Flak Magazine: Review of Spy Kids 2, 08-19-02

Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams confirms its franchise as the second-safest bet in cross-generational entertainment — that is, kids' movies that adults will thrill to — outranked only by Pixar's curiously unimpugnable work. It only has a handful of moments that will cause the childless adult to wonder what he or she is doing in the theater, but no too-hip-for-the-room moments that children will find stultifying. And everyone will dig on the many of the movie's gleefully inventive touches; a very short list would include a masochistic carvinal, a snappily animated little droid, magnet-headed henchmen and some the best Harryhausen homages ever. As the kids, Daryl Sabara and Alexa Vega give first-rate performances, with Vega's credit-sequence performance as a great bit of physical comedy. Where its predecessor underlined its sincerely felt message that being in a family is the ultimate adventure, Spy Kids 2 posits more challenging morals: that children should do what they know is right if their parents want them to do wrong, and that loving your family means being willing to make big-time sacrifices (at one point, the kids disable a tracking device so their parents won't join the kids in their seeming doom). Don't worry about these themes making the movie maudlin, because it's not, but it further establishes writer/director/everything else Robert Rodriguez as a filmmaker whose interest in art and entertainment for children comes from someplace more real than his wallet.

Yet it's hard not to talk about Rodriguez's wallet; he rose to fame in 1992 when his indie action film El Mariachi made a splash for providing blockbuster entertainment on a four-figure budget. He's famously kept this spirit of frugality, continuing to turn sow's-ear bankrolls into silk-purse movies, even if that purse is occasionally empty (neither From Dusk 'Til Dawn nor The Faculty really lived up to its promise).

It's no surprise, then, that Rodriguez wants to vie for high-priest status in the cult of digital video. It's part and parcel with his "Rebel Without a Crew" ethos — DV really does let you do it all yourself. Digital video has staged a flank attack on the movie industry, generating some of the most spoken-of indies of the past four years (The Anniversary Party, The Blair Witch Project, The Celebration, The Center of the World, Chuck and Buck, The Fast Runner, Lovely & Amazing, Tadpole) as well as recent work by name directors (Mike Figgis' Time Code, Spike Lee's Bamboozled, Richard Linklater's Tape, Eric Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke, Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal). Its virtues are perpetually cited — it's cheap and flexible like video but with an image quality that could someday rival that of film.

And by this point in the DV discussion, most readers tend to turn off — "I don't care what it's shot on; I just want to see the movie." Certainly when George Lucas dropped Attack of the Clones into multiplexes, its high-definition DV photography was the last topic on viewers' minds. But Attack of the Clones looked poor indeed — the compositing of actors onto digital backgrounds was early-days-of-blue-screen fuzzy, the candy colors didn't pop, the blacks weren't saturated, and there was no sharp detail except in close-ups … but then the close-ups were awash in pixel crawl, looking at their worst (during the outdoor cavorting between Anakin and Amidala) like ameobas were crawling over the actors' faces. (These problems were worse when seeing the movie transferred onto film than they were seeing it digitally projected — color vibrancy went up and the ameobas receded — but digital projection lacks fine photographic detail, particularly of elements in the middle ground.)

But, again, viewers for the most part didn't notice, much less care — and why would they? Who really thinks of movies as art, as opposed to narrative-delivery devices that, often as not, you might as well wait until video to see? (And theaters, particularly those outside major metropolitan areas, only have decades of their own shoddy presentations to blame.) It's a TV culture — and since Attack of the Clones and Spy Kids 2 will have much longer lives on video than in theaters, what's the point in getting all gussied up for a theatrical release when all people want is television? That may sound overly harsh, but the proof of the pudding is in the viewing.

It's funny that Spy Kids 2, which uses the same high-definition camera as Clones, actually looks better than it bigger-budgeted counterpart. Spy Kids 2 doesn't have the ameobas or the compositing halos, possibly because where Lucas inserted actors into almost entirely digital backgrounds, Rodriguez tends simply to insert digital effects into a photographed scene. But the bottom line is that the picture is soft and the colors are a little muddy; Rodriguez is big on the "film is dead" line, but he must be disingenuous — you can't consider The Phantom Menace vs. Attack of the Clones, or Spy Kids vs. Spy Kids 2, and prefer the look of the latter.

Lucas and Rodriguez aren't solely arguing image quality, however. They're arguing means of production; for Lucas, film is photographic where video is "painterly," allowing him to manipulate his images more completely. For Rodriguez, film is clunky, and "when something creative becomes a hassle, there's something seriously wrong with the process." For him, DV is a way to make movies at the speed of thought, improvisationally.

In the same way that there's not a lot of appreciation for Lucas' painterly period, however, Rodriguez may not be best served by such hassle-free filmmaking. Spy Kids 2 is bursting with creativity and has a definite surfeit of coherence. Rodriguez recruits Ricardo Montalban and Holland Taylor to play the kids' grandparents, but gives them nothing to do. He brings back Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino as the parents, but strands them in the movie, giving the affable Banderas only one protracted bit of high slapstick at the end. Even the dependable Steve Buscemi, asked to play a kooky scientist, seems adrift. I would be the last person to ask for rigorous plausibility from a kids' fantasy as high-spirited as this one, and you can't say Spy Kids 2 doesn't deliver, but you can see, all throughout the movie, ways in which it could have delivered more — foreshadowing that disappears, plot developments that overwrite themselves. They're the sort of issues that often get addressed before you start making a movie because it costs a lot of money to make a movie — it costs a lot of money simply to expose and develop the film — and so there's value in working to get it right the first time. Speaking from a strictly economic standpoint, shooting on digital video doesn't have that value.

From a rhetorical standpoint, however, the fact that digital video hasn't yet made Lucas and Rodriguez better directors (just more self-indulgent ones) is too anecdotal to serve as grounds for attacking DV. Nevertheless, these are the medium's principal evangelists, and if their DV work isn't as good as their film work, it makes you listen to their proselytization a little more critically. Rodriguez has one more DV feature in the can — Once Upon a Time in Mexico, opening next spring — and a third Spy Kids in the works. The sixth and final Star Wars movie arrives in theaters in 2005, at which point Lucas has said he intends on being very firm about only releasing the movie on opening weekend to digitally equipped theaters.

I think that's a genuine threat (it'll be the franchise-ender, so what does Lucas have to lose?), and that means the next three years may be critical to the adoption and dissemination of digital projection, which is in some ways concomitant with the proliferation of high-definition DV shooting. The system has some definite advantages for studios and exhibitors — why ship literally tons of movies every weekend when you can just have theaters download them? — and if consumers aren't proactive about registering their opinion, the changes could happen without any real chances for our input.

This isn't so much a call to action as it is a call to less inaction, to pay just a little closer attention to what you're seeing the next time a film unspools for you and soak up the epicurean pleasure of a pretty picture. Because the only people you'll find higher up the chain that care about film as film are the filmmakers — many directors and even more cinematographers. They understand that film and video are different, non-interchangeable media, but the money men may not, and if the financiers rally for a digital sea change, there may not be anything that even the directors can do. Which is why it's important for concerned moviegoers to demonstrate support and, when the time comes, vote with their dollar. It's not Luddite-speak to prefer movies over really, really big TV.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)