, it's been destroyed, its body parts scattered across this desert Mad Max world. At the end of the movie, they begin reconstructing said giant robot teeing up the final battle between big-ass planet sized robots. Which unfortunately only really gets told in the comics, and novels... kinda.

Eventually, after about 10 years, Bionicle sort of ran its course and the line was cancelled. Soon after, LEGO launched Hero Factory, which was essentially the same toy, but with much less interesting lore. They’re superheroes and they are built in the Hero Factory and they fight crime or whatever. They had boring white names like Mark, and William. It just wasn’t the same.

There was however a full on Bionicle reboot a few years ago. They kept it simple, only sticking with the original 6 Toa, and I was in. I bought a Tahu day one. But they just didn’t give it the marketing push that it deserved, or that it needed to take off. Sure there was a Netflix cartoon, but they didn’t go nearly as hard as the first time around, but expected people to still care.

There’s a bunch of other stuff that I skipped over. Like at one point the Maori people of New Zealand sued LEGO, for just stealing a bunch of shit from their language and culture. Nick on Planet Ripple's LEGO Rewind video does a much more in depth look at the series.

The point is, Bionicle was unique. A product of its time sure, but it tried way harder than it ever needed too, and all because someone, or a group of someones, had a story they wanted to tell. There was nothing quite like it, and there hasn't really been anything like it since.

One more lore thing I wanted to mention, because I don’t know when else I’ll get the chance to. So Bionicle has 6 main characters, based on the different elements, you have fire, water, air, ice, and then earth and stone. Yes, just like Pokemon’s rock and ground types, you have two different variations on the earth element, that are essentially the same. Also stone is represented by the colour brown, and earth by the colour black, and I feel like those should be flipped, but that’s beside the point. What gets more confusing, is that the first generation Toa of Earth was called Onua, and then the second generation Metru Nui Toa of Stone was called Onewa. Two characters, with almost the exact same powers that have essentially the same name just spelled differently. On top of that, the Metru Nui Toa of Earth is called Whenua, just to make everything more confusing. Three characters, all with extremely similar names and abilities, but are all different characters. Come on guys, change up the names a little more. Or just stick with 5 main characters.

If you wanna see more, check out the video that goes along with this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxHCfZ7eVvg