*** (out of ****)
Starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Bai Ling, and Laurence Olivier
Directed & written by Kerry Conran
2004
106 min PG
Every so often there’s a movie that looks so little like anything else we’ve seen before that we forgive its transgressions. To name two, “Tron” made a computer world that we’d never seen before, or really since, and “Dick Tracy” set the style for comic book movies done in bright comic book colors and deliciously fake sets. “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” is a sepia-soaked comic book world come to glorious life, all faded-photograph golds and greys, with deep, deep cityscapes and wildernesses done in rich old movie lighting. It uses much of the technology of George Lucas’s “Attack of the Clones” in which live actors are inserted into computer-animated settings and situations. But while “Attack of the Clones” is clunky in its storytelling and sometimes awkward in its attempts at visual realism, “Sky Captain” is lively, silly, and has no interest in recreating reality, but in fabricating a new, shrouded, rainy, ominous universe of the imagination.
That “Sky Captain” is utter, unapologetic pulp and Swiss-cheesed with plotholes is not to its discredit. That it is essentially a feature-length video game is not so bad either. Its only real shortcoming is that writer-director Kerry Conran, the gifted special effects wizard behind it, only exploits about 75 or 80% of the juicy giddiness that he could have wrung out of the material. The insertion of live actors into artificial surroundings is not a new development—“Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” anyone?—but it is becoming more and more prominent. I don’t want it to completely replace old fashioned set design, if for no other reason then you usually get better performances out of actors in genuine environments. It is ironic, though, that the end result of centuries of technological improvements have put actors right back into the days of Shakespeare and Sophocles, having to imagine all their surroundings.
But back to “Sky Captain”—what a goldmine of pulp imagery! Giant robots besiege New York. World War II fighter planes transform into submarines. Dirigibles dock with gravity-scoffing skyscrapers. Dinosaurs live again. Aircraft carriers fly over limitless oceans of cloud. Shangri-La is a place of tall pagodas and flowers in bloom. Our vision sweeps through cities and snowflakes that have never been beautiful in quite this way. Cleverest of all are the sequences in which Sky Captain must cross great distances in his airplane, or receive radio transmissions from across the globe. We’re used to seeing lines moving across “Indiana Jones”-style maps to track our hero’s progress, but how often do we see his plane and the cloud cover at the same time, superimposed and leaving shadows? “Sky Captain” is overflowing with gadgets and gizmos that seem straight out of the 1935 World’s Fair (except they actually work). Every futuristic multi-purpose vehicle has Art Deco styling and curlicues, with rotating knobs instead of a keyboard. The only explanation as to why this universe differs from ours is given near the opening, when we spot a zeppelin that we think is the Hindenburg, until we see the number “III” after its name.
The story, such as it is, is negligable; if “Sky Captain” did not look the way it looks, if it looked like another lusterless “X-Men” knockoff, I might not be recommending it. What the story accomplishes is a clothesline, however warped and goofy, to get from one of these extraordinary settings to another. It’s 1939—if the screening of “Wizard of Oz” is to be believed—and only One Man can uncover the secret behind the giant robots that are mysteriously attacking major cities of the world, taking what they want, and then vanishing. He is known as Sky Captain (Jude Law, so handsome you almost can’t look at him) and he is the pilot-leader of a band of mercenaries. Actually, he seems to be the only pilot who ever gets off the ground at his entire secret airfield, but that’s precisely the kind of silliness that “The World of Tomorrow” adores. He is joined in his trek across the globe by his reporter ex-girlfriend Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) and their target is a mad scientists known as Totenkopf, who, if his name is an any indication, is some kind of Nazi pharaoh. There is no shortage of “men of science” in “The World of Tomorrow,” mad and otherwise.
The players in “Sky Captain” are good sports, even if their chief duty is to stare wide-eyed at wondrous sights. Sky Cap and Polly bicker from time-to-time, which is not quite as funny as the movie intends it to be, although Paltrow gives a perfect delivery of the line “is that light supposed to be flashing?” while in Sky Cap’s plane. Angelina Jolie shows up, sans an eyeball, with a terrifically fake English accent as the brassy boss of the flying aircraft carrier, and Giovanni Ribisi has “loyal sidekick” written all over him.
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