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DEAD DROP: "Spy Kids: Armageddon" guest starring Alanna · The Spy-Fi Guys

• 0:01
  Speaker A: Meet the next generation. We are the Spy Fi guys. And this is Spy Kids armageddon. Hello, and welcome back to The Spy Fi Guys, where we cover spy facts, spy fiction, and everything in between. I'm Zach.
• 0:20
  Speaker B: And I'm Christian.
• 0:21
  Speaker A: And today we have a dead drop episode for you.
• 0:25
  Speaker B: Yeah. So this is the newest Spy Kids movie, which dropped recently on Netflix. So I'm a little unclear. Is this a reboot, or are the other movies still, like, in continuity? Because then they make no reference to them at all.
• 0:38
  Speaker C: Isn't the OSS the same from the other movies?
• 0:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, but I mean, they don't reference, like, Junie and Carmen.
• 0:44
  Speaker C: That's true, that's true. Or Antonio Banderas and Carla Guggeno.
• 0:48
  Speaker A: Okay, so that is our guest star, Alana, who spoke without waiting to be introduced.
• 0:53
  Speaker C: I wasn't sure what the protocol was. It's been years since we did Spy Kids. Years.
• 0:59
  Speaker A: Yes. You may remember Alana from our coverage of the original Spy Kids, and we have not had her back until this James Bond draft, but now she is back for Spy Kids. Armageddon. Now on IMDb, the Trivia says this film is a reboot to the original Spy Kids franchise.
• 1:18
  Speaker B: Interesting. Okay. All right.
• 1:20
  Speaker C: Wow.
• 1:21
  Speaker B: Well, unless this movie doesn't do that well and decide they need to bring back the original Spy Kids as, like, a team up movie kind of OOH.
• 1:30
  Speaker A: That would have been a good idea.
• 1:31
  Speaker C: Andrew asked me if Gina Rodriguez and Zachary Levi were the kids from the original movie, and I was like, well, they were siblings, so I really, really hope not.
• 1:42
  Speaker A: Very close family.
• 1:44
  Speaker B: Well, they kind of already did that idea, Zach, though. Well, not the incest part, but the bringing them back as adults for the fourth movie all the time in the world.
• 1:55
  Speaker A: Can't wait till we get to it.
• 1:56
  Speaker C: I want to see them in, like, ten years.
• 1:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, these are too many franchises, is the problem.
• 2:04
  Speaker B: All right, Zach, do we have a synopsis?
• 2:07
  Speaker A: Yes, we do. So, as always, we do our poetry synopsis. Yes. Do you come up with any poetry, or is it just me this time?
• 2:15
  Speaker C: I have a favorite quote.
• 2:17
  Speaker A: Okay, that's later. That's later. Okay, so here's the haiku, and the haiku this time is the theme, which is the lessons of the movie.
• 2:24
  Speaker C: Oh, there are a lot of lessons.
• 2:26
  Speaker A: Okay, listen to parents. Spies are bad. Actually abolish prisons.
• 2:37
  Speaker B: I'm glad we're going to talk about this.
• 2:39
  Speaker C: Also, like, screen time is bad. That's another one.
• 2:43
  Speaker A: Well, come on. It's a haiku. You can only fit in so much. And then here's the limerick. There once were some kids who were spies who disagreed about telling lies. They're real good at games and have very long names, and compared to adults, they are wise.
• 3:00
  Speaker C: Wow, that was really good.
• 3:01
  Speaker A: Thank you. I'm pretty good at this, so I do say so myself.
• 3:04
  Speaker B: He's getting pretty good.
• 3:07
  Speaker A: And then here is the real IMDb plot summary. The children of the world's greatest secret agents unwittingly help a powerful game developer unleash a computer virus that gives him control of all technology, leading them to become spies themselves to save their parents in the world. That is definitely a run on sentence.
• 3:29
  Speaker B: Yes. So we start in media's race. The spy kids are sneaking into a castle. Armageddon will launch in 1 minute and they need to make it across the chasm. They use some magnet boots. They've got a surveillance robot.
• 3:44
  Speaker A: Was anyone else reminded of Legends of the Hidden Temple in this part?
• 3:47
  Speaker C: I thought it was like Temple Run or what's that mobile game?
• 3:51
  Speaker A: Yeah. Temple, run. That's right. I also was impressed that they were actual kids this time.
• 3:57
  Speaker C: They are so little.
• 4:01
  Speaker B: I mean, I feel like Carmen was maybe a preteen. Junie was definitely a kid here. They're about closer to the same age. I'm going to bring up the fourth one again. They are also kids. Like actually kids in that one as well.
• 4:14
  Speaker C: They seem younger than Junie was in the first one. I think maybe they could have acted younger.
• 4:20
  Speaker A: I don't know.
• 4:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. We cut to one day earlier and we see Chuck. Oh, well, not actually Chuck, but Zachary Levi. Come on. Anytime he's in a spiral, you think of Chuck, though.
• 4:32
  Speaker A: His personality is totally different from Chuck.
• 4:34
  Speaker B: In that he's oh, definitely. So different. And I'll bring that up later. So one of the kids, Tony, is sneaking into a box and apparently this is where all of their technology is kept except for the hours of four to 06:00 p.m..
• 4:51
  Speaker A: So talk about relevant.
• 4:54
  Speaker C: A little too relevant. Maybe a little on the nose.
• 5:00
  Speaker A: Well, Christian, you have a kid.
• 5:02
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 5:02
  Speaker A: Obviously too young for devices. It's only going to get worse, though, as time goes by. What do you think your device role is going to be when she gets older?
• 5:12
  Speaker B: I don't know, and I haven't made any concrete plans on it because who knows where technology will be at that point, really, right.
• 5:21
  Speaker C: I suppose that's true. Do you guys think Nintendo sponsored this movie?
• 5:25
  Speaker B: We got Switch lights because they use a switch.
• 5:26
  Speaker C: We got switch controllers later. We got another Switch light with the car.
• 5:31
  Speaker A: Well, if they had, do you think they would have name dropped Nintendo? I don't.
• 5:37
  Speaker C: Know. Nintendo is kind of touchy like that.
• 5:41
  Speaker B: Especially Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. They show the Sony VIO logos super prominently, but they never call out in the film. Oh, let me check on my Sony VIO.
• 5:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, they would get more money if they did, but they don't want to, I suppose.
• 5:56
  Speaker B: Yeah. So that's what Tony is doing. He's sneaking a switch out of his technology box, whereas Patty, his younger sister, is not eating breakfast and doesn't want whatever her mom is providing. I forget what it was.
• 6:08
  Speaker C: It was overnight.
• 6:08
  Speaker B: Oats, that's what it was.
• 6:10
  Speaker C: Yeah. Apparently they were bad. And apparently Zachary Levi made them and that's why they were yeah, and she's the good know. She wants a picture for her paper, but she has to ask.
• 6:24
  Speaker B: Definitely thought that that was a ruse when that she was trying to get her mom's password for something.
• 6:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, I thought that too, and then came back.
• 6:34
  Speaker B: No, she's definitely the rule follower, which is interesting. Between Carmen and Junie, I guess it's the same. The younger sibling is the one who is more of the rule follower, and the other one is the more the older one is more of the rebel.
• 6:48
  Speaker C: But in this one, they were the same age. They were twins, right?
• 6:52
  Speaker B: Were they supposed to be twins?
• 6:53
  Speaker C: They said we've been wanting to tell them we were spies since they were.
• 6:58
  Speaker B: Oh, I never caught that.
• 7:00
  Speaker C: Yeah, they also never talk about like, well, I'm the oldest, so I'm going to do this. Well, I'm the youngest, so I get away with it. So I think they were twins. Come on, Zach, you didn't pick up on this girl.
• 7:10
  Speaker A: She was a lot younger than him. Well, not a lot younger.
• 7:13
  Speaker B: Patty acted younger too, I feel.
• 7:19
  Speaker C: So yeah, I'm going to go with the twins.
• 7:22
  Speaker B: I mean, probably with that line.
• 7:25
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 7:26
  Speaker B: The parents go off and go to their sneaky spy computer. They use the armageddon code. He has to do something to sync it. I thought this was a thing. Whereas they're protecting the world from the code. And it's like in Lost, we have to enter in a code every couple of hours or else something will happen.
• 7:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's like a deadband switch.
• 7:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, but it's not. He's just syncing it to his watch so that he can have access to it. And here's the interesting thing. So unlike in the original, the parents are active spies. They're not retired spies.
• 7:56
  Speaker A: They're not retired.
• 7:56
  Speaker C: Yeah, right.
• 7:58
  Speaker B: And here we get that line that you said where they're deciding to tell the kids and apparently there's been making plans since they were four, but never go through with it. Terrence, aka Zachary Levi, delays on telling them.
• 8:12
  Speaker A: Wasn't this a conflict in the original one too? No, I don't remember.
• 8:16
  Speaker B: Maybe like barely a thing, really?
• 8:20
  Speaker C: Yeah, maybe a little. They definitely didn't know that they were spies, but they also were retired, so it's more like we used to be spies. So is it as much of a secret? Not really.
• 8:29
  Speaker A: They don't have to sneak around, like, literally sneak on each other, which is.
• 8:33
  Speaker B: Funny, but then they sort of drop a line about how they can't risk anyone getting into their system via the kids devices. Which is why Terrence is so strict about no devices.
• 8:46
  Speaker C: Yeah, right.
• 8:48
  Speaker A: Which I like that because they actually explained it as well as a real life reason. So I don't really understand why them only being on the Internet for 2 hours a day makes them less vulnerable, since you can be hacked instantly.
• 9:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, but in terms of just, like all right. Terms of availability, if they're only on that for there's only that much time versus the whole time that they could yeah.
• 9:10
  Speaker A: Versus 12 hours a day or whatever.
• 9:14
  Speaker B: So the parents get into their car, which has a spy gadget or spy screen inside. There's a new Devlin. Or, I guess, a reboot Devlin. Do you remember who Devlin was in the original?
• 9:24
  Speaker C: No.
• 9:26
  Speaker A: George Clooney.
• 9:27
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 9:29
  Speaker A: This guy is not nearly so famous.
• 9:31
  Speaker C: Yeah. Seriously?
• 9:32
  Speaker B: Well, he's cortona who was he was one of the other Marvel not Marvels, other Shazam family members in Shazam.
• 9:41
  Speaker C: He was one of the other adults.
• 9:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think so.
• 9:43
  Speaker A: Really?
• 9:44
  Speaker B: Pretty sure. I think he's here.
• 9:47
  Speaker A: Keep going.
• 9:48
  Speaker C: The one who was pedro, his altering.
• 9:50
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah, no, he is.
• 9:54
  Speaker C: Okay. I didn't recognize him without his super suit.
• 9:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, the only reason I remember is because he was also supposed to be Superman in that George Miller Justice League, which had, like we're going to have Army Hammer as Batman.
• 10:08
  Speaker A: Oh, so he's been around.
• 10:10
  Speaker B: Yeah. Someone has broken into an OSS server room, including what looks like a robot or a giant armored guy. So they go to investigate. And here's where I noticed that they have very different parenting styles, and I will get to those in our spy fact versus spy fiction.
• 10:26
  Speaker A: Excellent. Excellent preview.
• 10:28
  Speaker B: So they get locked out of the room. Terrence uses his spy watch, which has the armageddon code on it, which he can use to basically hack into anything.
• 10:38
  Speaker A: Right.
• 10:39
  Speaker B: And here's where I noticed not only do they have different parenting styles, they have different spy styles. Nora seems to be more like, know, going guns blazing, whereas Terrence likes to be more sneaky.
• 10:49
  Speaker A: They have different fighting styles, different ways of dealing with the problem. Reminds me of playing a video game where it's like, play it your way. Then my note here is and then they get attacked by a Power Rangers villain.
• 11:03
  Speaker C: First of all, Hack Knight was, like, the greatest character in this.
• 11:06
  Speaker B: Okay, well, again or they get attacked by the villain. They're on the computer screen.
• 11:12
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 11:14
  Speaker B: And it shows, like, a video game where the heck Knight is there. So defeat the heck Knight to gain access, and Zachary Levi having to solve a video game to get to something in a computer just reminded me of Chuck again.
• 11:25
  Speaker A: Does he do that in Chuck?
• 11:27
  Speaker B: It's how he gets the Intersect in his head in the first place. He has to play Zork, the word role playing game.
• 11:36
  Speaker A: Yes. That was in the episode we watched.
• 11:38
  Speaker B: It was in the first episode. Yeah, but here this is funny, and we'll get to it more. Even the fact that he doesn't know how to play video games. I don't ever believe Zachary Levi not knowing how to play video games.
• 11:50
  Speaker A: Zachary Levi in any yeah, just it.
• 11:55
  Speaker B: Doesn'T compute for me.
• 11:57
  Speaker A: Okay, I have thoughts about the video games, but I'm going to save it.
• 11:59
  Speaker C: Yeah, you got to wait.
• 12:01
  Speaker B: And they find out when they get into the system that the goons weren't looking for anything. What were they doing? And that's when the actual Heck Knight appears, and he takes the watch from Terence. And this whole thing was a trap. The heck knight leaves. I enjoyed the heck, knight. It was not really a character.
• 12:23
  Speaker C: He kind of looked like a League of Legends minion.
• 12:27
  Speaker A: I mean, why do they call him Heck Knight?
• 12:30
  Speaker C: Because it's like, for kids. You can't say hell. It's funny.
• 12:33
  Speaker A: Then why not call him something else?
• 12:36
  Speaker B: Because it's a heck night instead of a hell. Come on.
• 12:39
  Speaker A: All right.
• 12:40
  Speaker B: As they're leaving, a kid recognizes the Heck Knight from a game called High Score, which I enjoy. So it's spelled H-Y-S-K-O-R. But of course, it also sounds like high score, right? Like, as in the top score in a game.
• 12:54
  Speaker A: All right, I can't take anymore. I got to talk about this. I think we talked about this before, okay. In Hollywood movies, technology is always, like, 20 years behind the present.
• 13:05
  Speaker B: Okay, we talked about this.
• 13:06
  Speaker A: I read that somewhere. And the reason is because the people writing it tend to begin their, like, 40s okay. People who write Hollywood movies. So for this movie, they're like, yeah, video games. That's platformers, and there's high scores. When was the last time you guys played a game with a high score?
• 13:24
  Speaker B: A new game, actually. Star wars squadrons has high scores.
• 13:31
  Speaker A: It does.
• 13:32
  Speaker C: Battlefront.
• 13:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, Battlefront has scores.
• 13:36
  Speaker A: It does.
• 13:37
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 13:38
  Speaker B: The best that you have.
• 13:40
  Speaker A: Not what I meant.
• 13:41
  Speaker C: So you're talking about something where you play, like, the levels to get to the high score. Like a Mario game or something.
• 13:47
  Speaker B: Or like an arcade game that's more mobile games nowadays.
• 13:52
  Speaker C: Yeah. Candy Crush.
• 13:54
  Speaker A: Oh, so maybe I'm the one who's out of touch.
• 13:56
  Speaker B: Yeah. Or Fortnite definitely has high scores, I feel like.
• 14:00
  Speaker C: Well, Fortnite's like, who wins at the end, right? Who can live the longest?
• 14:04
  Speaker A: Yeah. But, I mean, you get experience.
• 14:05
  Speaker C: True.
• 14:06
  Speaker B: Yeah. Zach, you're out anyway, zach but also.
• 14:10
  Speaker C: Getting the sequel to Low Score.
• 14:13
  Speaker B: Sorry, was that actually the name of the school?
• 14:16
  Speaker C: Yeah, I didn't catch that.
• 14:20
  Speaker B: But the other thing, though, too, is it makes sense because the guy who's designing the game thinks of older. Well, he's older, and he thinks of the and he said, like, the mid 2000s or early 2000s as the pinnacle of video game design. We'll get to that when we get there. But here's what I had to say about this. So we see Tony, who's playing this game in a tournament.
• 14:49
  Speaker C: There's a card version of it, too. Yeah. Which we were like, what?
• 14:54
  Speaker B: Which was more like Magic the Gathering or Yu GI? Oh.
• 14:58
  Speaker A: Or something like yeah.
• 15:01
  Speaker C: And the kid like, blatantly cheats.
• 15:03
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
• 15:04
  Speaker C: He pulls it out of his wrist. He doesn't even try to hide the fact that he didn't even take it from his hand. So he's got the same number of cards in his hand, and then he plays this other 7th card, like, come on, dude.
• 15:16
  Speaker A: I mean, he is a kid, but fortunately his opponent is a kid as well and doesn't notice.
• 15:20
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 15:21
  Speaker A: I like, this is the only part where he cheats in the whole movie, even though they talk about it a lot.
• 15:26
  Speaker C: He was cheating at the beginning when he takes his switch out of the box early. Right.
• 15:31
  Speaker A: Yeah. He breaks the rule.
• 15:35
  Speaker B: He manages to win the tournament, which gets him early access to the game high score.
• 15:41
  Speaker A: Right.
• 15:41
  Speaker B: And we also get an info dump about the inventor who's, like, a genius recluse who's nicknamed The King. I forget what his actual name is.
• 15:49
  Speaker C: It was like so, like, King was in it or yeah, yeah.
• 15:54
  Speaker A: Ray. The king kingston. I have IMDb right here.
• 15:57
  Speaker B: And apparently he uses VR to design his game. So he gets into a VR pod and designs it around him.
• 16:05
  Speaker A: Yes. It's basically ready player one.
• 16:07
  Speaker B: Tony wants to stay up all night playing high score, and he needs Patty's help to get around the parental restrictions.
• 16:15
  Speaker A: Again, very current.
• 16:18
  Speaker C: Is this where she makes the map of the squeaks in the hallway?
• 16:21
  Speaker B: Yes, she does. I enjoyed that because I know for different reasons, mainly so I don't wake up my daughter when she's sleeping. I wish I had a map of which stairs creaked and where they so I think it's a great idea when.
• 16:37
  Speaker A: Zachary Levy was walking down the hallway and he's like, how is this house squeaky? I thought his kids had done something to make it squeak so they would hear him when he's coming to check.
• 16:48
  Speaker B: On them, because they're spy kids, but they're not yet. Meanwhile, the heck Knight reports into the King. Apparently he wasn't able to get the code from the Watch. The actual armageddon code wasn't stored on there. It was just a synchronous device that could be used with it. So The King realizes that the code must be in the house.
• 17:11
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 17:12
  Speaker B: So the kids almost get caught. I don't know how Tony got the password.
• 17:17
  Speaker C: He, like, stole it from his desk. Apparently the dad's old, so he writes his password down.
• 17:22
  Speaker B: That seems like a terrible idea.
• 17:25
  Speaker C: It's very dad like, though.
• 17:29
  Speaker B: And then the parents are talking with Devlin about getting rid of the Armageddon code. Nora I forgot what her name was really wants to get rid of it, but Terrence is a little iffy on it. But they're ordered by Devlin to protect the code until they find a.
• 17:46
  Speaker A: Solution.
• 17:47
  Speaker B: Yep. What that solution is, I don't know. Meanwhile, the kids are downloading the game, and Patty has a moment of self awareness of what if by downloading this, we open up some sort of backdoor for someone to get into our computer system.
• 18:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, patty's the smart one.
• 18:03
  Speaker C: Yeah, she's a smart one. Even though her brother's, like, a genius.
• 18:05
  Speaker A: Hacker, he doesn't have a lot of common sense.
• 18:08
  Speaker C: He's got intelligence, and she has wisdom.
• 18:11
  Speaker A: There you go.
• 18:12
  Speaker B: So the parents are still arguing about whether to delete it. Nora uses some knock up lipstick hidden in her engagement.
• 18:19
  Speaker A: No. Okay. When she starts filling with her ring, I thought she was on drugs, and that was, like, her drug stat.
• 18:25
  Speaker C: What?
• 18:27
  Speaker B: What movie do you think you're watching?
• 18:29
  Speaker C: I don't like, going to get the cocaine out of my engagement ring.
• 18:33
  Speaker A: The last thing I saw her in was Annihilation. All right. It's a very adult movie. It's a great movie.
• 18:40
  Speaker C: That's a totally different movie from this, that's for sure.
• 18:43
  Speaker B: Terrence gets knocked out. Nora goes to delete the code, and the King gets into their system and is getting the armageddon code and gets it. Before Nora can delete it, the kids try to sneak back into bed. The next morning, the kids realize that something's happening. High score is on every screen.
• 19:00
  Speaker C: Oh, yeah, this part is great. Half the world this is great. ATMs aren't even, like, connected to the Internet or something or I don't know. Some of them are.
• 19:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.
• 19:09
  Speaker C: Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. It's great.
• 19:11
  Speaker B: Well, that's how armageddon code is just that powerful.
• 19:14
  Speaker A: So yeah. This is my first note. I think the lesson of this movie is obey your parents.
• 19:20
  Speaker B: Or the lesson is don't have video games. Actually. You can actually solve problems with video games.
• 19:26
  Speaker C: Right.
• 19:26
  Speaker A: It reminded me of a story that I read once where hold on. Where there was a mom and her kid, and her kid, I think, was like, 13, and he had autism. And there was one time when I don't now remember the story in its entirety, but he asked why she didn't put clothing up on the line to dry it off. And I think she just didn't want to answer his questions, so she just said, because it's illegal to do that. So then what he did was he took a pair of scissors and he went down cutting down clothesline all over town. And the moral of the story is it's helpful to explain to kids why you do something or why they're not allowed to do something rather than just making them do it. So for this movie, the kids didn't know why their devices were restricted. So when they disobeyed their parents, the consequences were much more than they ever could have expected.
• 20:19
  Speaker C: That's a pretty good lesson.
• 20:21
  Speaker B: We see a news report where you have to play high score to actually get access to any of your devices. So home security system. Some people are locked out because they have one of those smart locks on their house and they can't get in.
• 20:33
  Speaker C: Why don't they just break a window?
• 20:35
  Speaker A: It seems feels like an episode of Black Mirror.
• 20:37
  Speaker C: Yeah, totally.
• 20:38
  Speaker A: I also like there's a part where it shows the world and only half the world's affected, but one of the countries that's affected is Afghanistan.
• 20:46
  Speaker B: Interesting.
• 20:46
  Speaker C: Well, he's trying to make the whole world a better place. He has to cover as much territory as possible, better living through video games.
• 20:55
  Speaker A: I thought it was when he was just pranking everybody.
• 20:58
  Speaker C: Well, he was trying to get to his ultimate goal, which is getting everyone to play his game so they can be better people.
• 21:05
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 21:05
  Speaker C: Apparently the game makes you a better person. Did we ever see anything in the game that would do that? It's not like they ever have to do, like, moral dilemmas as they're playing. It's like no, they jump over a chasm. They fight skeletons.
• 21:20
  Speaker B: Someone is breaking into their house. And these are all enemies from high score. And the kids see their parents know bad guys for the first time. I have a note here that says, Tony is super distracting. So he's shouting things, and Zachary Levi's, like, looking at him and gets beat up.
• 21:39
  Speaker C: Yeah, right. The kids have to play the video games thinking, get through the smart lock on the door. It's great.
• 21:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, it made sense. They're useful.
• 21:48
  Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
• 21:49
  Speaker B: Yes. They need to get to the safe house. There's a manual override, which means they get to slide down a slide to get to a secret spy garage. Are trying to send off the kids to the safe house. They put them in the car with an autopilot. Nora gives Patty a necklace with a tracker, and they send them off as they fight off the bad guys.
• 22:08
  Speaker A: I don't really understand why they didn't have a four person spy car.
• 22:12
  Speaker C: Because they don't normally take the kids with them. Why would you? Come on.
• 22:18
  Speaker A: All right.
• 22:18
  Speaker C: That's like having a convertible when you don't have children or something. I don't know. You don't need passengers.
• 22:24
  Speaker A: They have a four person real car, so it makes sense.
• 22:26
  Speaker C: Right. This sequence was pretty funny when they're, like, sending the kids down the slide and the kids don't want to go and they're like, don't go down there. It's full of know. Should we have tested this beforehand? It's fine.
• 22:36
  Speaker A: There's some good jokes.
• 22:37
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 22:37
  Speaker A: What do we think of Nora being like, don't break my TV. That's my TV. That's my car. That's my this. That's my thoughts.
• 22:49
  Speaker B: No strong feelings. So they have a car chase. At first I thought this was then, but apparently it's Austin. Almost every state capital looks like the US. Capital. Except for Hawaii. Hawaii's is unique.
• 23:02
  Speaker C: But thanks for confirming it was Austin, because as they were going through this, I was like, I feel like I should recognize this. Is this austin? And then I forgot.
• 23:10
  Speaker A: I remember last time we were talking about where exactly they lived.
• 23:14
  Speaker B: That one was more vague.
• 23:16
  Speaker C: Didn't they live in Mexico, maybe?
• 23:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, it was never proven. There's a part where that shows the tracker, and it looks like it's, like, right on the US. Border. Yeah, take that for what it's worth, but yeah.
• 23:31
  Speaker B: Well, it was at least filmed in Austin, right? Yeah. So they have to turn off the, you know, drives because the controls are just like a video game that she knows how to play.
• 23:42
  Speaker C: Right. She controls it from a switch light, which is just like ocean Gate controlling from an Xbox controller.
• 23:50
  Speaker A: Wow. This movie is relevant.
• 23:56
  Speaker B: So they lose the bad guys before they head to the safe house, which apparently is in the middle of nowhere. And here's where we get a callback to the first Spy Kids, where there's a voice saying, say your full name. And they each have super long multiple names, and that activates the safe.
• 24:16
  Speaker A: Did you guys find it funny?
• 24:17
  Speaker C: Yeah, it's classic.
• 24:18
  Speaker B: I mean, I recognized it as a reference to the original. I didn't think it was that funny.
• 24:22
  Speaker C: I was impressed the kids knew their whole name. That's a long name.
• 24:26
  Speaker A: Good point.
• 24:27
  Speaker B: Yeah. It takes them to an elevator down. We see a hologram with Nora, who explains that they're spies and all the things that they have. They got bunk beds.
• 24:36
  Speaker A: So I was like, who's going to be the new Machete? It's got to be somebody good.
• 24:42
  Speaker C: Yeah, we wish.
• 24:43
  Speaker B: Until later.
• 24:44
  Speaker C: I did Miss Machete in this movie.
• 24:47
  Speaker A: You needed somebody. Yeah, somebody with some edge to them. No pun intended.
• 24:51
  Speaker B: Anyways, addition. Yeah, they had food. There's also a training room with spy gadgets, as well as a training room for, like, self defense.
• 24:58
  Speaker C: This has a pretty funny part where they're, like, stand here to access the gadgets or whatever, and the kid goes and stands and he falls through a trap door, and it's like, watch out for traps. Hilarious.
• 25:09
  Speaker A: Lesson one.
• 25:09
  Speaker C: Yeah, lesson one.
• 25:12
  Speaker A: And then they had the kid getting slapped all the time, even if it didn't make sense.
• 25:16
  Speaker B: Ambush Alley.
• 25:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, I don't see enough movies where kids get slapped.
• 25:20
  Speaker C: Yeah, they'll have kids slapstick.
• 25:22
  Speaker B: I don't know. How many kids movies do you watch, Zach?
• 25:24
  Speaker A: Only with you, buddy.
• 25:26
  Speaker B: There could be out there. You just don't know it.
• 25:29
  Speaker A: Well, I guess we'll find what happened.
• 25:30
  Speaker C: In Sergeant Stubby death that was a.
• 25:32
  Speaker A: Very different kind of kid. World War I and a dog.
• 25:39
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 25:40
  Speaker B: There's also a scene where they're trying out a laser net, which I always enjoy. A laser net in spy movies?
• 25:45
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 25:45
  Speaker B: Terrence and Nora or Torrance as their.
• 25:49
  Speaker C: Couple name terence Torres. Nora Torres. Yeah, it's complicated. Or Torrance Tango is his name. Nora Torres. Like okay, so when he was having fun yeah.
• 26:01
  Speaker B: They're captured terrence is still experiencing side effects. Effects from the sleeper kiss. And they're in a jail cell, and apparently the door is open. So they go out and they meet the King, who they ask him, why are you forcing everyone to play video games, and he doesn't really give a good answer.
• 26:18
  Speaker C: It's like, I want to make the world better.
• 26:20
  Speaker A: I like that he actually has a reason for keeping them alive, which is that he needs their help to find the other half of the armageddon code. And but I also have a note here. There's a lot of unnecessary dialogue in this movie. Like, there's a part where they're walking around outside the cell, and Nora says, Very interesting. Uh huh. Oh, stop talking. I'll have a better example later.
• 26:45
  Speaker C: This also is when he's like, It's not working. I need you to fix it. And she's like, have you tried turning it off and on again? Taking it out, blowing the cartridge? That was good.
• 26:54
  Speaker A: The environments also looked quite good in this movie, considering it was probably made on a budget.
• 26:59
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 26:59
  Speaker B: So when you talk, know, extraneous dialogue. This was written with so Robert Rodriguez, who directed it, also co wrote it with his son, Racer. I have no idea how old his son is now, but interesting.
• 27:14
  Speaker A: That was the most shocking twist of.
• 27:15
  Speaker C: The movie for me, that he wrote.
• 27:17
  Speaker A: The movie and that he directed.
• 27:19
  Speaker C: Robert Rodriguez wrote it. Did he direct the first one?
• 27:23
  Speaker B: He directed all of them.
• 27:24
  Speaker C: Yeah. There you go.
• 27:26
  Speaker A: So why wasn't as good as the first one?
• 27:29
  Speaker C: It was good. I actually thought it was pretty good. My expectations were, like, in the gutter, and I was like, this is actually pretty good. We can talk about that later.
• 27:38
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 27:39
  Speaker C: Anyway, Billy Magnusson is great. He plays King, top tier actor. He should make it big. He's great.
• 27:45
  Speaker B: He was in the last Bond movie.
• 27:47
  Speaker C: Yeah, he was in game night. You guys seen Game Night? That's a great movie.
• 27:51
  Speaker A: Yeah, a long time ago. How do you have, like, a perfect memory of everything that happens in that?
• 27:56
  Speaker C: In what? The movie.
• 27:57
  Speaker A: Game Night.
• 27:58
  Speaker C: Oh, in game night. I don't we're just talking about it.
• 28:02
  Speaker A: No, but I don't know, it seems like you remember everyone who was in it.
• 28:05
  Speaker C: I think I saw it twice. Which helps.
• 28:07
  Speaker A: There you go.
• 28:08
  Speaker B: He challenges the parents to a duel, a sword fight, which I was like, oh, this should be fun. And then he throws in all these moving blocks in there, which I was like, I just want to see a straight up sword fight. I don't want to see them having to try to struggle around those things.
• 28:23
  Speaker C: That was kind of strange.
• 28:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. I thought he was cheating. Kind of like Tony. He's not as good at sword fighting, but it's his world. And then I thought they were in the digital world again, like in writing player one. That's why all this stuff is happening around them now.
• 28:41
  Speaker B: He just controls all of it somehow.
• 28:43
  Speaker C: Didn't really explain it. Was it more robots that just looked like blocks?
• 28:47
  Speaker B: AR filters. So I assume hologram.
• 28:50
  Speaker C: But Gina Rodriguez was sitting on something.
• 28:53
  Speaker B: I know.
• 28:53
  Speaker C: That's what had to be something physical in there. Anyway.
• 28:57
  Speaker B: Force field, you know?
• 28:58
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 28:59
  Speaker B: Something however the holodeck works.
• 29:03
  Speaker A: Right.
• 29:04
  Speaker B: But they know, get rid of all the blocks and just have a straight up sword fight, which I thought was fun.
• 29:09
  Speaker A: And the king actually wins, so he's good at fighting against super spies, and.
• 29:12
  Speaker C: Then they think that the floor falls away. I'm like, guys, come on. You were just standing on the floor. You really think it fell away? Like, test it with your hands or something?
• 29:23
  Speaker B: Come on. Well, I mean, they don't know. This is a world where he can make those blocks move however he likes, so maybe he can make the floor fall away. It's revealed that the kids have a missing piece of the code, and so he takes Nora's necklace and uses it to track the tracker that is on.
• 29:44
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 29:45
  Speaker B: So we have the kids exploring the safe house. There's a spy suit generator.
• 29:49
  Speaker A: It was made for yep.
• 29:53
  Speaker B: As a training montage.
• 29:55
  Speaker C: Yeah. Classic. For Spy Kids.
• 29:57
  Speaker A: Okay. And then one of my favorite parts was the grenade of emotions.
• 30:01
  Speaker B: Oh, yes. The thought.
• 30:02
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 30:03
  Speaker A: Okay. So back when we were all much littler, I think we were in middle school and Alana was in elementary school. We played Dungeons and Dragons. And one of the magic items that I, the DM, came up with was the rocket launcher of feeling good.
• 30:21
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 30:22
  Speaker A: You shot it at people, and it made them feel slightly happier.
• 30:26
  Speaker C: Slightly. It should be, like, extra happy. So they don't want to fight you.
• 30:30
  Speaker A: It was only feeling what happens here. Great.
• 30:33
  Speaker C: Whatever.
• 30:35
  Speaker A: But, yeah, it was a nice callback, nice nostalgia moment.
• 30:38
  Speaker B: There's also some super goop, which actually never does. I was waiting for it.
• 30:43
  Speaker C: It was in the beginning. Yeah, it was, like, right at the beginning with the Magna boots. When they're trying to sneak in, he uses it to grab a guy, which I didn't even think about after you said the goop. It was like a callback. Anyway, I also like the part where she finds all the watches and goes, we have all the time in the world. I thought that was really fun.
• 31:03
  Speaker A: Which is that was a reference to Bond.
• 31:06
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 31:07
  Speaker B: Also a reference to the fourth movie, which is called all the Time in the World.
• 31:12
  Speaker C: Yeah, I see.
• 31:13
  Speaker B: Which was a reference to right.
• 31:15
  Speaker A: Oh, okay.
• 31:17
  Speaker B: Patty also remembers that her mom said that something would find her and it's a robot crab or spider or something.
• 31:23
  Speaker C: MVP, bronson.
• 31:25
  Speaker B: Bronson. She names it bronson. Also, what's the kid's name? Tony finds the book how to Be a Spy author unknown. Just like Junie did in the original Spy Kids.
• 31:36
  Speaker A: I completely forgot that.
• 31:38
  Speaker B: Yep. Here's where we have a debate about truth and whether or not it's good to lie.
• 31:43
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I was like, is this movie trying to say that spying is not good? We don't like spies.
• 31:49
  Speaker B: That's what I'm wondering about, like, this is a spy movie, and you get them more clear that doesn't think that spying is good. That is anti spy.
• 31:58
  Speaker A: It also reminded me of the dirty tricks department microdot. For those of you who haven't listened to that, check it out. There's a part where someone is like, this is great. When you're a spy, you can do whatever you want. You can blow stuff up, shoot people, lie to people. It's great for this movie. I wonder if Robert was like, okay, it's okay to lie sometimes, but not all the time. That was too complicated for them.
• 32:19
  Speaker B: Patty is worried that this is all their fault because they downloaded the game. And then all of a sudden this happened. And if it is their fault, they should fix it. And Tony is like, how are we supposed to fix all that? No, we just fix it by finding our parents, and then they can fix it.
• 32:35
  Speaker C: There you go. This is kid logic. I like it.
• 32:40
  Speaker B: That's actually better thinking than, oh, we're going to go solve all the world's problems.
• 32:44
  Speaker C: Right.
• 32:45
  Speaker B: And here's where we get another callback, or very similar situation to the original movie where some supposed coworkers arrive at the safe house.
• 32:54
  Speaker C: Right. The sequence was pretty funny, too, where the kids are like, we'll just take them down, apologize later.
• 33:01
  Speaker B: Jerry Hatcher, if I recall, was in.
• 33:03
  Speaker C: The first yeah, yeah. And also one of the goons was like, kind of old. Did you guys see this?
• 33:10
  Speaker B: Yeah, I noticed that.
• 33:11
  Speaker C: Was he like a producer or something?
• 33:13
  Speaker B: I don't know.
• 33:15
  Speaker A: He's just experienced.
• 33:17
  Speaker C: Okay. Seemed like some sort of cameo.
• 33:20
  Speaker B: They tell them, you can trust us. We're coworkers. Your parents, they don't trust them, so they just break in. So the kids turn on the training modules. Bronson brings them some gadgets, and they almost escape. But then Devlin catches them and handcuffs them.
• 33:35
  Speaker C: One of the OSS guys says, Careful, they might have gadgets.
• 33:38
  Speaker A: That was great.
• 33:39
  Speaker C: Also, Devlin has two sunglasses, so he takes one off. He's wearing more OSS, boss. Amazing.
• 33:46
  Speaker A: That was great. And then the thought bubble, apparently is the ability to induce hunger. They use that.
• 33:53
  Speaker C: Oh, yeah, that was kind of scary. Yeah. A little too powerful, that one. They take the kids to the spy headquarters and wrote down, wow, I wonder where all the spies are. It's got, like, a giant OSS thing on it.
• 34:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's called funny.
• 34:10
  Speaker B: I've heard the similar joke about that, about the current spy museum, which has in giant letters spy on it.
• 34:17
  Speaker C: It's not a spy headquarters.
• 34:19
  Speaker B: I know, but people make that joke all the time. But you guys know that it's not an actual spy headquarters. It's just the museum.
• 34:25
  Speaker C: It's like, do you want to be able to find what you're looking for as a tourist?
• 34:29
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 34:29
  Speaker C: Okay. You don't. Okay, we'll hide it better.
• 34:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. It's a giant building. Of course you're going to have a giant advertisement on the side.
• 34:36
  Speaker B: But before they get there, we also see that Heck Knight is in like, a tree watching them get away.
• 34:45
  Speaker A: Built for stealth.
• 34:48
  Speaker B: So as they get there, they go through the garage. They see a spy boat that's also a plane. It's apparently one of the only vehicles that hasn't gotten locked down.
• 34:56
  Speaker A: Gypsy's analog.
• 34:58
  Speaker C: Yeah, nuclear.
• 35:03
  Speaker B: So Devlin wants them to help by beating the video game so they can access the system. And once they kind of get it, devlin takes over. Is like, I played my fair share of video games. You ever heard of GoldenEye?
• 35:15
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 35:16
  Speaker A: I'm stealing all my favorite lines, you guys.
• 35:18
  Speaker C: Sorry. They're good.
• 35:19
  Speaker A: This also reminded me of the last Starfighter classic 80s movie, except Tony is not the best gamer in the world. He's just a really good he's just a good gamer.
• 35:28
  Speaker B: Yeah, but Devlin is a bad gamer and messes up, so he has Tony do it again. And at this point, I'm wondering what are the key binds for this game? Because he's, like, just pressing any damn key. He's not WSAD. So they also plug Bronson into the system, and it's revealed that he has part of the Armageddon code. And they realize who's actually behind all of this, and it's the king.
• 35:53
  Speaker A: Right.
• 35:54
  Speaker B: And as soon as they figure that out, the high score goons are infiltrating OSS HQ. They fight, and the kids realize they need to get away. So they reverse the tracker and figure out where their parents are. The room gets locked down, goons infiltrate, so they got to get the code out of there. We get a call back to the laser net, and then Devlin decides, no, the code is safer with me. So he takes it. But almost immediately, the Heck Knight gets the code from him.
• 36:27
  Speaker A: Okay, so speaking of the laser knight, there's a part where someone throws a laser net and someone's trapped. I was like, what's going to happen if they go through the laser? They're not going to get, like, hot in half.
• 36:37
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 36:38
  Speaker A: What it's going to hurt?
• 36:39
  Speaker C: Yeah, I guess. I don't know.
• 36:41
  Speaker A: The last time was those little hand things that came up and slapped them.
• 36:44
  Speaker B: That was the training module, right?
• 36:46
  Speaker C: It's not here, right?
• 36:47
  Speaker A: I don't know.
• 36:47
  Speaker C: I don't know. Don't worry about it. Anyway, Devlin's like, let the adults handle this. He takes the code, then Technite grabs or Heck Knight, and he just, like, hands it to him. He's like, here you go.
• 36:58
  Speaker B: So the kids take the OSS super ducky to chase the goons. But almost immediately, the boats that they're chasing go underwater and become submarines. So they go into airborne mode and fly to their parents location, where we have yet another moral discussion about spying.
• 37:16
  Speaker A: Right. And he's like, go by the book. The book?
• 37:20
  Speaker C: Yeah. Got to do your cookie by the book.
• 37:24
  Speaker B: So the kids arrive at the king's base, and they make a note about the polygon based architecture. And this is where they make that comment about the mid 2000s or like early 2000s having the best game design.
• 37:38
  Speaker A: Apparently it is not, in fact, a digital world, as it turns out.
• 37:41
  Speaker B: No, but there is an AR overlay on a bunch of stuff.
• 37:45
  Speaker A: That's a pretty good explanation. I'm impressed that Robert Rodriguez was, like, in the know about that.
• 37:51
  Speaker C: I mean, he's got kids, Pokemon, Go. It's everywhere.
• 37:54
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 37:55
  Speaker B: The Armageddon code was based on plants from a weapon from an old mission. And he brought those plans or Terrence brought those plants home and is trying to use them to build armageddon code, but he couldn't actually solve it. And Tony's actually the one who finished the code.
• 38:11
  Speaker A: Yes, that's very plausible. Tony's a super genius.
• 38:16
  Speaker C: Yeah, he's a genius.
• 38:18
  Speaker B: And that's when he put up the tech restrictions instead of congratulating him for figuring it out. After that is when he started putting up the tech restrictions instead of praising Tony for figuring out, he actually scolded him. And that's why he's so strict about the technology stuff. And it's revealed that he thought he was confessing all of this to Nora, but it was actually the King with an AR overlay on himself.
• 38:47
  Speaker A: Very nice.
• 38:48
  Speaker C: Yeah, classic.
• 38:50
  Speaker B: And the King already has the other piece of the code and now is going to put them both together.
• 38:55
  Speaker A: Apparently at some point they have a discussion where it's not so easy to unmake the code. It's like the one ring. They can't just delete it even though that's what they were doing earlier. But whatever.
• 39:06
  Speaker B: Well, you can delete it, but you can't I don't know what's the difference between deleting it and then whatever she says to try to do.
• 39:13
  Speaker A: I don't know. It can still be recovered. It's like the atomic bomb. Like once knowledge is out there, it can't be unmade.
• 39:20
  Speaker B: So the kids are sneaking around, they find the computer terminal, download a map, hide from some guards. They realize that the high score characters are also just AR overlays on robots.
• 39:32
  Speaker A: So this guy could build robots. That's a really good ability, too.
• 39:37
  Speaker B: He's a tech genius. Recluse.
• 39:41
  Speaker A: That would make the world a better place, too, if everyone had a robot.
• 39:45
  Speaker B: Not if you watched that Animatrix Short. The Second Renaissance.
• 39:50
  Speaker C: Or that other movie ex machina.
• 39:53
  Speaker A: Or that other movie Irobot.
• 39:55
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 39:56
  Speaker C: That other movie, Terminator.
• 39:57
  Speaker A: Here you go. We could go on all day.
• 40:01
  Speaker B: They're like on a ledge, so the only thing to do is jump. Use a grappling hook to stay to save themselves.
• 40:08
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 40:09
  Speaker C: I was saying how earlier, it wasn't a bottomless pit and the parents should have known. In this case, it was a bottomless pit. It's a good thing that they checked.
• 40:18
  Speaker B: So they go to find their parents and break them out. We find out the whole backstory of Operation Fireball. It broke into this bad guy's lair and Terrence got the weapon. While Noah took out the bad guy, she negotiated aggressively.
• 40:32
  Speaker C: Yeah. I wrote down Patty's off her rocker because she tells them that they should have just been nice to the bad guy and said it's everything fine.
• 40:42
  Speaker B: Operation peace and happiness.
• 40:45
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 40:45
  Speaker A: She comes off kind of condescending when she says it, too.
• 40:50
  Speaker B: This is a spy movie that hates spies.
• 40:53
  Speaker A: I know. It's an action movie that hates action.
• 40:56
  Speaker C: Why does it have so much action?
• 40:58
  Speaker A: It's talking about a mixed message, right?
• 41:01
  Speaker B: Yeah. Once they hear the backstory, they realize, all right, the only thing we need to do is to get to the computer terminal and stall for time and wait for the OSS.
• 41:12
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 41:12
  Speaker B: Great plan speaking. Since the person they got the other piece of the code from was Devlin, I don't think that's a great plan.
• 41:22
  Speaker A: Nope.
• 41:24
  Speaker B: But the kids are the ones who have Magna boots, so they're the only ones who can actually get to the terminal, so they have to do this. Whereas the parents I don't know what they're doing at this point.
• 41:33
  Speaker A: Apparently, they just do nothing. They just wait for their kids to do it.
• 41:38
  Speaker B: And here's where we split up to something.
• 41:40
  Speaker C: We don't know what they were doing, where'd they go.
• 41:45
  Speaker B: So, at this point, we catch up to the beginning, and Tony is trying to beat high score to stall for time, but they don't stick to the plan. Instead, they go to the top of the pyramid to find the central computer. Here, Tony recognizes the armageddon code. Apparently, the reason why his dad couldn't figure it out is it had a trick to it. You couldn't tell if the code was completed or not, and you had to do the same steps backwards. Tony does. So, thinking that he had just deactivated the armageddon code, but instead, he actually just integrated the two parts of it, which I thought was pretty clever on the King's part.
• 42:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, the king's smart.
• 42:22
  Speaker C: Yeah. Actually, he's a good villain.
• 42:25
  Speaker B: Yeah. So, the parents well, here's what we find out. What they were doing. They were just getting captured, right?
• 42:32
  Speaker C: Right.
• 42:32
  Speaker A: Again, just like in the original one.
• 42:35
  Speaker C: Yeah. We find out Vargos was King's father.
• 42:40
  Speaker B: Yep. Here's the interesting line. He said he used technology to make our home a better place.
• 42:47
  Speaker A: Was he always says, our home country a better place. Why did he say that so weird.
• 42:53
  Speaker B: He also says, was he always I forgot the line or something to the effect of, did he always have his head in the right place? No, I was like, well, I was.
• 43:06
  Speaker A: Referring more to like, why did he say our home country? Nobody talks like that. Are they trying to make it intentionally vague about where the movie takes place?
• 43:15
  Speaker B: Probably. Or where he's from? Yeah, sure.
• 43:18
  Speaker A: I don't know.
• 43:19
  Speaker B: That didn't catch me as weird. It was the part where the next line of that was that he was kind of crazy.
• 43:26
  Speaker A: Right. Oh, you mean the only way to make the world better is by force?
• 43:30
  Speaker B: No, the dad saying he was trying to using technology to make our home country a better place, but he was also kind of crazy.
• 43:38
  Speaker A: Oh, vargas was yeah.
• 43:41
  Speaker B: Apparently he died in a top secret prison and he never saw his father again.
• 43:45
  Speaker C: Maybe there was a whole geopolitical plot that was left on the cutting room floor.
• 43:50
  Speaker A: See, your parents know what's going on sometimes. Maybe they know things that you don't. That's why you should listen to them.
• 43:57
  Speaker B: King uses the rejoined armageddon code to target the entire world. Is this the first time we get the mention of how high score makes you a better person as you play? I feel like this is the first time I noticed it.
• 44:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're right.
• 44:12
  Speaker B: It might have been in the info dump about him in the very beginning, but I don't really remember it.
• 44:18
  Speaker A: It might have been no, I don't think so.
• 44:20
  Speaker C: No, I think it was. And there's also like some sprinkling of stuff about game theory. He keeps talking about it. He's like, we just need game theory. We could fix the world. We're like, that's not how it works.
• 44:32
  Speaker A: He never explained what it was, what game theory is.
• 44:35
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, we will get to that in our spy effect.
• 44:38
  Speaker C: I was like, I assume it's the same as it is in the real world. But anyway.
• 44:44
  Speaker B: King gets away and goes up to I don't know where, because I thought they were at the top of the pyramid, but he takes a block that goes up somewhere else.
• 44:55
  Speaker A: Right?
• 44:56
  Speaker B: And this is where the parents are like, we did it all wrong. They acknowledge what they perceive as their mistakes. They're like telling know, I'm sorry, we shouldn't have lied to you, and that we should have done this. Your and Patty realizes there's still a way to win. We can't stop in the real world, so we're going to stop him virtually.
• 45:15
  Speaker A: So finally we get our virtual world. Finally goes. Ready, player one?
• 45:19
  Speaker C: Yeah. If you die in the game, you die in real life.
• 45:23
  Speaker A: Wow, that was shocking. When they did it in The Matrix more than 20 years ago.
• 45:28
  Speaker B: How many kids are watching this that this is meant for? Have you think have seen the Matrix?
• 45:33
  Speaker A: That's like their first matrix.
• 45:35
  Speaker C: What about stored art online?
• 45:39
  Speaker B: I feel like that's again, too old.
• 45:42
  Speaker A: For not for kids.
• 45:43
  Speaker C: Not for children.
• 45:46
  Speaker B: Like they said in the beginning, king uses his VR pod to design his game, but he's also using it to control armageddon code. So they're going to use the other VR pods to beat him. But they've got to do it her way. No cheats, no tricks. And Tony throws away the spy book.
• 46:01
  Speaker A: And why no cheats or tricks?
• 46:03
  Speaker C: Because that's not what real people I don't know.
• 46:06
  Speaker B: I don't know.
• 46:07
  Speaker A: It's not explained.
• 46:08
  Speaker C: I know it's really unclear it's because.
• 46:10
  Speaker B: They realized that if they had done things patty's way in the beginning, this whole situation would never have happened.
• 46:17
  Speaker C: There you go.
• 46:18
  Speaker A: Just told the truth to begin with. And yeah, so there's a part where they use the grid on robots, and for some reason it works on robots. Even though they don't have thoughts, they still have feelings.
• 46:29
  Speaker B: Robots have feelings.
• 46:31
  Speaker A: No, they don't. We've established this.
• 46:34
  Speaker C: Just like in that movie.
• 46:36
  Speaker A: Just like Casino Royale. Yeah, that's the first time we talked about it.
• 46:40
  Speaker B: Robots in Casino Royale in the 1967 version. And yes, he was a robot. You argued that he wasn't a robot.
• 46:47
  Speaker A: But no, I'm around I argued he was a cyborg because he felt love. And robots can't feel love. It's science, Wally.
• 46:56
  Speaker C: Come on.
• 46:58
  Speaker A: So this part, I liked it. It reminded me of the kitty Glitter from Spies in Disguise. I forgot.
• 47:04
  Speaker B: What the kitty?
• 47:05
  Speaker A: Now, that's a callback. It has a cute cat. And all the bad guys get distracted.
• 47:09
  Speaker B: They're like, yeah. And I hear the parents don't understand what's going on. Apparently, they're at the final level of the game, which is like a platformer.
• 47:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's a platformer cross with, like, gauntlet, because they beat up a bunch of bad guys. And there's a joke where someone says, oh, yeah, it was the die in the game. There was like, you always told me video games would fry my brain. Why is it that every parent uses that exact phrase?
• 47:33
  Speaker B: Because they heard it from their parents?
• 47:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, I guess so.
• 47:37
  Speaker C: From, like, NBC News at ten. Video games fry your kids brain more. Do you know where your children are?
• 47:44
  Speaker B: But yes. And so they have to not fall, but also work as a team. And parents not good at this video game. And here's just it is weird to see Zachary Levi as someone who doesn't know how to play video games. It just doesn't read as right to me.
• 48:00
  Speaker A: Because they know how to fight. So why aren't they good at fighting in the game?
• 48:05
  Speaker C: They're using controls. They're not well, it's really unclear because they're sitting in the pods. It's like the pods don't have controls. You can move with your hands. Doesn't make sense.
• 48:15
  Speaker A: I just assume their brain got jacked into it because that's what always happens.
• 48:19
  Speaker C: Yeah. In which case, yeah, you're right. They should be really good at fighting.
• 48:22
  Speaker B: They manage to get to the very last level. They just need to beat the King. Last man standing. But only one of them can fight the king, and the rest have to fight the heck Knight.
• 48:31
  Speaker C: Right?
• 48:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. I like that they explained how living works. They're like, if all your health is zero, you will die.
• 48:41
  Speaker C: Thanks for that. And so King is like, deleting nuclear launch codes. I'm like, oh, that seems good.
• 48:51
  Speaker A: Also, whoever filmed this fight, I'm kidding, obviously, it's Robert Rodriguez. He must have gotten some inspiration from episode three.
• 48:58
  Speaker C: With the lava.
• 48:59
  Speaker B: I have it here. Well, let's get to that. But I like this moment here. King is fighting against Tony, and he breaks Tony's swords. He grabs one of the spikes that's springing out from the floor, and King even says, Careful. Spear is whatever character that you admire. His worst weapon. He's like, Well, I don't want to be that character anymore because he's a scoundrel and blah, blah, blah. And he takes off the eye patch. I'm fighting as myself.
• 49:31
  Speaker A: Yay.
• 49:31
  Speaker B: And he actually managed to get a few hits in, which I was like.
• 49:34
  Speaker C: Okay, did you guys notice the music during the fight between Fortuna? Yeah. The camina barana.
• 49:42
  Speaker B: I did notice that. We also have the parents and Patty fighting the heck Knight, and so they decide they're going to try it Patty's way. Patty almost falls off, and the heck knight is coming to finish her off.
• 49:53
  Speaker A: Yes. This is another part with more unnecessary dialogue. I wrote it down. Patty says stay back. Don't come over here. I'm like, yeah, that's what staying back means. Patty.
• 50:03
  Speaker B: Okay, remember who this movie is for.
• 50:09
  Speaker C: Well, stay back is like, don't come near me. She's clarifying, don't come near this area because it's unsafe. Right.
• 50:18
  Speaker A: Oh, it's revealed later.
• 50:19
  Speaker C: Right.
• 50:20
  Speaker A: This would be too smart for me, I guess.
• 50:23
  Speaker B: But the heck knight doesn't listen, comes over, and, like, the floor crumbles beneath him. And the parents save both Patty and the heck Knight.
• 50:32
  Speaker C: Wow.
• 50:33
  Speaker B: Because they did that. He's on their side now.
• 50:35
  Speaker C: They've turned over a new leaf of being nice.
• 50:40
  Speaker B: So here is the very Mustafar scene. Tony at one point, even has the high ground.
• 50:48
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 50:48
  Speaker A: When he's playing fair, it doesn't really seem to make a difference.
• 50:52
  Speaker B: Well, but it does. So Terrence is trying to sees them all fighting, and he's like, oh, I need to do something to help. And Patty's like, no, you can't. That's cheating. But he does it anyway. He launches part of his hammer towards the King, and Tony, still trying to play by the rules, is like, no, you can't do this. And he actually jumps and takes the hit instead of King.
• 51:16
  Speaker A: That one. It is very honorable.
• 51:17
  Speaker B: Which brings him down to five out of his 100 HP. And then after that, King defeats him easily by just poking him with a spear or with his hand.
• 51:27
  Speaker A: Right.
• 51:28
  Speaker B: But before he dies completely, it's revealed that Tony gets the legendary one hit, which was set up all the way in the beginning that I didn't even think to write down because I didn't think it would come back.
• 51:42
  Speaker A: So he's literally saved by a deus ex machina. But then it's revealed later where Patty, in kind of a condescending manner, says, you could have taken the one hit out, but you left it in. So it's like a little bit of like, maybe he wanted to be defeated.
• 51:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's that he still believed in goodness. There's still good in him, blah, blah, blah.
• 52:04
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think he's like, somebody proved me wrong. Somebody stopped me.
• 52:08
  Speaker B: Tony uses the one hit on King to defeat him. And, yeah, King believes that the only way to change the world is by force. But Tony tells them there's another way. You have to inspire everyone to change. And so King gives Tony the power to stop Armageddon, and he stops the code, and everyone wakes up from their pods.
• 52:27
  Speaker A: Yay. And then they're like, we're not going to send him to prison. We're going to rehabilitate him in the video game.
• 52:34
  Speaker C: And the robots are so happy. They're, like, totally on the good guy's side now.
• 52:39
  Speaker B: Yes, the King will be locked in his lair until he beats high score.
• 52:44
  Speaker C: Because it makes you a better person, which is like, they should do that for all prisons, right? Like, not just this guy.
• 52:52
  Speaker B: You would think. Yeah, well, you have to test it out to make sure it actually works.
• 52:56
  Speaker A: First. I'm going to test it on you, the creator.
• 53:01
  Speaker B: Well, Devlin is there and says, okay, I guess we do this because apparently part of the spy rulebook says that the ranking Osas member who apprehends someone gets to choose how they're imprisoned, which is wow.
• 53:15
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 53:17
  Speaker B: And the parents tell Devlin that they want to quit the OSS because they want to figure out how to do things their own way, which know Patty's way.
• 53:25
  Speaker C: And then Devlin's like, well, I'm going to destroy Armageddon, and we're going to be nice now. And so that everybody rejoins the OSS, including the kids.
• 53:34
  Speaker B: Again, this is a spy movie that hates how spies yeah.
• 53:39
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 53:41
  Speaker B: So six months later, everyone's getting into their spy cars. We find out from a news report that King has beaten the game and now he's helping people with technology and is calling himself the Court Jester, which is a reference back to something that I keep wanting to say Junie, but no, Tony said earlier. And with that, our movie ends.
• 54:02
  Speaker A: I wanted to see the kids'desks. He said something about, I'll see you at your desk on Monday morning.
• 54:08
  Speaker C: Yeah, they'd probably be, like, small and cute. I didn't look to see if there was an after credits.
• 54:16
  Speaker B: I also did. I looked. There wasn't anything.
• 54:18
  Speaker C: Oh, okay, good.
• 54:19
  Speaker A: All right, so that is the movie. Now it is time for spy fact versus fiction. So, Christian, why don't you go first?
• 54:26
  Speaker B: Okay. I think well, I've got one thing. We've talked about this before. Obviously, the OSS doesn't exist anymore. It stands for the Office of Strategic Services. It's. A predecessor to the CIA was active during World War II. So. I also have something on game theory. So this is from Wikipedia. Game Theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interaction among rational agents. It has applications in all fields of social science, as well as logics science or system science and computer science.
• 54:58
  Speaker C: One of the most famous examples being the Prisoner's Dilemma.
• 55:02
  Speaker B: Yes, as shown in the Dark Knight.
• 55:07
  Speaker A: But how can you build society around that?
• 55:10
  Speaker C: You can't. It doesn't make any sense.
• 55:12
  Speaker B: It doesn't work that way. I mean, I enjoyed that they took the time to make a reference to it, but there was not anything to really back it up. All right, so that's what I have on that. I've got something on parenting styles, and this is actually something that's come up recently with me because we're trying to figure out, all right, what kind of parents do we want to be? So my wife Carolyn, who's been on the podcast before, actually sent me this link from a blog called Ecofeminist Mama, and it's a baby blog. It's called gentle parenting explained. And they have a nice little graph of it's. X and y axes. Where you have on your one axes, you have high and low. Your expect high would be expectations and control. The other axes is responsiveness and warmth. So in one corner we have authoritative, which says it's high but realistic expectations that take child's age and developmental capacity into account. You're warm and responsive towards your child, flexible but able to assert clear boundaries, democratic and willing to listen. And it understands that so called misbehavior is a child ways of communicating. And from my analysis, this is where Nora sits. She understands the level of developmental capability that the kids have and how they should react. Whereas on the other end of where I'm putting zachary Levi's character is authoritarian high, often unrealistic expectations of child emotionally distant parents are to be obeyed, uses punishments and reward systems to get children to behave in the desired way. Children are expected to be emotionally independent and behave like adults. Just from my reading, especially his whole thing about all the being restrict on technology and punishing him for solving that because he couldn't solve it. That's where I put him.
• 57:10
  Speaker A: It's a little bit harsh, but I can see where you're coming from.
• 57:14
  Speaker B: But he evolves his way of thinking to become more authoritative rather than authoritarian.
• 57:21
  Speaker A: Yes, and he also had good reasons for some of that. Not all of it, but some of it he just didn't explain it.
• 57:28
  Speaker B: Talked about that was I said there were four. The other two, which were not as relevant here are permissive and neglectful, which I don't think either of them sort of fall into that categories.
• 57:38
  Speaker A: Certainly not.
• 57:39
  Speaker B: Yeah. All right, so what do you got, Zach?
• 57:41
  Speaker A: Okay, so at the Spy Museum, which we've talked about before, they have a cyber section and they talk about is there a master key that unblocks every device, kind of like the Armageddon code? Unfortunately, it was just from my memory. I couldn't find something on the web about it. But the short answer is no. But there are devices that can unlock an so according to Tech Eris. So do you guys remember the San. Bernardino shooting in Texas a long time ago.
• 58:08
  Speaker B: I remember this.
• 58:09
  Speaker A: Do you remember the FBI?
• 58:11
  Speaker B: Do you remember this?
• 58:12
  Speaker A: The shooters. Yeah. They use something called a gray key, which is a simple black box with a couple of lightning cables sticking out of it. They plug one or two iPhones into it for two minutes while it loads the software. After two minutes, the iPhone is unplugged and left to sit for up to 2 hours. It will then power back onto a black screen, which shows the passcode to get into it. Now, that was a long time ago. Tech eris doesn't have much more info than that. Presumably things have changed since then. And then, finally, augmented reality. The integration of digital information with the user's environment. Unlike virtual reality, this is Wikipedia again, which creates a totally artificial one. AR is an overlay. The primary benefit of AR is that advantages to blend digital and 3D components with the real world. And it has a variety of uses from helping and decision making to entertainment. I would love to know what helping and decision making they were talking about, but it didn't elaborate.
• 59:08
  Speaker B: I have no idea. Yeah.
• 59:10
  Speaker A: All right. So that is it for fact versus fiction. Next, we have our favorite quotes. Alana as our guest. Would you like to go first?
• 59:15
  Speaker C: So mine is from King, where he's doing the duel with the swords and he defeats semi is like and with Game Theory, anything can be fixed, even this sorry world. That's what game theory does.
• 59:36
  Speaker B: All right, zach, what do you do more than one?
• 59:40
  Speaker C: Oh, you do. Well, I mentioned some of the other ones as we were going.
• 59:44
  Speaker A: Okay. So I liked another one by the Kang when he says, only way to make the world better is by force. Christian, don't get triggered. But I liked it because it's something like similar to what Batman says in The Dark Knight Returns. There's a part where Tony says, I wanted to win, dad, but I ended the world. This is funny. But then my favorite one, which is ridiculous, terrence says, everything they love is being kept from them and he's talking about their devices.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker A: I forgot about everything they love. Everything they love. So that cracked me up.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker B: All right, so actually, I've got a few we've already talked about. Look, in case anyone wonders where the spies are and know video games fry your brains from Tony. I never cheat. I use creative sportsmanship.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that was right at the Is.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker B: I don't remember which one of the kids says it, but one of them says it about Devlin. He has two pairs of sunglasses. He's definitely a spy. Lastly, I've got from Devlin, it's called secrecy. And secrecy is how we protect the world from our enemies.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, and who are their enemies then? They have a whole back and forth where she's like, well, maybe you wouldn't have enemies if you weren't so secretive, and I was like, stop. Movies. All right, so now it is time for our ratings. We rate our movies here on the Spy Fi. Guys, on a scale of one to ten martinis, one being Avengers, 1998 level, and ten being Mission Impossible, ghost Protocol or better, how would we rate Spy Kids armageddon Alana as our guest? Would you like to go first?
• 1:01:25
  Speaker C: Wait, okay. I don't remember what I gave the first Spy Kids. What did we give them?
• 1:01:30
  Speaker B: Well, oh, you have it all written down.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker C: I, like.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker B: Gave it.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker A: Generous.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker B: I gave it a six and you gave it an eight. Nice. It was a weird reversal where Zach actually gave it more credit than I did.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker A: I must have been in a good mood that day.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker C: Or it's great movie. All right, so like I said, my expectations were, like, really in the gutter for this, and I thought it was pretty entertaining. They did a decent job with what they had. All the actors didn't really seem to be phoning it in. That being said, I don't think it was as good as the first Spy Kids, which is a classic. What do I give it? Maybe like a six and a half or like a seven, right?
• 1:02:27
  Speaker A: Better than average.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker C: Yeah, I thought it was pretty funny. I was entertained.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker A: All right. Okay, so I will go next.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker B: I'm very curious.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker A: I don't know. My expectations were also kind of low. The movie is only in an hour and a half, but it felt like it was really long.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker C: It did feel kind of long.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker A: Yeah. I didn't find the kids to be as likable as the kids in the first one, or the parents, for that matter. The messages of the movie were really weird. Villains, plot didn't make any sense. So I'm going to be harsh on you all on it. I'm going to give it a three and a half out of ten.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker B: All right. Very interesting. So I also didn't have great expectations for this movie, and it was fine, actually. I don't know if I've ever actually finished Spy Kids 3D. Game over. I've definitely seen the second one. I've seen the fourth one. And this movie is like, trying to be all three of them at once because you have, like I remember in the second one, you have the ancient temple kind of stuff in there. Third one, you have the virtual reality stuff. Or they go into a video game. It's too much. They didn't need that entire part where they go into the video game. It could have ended it right before that and wrapped it up there. That was just too much.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker C: I agree.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker B: It was unnecessary. I agree with Zach. The kids are not as likable as Junie and Carmen were. Also, the parents were not as likable as Antonio Banderas and Carla Wiggino or something. Yeah.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker A: Do you guys remember the part where Antonio Banderas is made fun of by another parent and fantasizes about Spin kicking him through a window. There was no moments like that.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, they were just sort of stock parent characters. They weren't interesting in any way, really, other than the fact that know Zachary Levi, although his star has sort of waned as of late. Yeah, it was below average for me. So I'm going to give this a four and a half out of ten martinis.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker C: I really could have benefited from a machete type character.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, someone to mix it up a bit. All right, Lana, well, thank you for joining us. Anything you want to plug before you go? Another podcast perhaps, that you do with.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker C: Your siblings Bay and neuter your pets? Yeah. Also, I guess you can listen to Tuesday night gaming if you want to. We're covering ahsoka, and it sucks.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker A: Listen to the podcast now before another argument is set. So thank you all for joining us. You can find us on social media at the Spy Fi Guys on Facebook, Twitter we're still calling it that. And Instagram. And also our merch store, Redbubble.com. Until next time. I'm Zach.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker B: And I'm Christian.
• 1:05:41
  Speaker A: And we are the spy fi guys signing off.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the spy fi, guys. If you enjoyed our podcast, please be sure to give us a five star rating on itunes. The theme song from this podcast is Mistake the Getaway by Kevin McLeod from Incompetent.com. Licensed under Creative Commons by attribution 30 films, books and television shows reviewed by our podcast are the intellectual property of their respective copyright holders and no infringement is intended.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker A: This is a personal podcast. Any views, statements or opinions expressed in this podcast are personal and belong solely to the participants. They do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the participants may or may not be associated with in a professional or personal capacity unless explicitly stated. Any views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic, group, club, organization, company or individual.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker B: You can find our podcast on social media at the Spy Fi Guys on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.