Spare Parts

At a high school in Phoenix a new teacher is obliged to start a robotics club. Four students sign up and all four are undocumented. They have no money and gather parts from scrap and donations. Eventually they enter an underwater robotics competition otherwise contested by universities. The subject is not the contest but winning changing nothing about the students' legal status. The film celebrates the ending as a victory and immediately says it is not enough; the questions of college and deportation are left open at the close. The form follows the familiar school-film template: a shambolic team, a hopeless teacher, a machine that works at the last minute. The one thing that steps outside it is the question of what happens to these characters after they win. The source is a real event. In 2004 four students from Carl Hayden High School beat university teams including MIT to win the competition, and one of the materials holding their robot together was tampons. The story became a magazine article first and then a book. George López plays the teacher, with Marisa Tomei and Jamie Lee Curtis in the cast. Sean McNamara directs. Who it is for: viewers who like school films based on real events. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a narrative outside the template; the film presses its emotional buttons in order.