The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D

Robert Rodriguez’s The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl is billed as ‘a Rodriguez family movie.’ This highlights its kinship with the director’s previous films for children – the Spy Kids trilogy (2005-03) – and its distinctness from his violent fantasies for teenagers and adults (most recently, Sin City). Equally though, this is a movie by the Rodriguez family: the credits reveal not merely the active participation of various members of the Rodriguez clan, but also that the film was inspired by the ‘stories and dreams’ of the director’s then seven-year-old son, Racer.

The film charts the escapades of an ostracised and wildly fanciful schoolboy after a pair of superheroes fetch him to help restore order to the dream world in which he has conjured them. It inevitably evokes several of its fantasy precursors. Sharkboy, who acquired gills, a fin and an appetite for sushi after his adoption by a shiver of shark that found him lost at sea, fits the mutant-hero archetype of infinite comic books; though his animal parentage – pictured in the film’s opening moments complete with woozy 3D tide effects – echoes also Mowgli’s upbringing in The Jungle Book. Lavagirl, she of the fiery emotions and incinerating touch (‘she’s hot!’ exclaims one of Max’s classmates), is a kindred spirit of Edward Scissorhands: her superhero’s solitude is exacerbated by an inability to hold anything or anybody without causing harm.

Above all, however, it is Dorothy’s adventures in Oz that seem to have provided the template for the film’s ideas. This is not simply a matter of the tornado that bookends Max’s trip into the realm of his subconscious, but also of the displacement of figures from Max’s home life into distorted fantasy form on Planet Drool: significantly, the school teacher who is reimagined by Max as the planet’s frustrated electrician-turned-evil-dictator, Mr Electric. Bent on ridding his domain of dreams and their dreamers, Mr Electric (played by George Lopez) spouts infinite electrical puns as his pursuit of the children escalates with bed-wetting intensity. (‘Watts up?’ he asks Sharkboy mockingly as he unleashes electric eels into the water after him.)

But formal similarities with The Wizard of Oz point to this film’s major flaw. While Oz’s delirious Technicolor contrasted with the drab sepia of Kansas, Rodriguez signposts Max’s world of reverie with the use of 3D. The technology is effective in adding a dreamy sensation to whooshing rollercoasters and cuckoo clocks bursting open with menace, but it creates significant visual problems, too. In the two-dimensional real world, the camera notices the yellow of a climbing frame, the purple of Max’s lava lamp and the fluorescence of Lavagirl’s pink hair; the 3D dream world, on the other hand, seems blanched of such vibrancy, monotonously violet.

This gloom seems apposite for the scene in which Max arrives at Mount Neverest to find his latent utopia plunged into its hellish flip side by Mr Electric’s evildoings: the faces of Max and his fantasy friends are bathed in the suitably infernal glow of nocturnal lights. The trouble is, there is no respite from this oppressive murkiness: the idyllic Land of Milk and Cookies is similarly monochromatic (this time with an anaemic green); the viewer begins to covet the primary tones of ‘reality’.

The virtual gaming sequences in Spy Kids 3-D (2003) were similarly flawed, though in that film the lack of lustre seemed endemic, the flights of fancy lethargic. For Sharkboy and Lavagirl, conversely, Rodriguez has fabricated a vividly imagined and wittily realised dreamscape. And scenes in which the protagonists escape in a banana-split boat down the Stream of Consciousness, or catch a ride on the Train of Thought on its trackless journey in the skies above a brain forest, evince a ripe imagination – whether father or son’s – toiling busily under the dulled veneer.

This review features in the September 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.