Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)September 27th, 2004
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Matinee Price
Sky Captain is exactly the kind of movie which would naturally hypnotize me visually and therefore get away with murder, storywise. Determined to rise above this weakness of mine, I chewed on the film for a week.
Without a doubt, the ethereal retro-futuristic look of the film (set in or around 1939) is completely awesome, a triumphant display of the vision of director Kerry Conran. Great texture, great detail, cool machines, gorgeous sets. The hard part, of course, is for the actors. As we painfully witnessed in the most recent Star Wars installments, actors in costumes shooting in an empty green room need a lot of direction for us to believe in the artificial space. Stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law make us utterly believe (except one time) that they are in the spaces they inhabit. This makes all the difference in the world. Gazing around at cavernous expanses, dim, intimate offices, walking around furniture or scrambling out of airplanes that aren't even there - this makes the movie feel real.
But again, this is an assessment of the visuals. The film is utterly period, in all ways, and this too is effective. It's like a little bubble of an art project, simultaneously being an interesting experiment in a medium but also being an effective piece of art itself. The plot is cobbled straight out of a throwaway radio serial. The characters and their inter-dynamics depend on stock character types, like Dex the sexless gum-chewing mechanic savant, or their harmless multilingual guide across the globe. It doesn't sound like a compliment, but it is. The poorly defined science, the cartoonishly elaborate and insane machinations of the bad guy, the impossible heroic stunts, the hard-boiled dialogue and simple motivations, all could have come directly from that narrow, idealistic pre-World War II era (when they didn't call the war of 1914-1918 World War One). And that is the real charm of the film.
Homages to George Lucas, The Iron Giant, Metropolis, and more abound, but besides these tips of the hat, the film is grounded solidly in every way in the aesthetic of the period in which it is set. It would have been in black and white, but for studio nervousness, but its hand-tinted low-saturation color works even more effectively, I think. Recently, I was watching Byron Haskin's 1953 War of the Worlds and marveling at the fact that, even with the wires clearly visible, how scary it remains, just with committed acting and some scary, iconic visuals. This World of Tomorrow takes that inherent X Factor, the one that sometimes ripens to cheese as years pass, and sometimes does not (creating classics), and renders it so skillfully and beautifully, that they X Factor itself becomes art again.
What about the actors? You know, the only real things onscreen? Well, Paltrow looks the part, but I did feel that something was missing, perhaps a lack of commitment to the gee-whizzery of it all. In her clear and effective focus on making it real, maybe she forgot to make it fun. Law, slightly less out of his element after having made A.I., totally gets it. He's a dashing, serious hero, playing it straight, no winking - but he's having a gas. Ditto the perfectly cast Giovanni Ribisi. If Angelina Jolie's character was used solely to give Paltrow and Law something to fight about, then she was wasted. Her fleet is totally cool, though. Check it out.
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These reviews (c) 2004 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at:
http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource
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