. . . a rollicking good matinee film for the whole family.
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I didn't know what to expect from "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." Though I hadn't read any of the reviews, I'd heard that critics were all over the map on this one, with Roger Ebert giving it four stars but most others hovering in the two to two-and-a-half star range. After seeing it, I have to agree with DVD Town's Dean Winkelspecht that this film hasn't gotten a fair shake.
After all, this was one of the first films to shoot totally in blue-screen on High Definition, so technically speaking it's a pioneer. You'd never know from looking at it that the budget was only $40 million and that it was shot in just 29 days. For that, perhaps, credit writer-director Kerry Conran and his artist brother, who combined talents to create a six-minute short version of "Sky Captain" to show the roughly 100 people they brought onboard to work essentially without pay, just so they could be a part of it. These were mostly young people, mind you, and we learn on one of the bonus features that many of them hadn't even worked on a film before. But that six-minute clip was so stylistically distinctive that you can understand why they wanted to be a part of the project. Gwyneth Paltrow liked the short film so much that she agreed to work for indie pay without even seeing a script.
More than any other film, "Sky Captain" captures the look and feel of sci-fi comic books and old-time Saturday matinee serials, with a touch of private eye noir thrown in for good measure. Filmed in heavy sepia tones and given a slightly gauzy look, "Sky Captain" has an aged feel that's totally compatible with its Buck Rogers plot.
But don't look for anything complex here. Serials weren't terribly complicated, and neither were comic books. Everything depended on keeping a pretty straightforward domino-effect plot in motion. Since it was Conran's obvious intent to pay homage to both, what you get here is a visual page turner--a "Speed" ride that takes you from cliffhanger to cliffhanger the same way that "Raiders of the Lost Ark" did. And maybe that's where the unfair comparisons start to creep in. "Raiders" had a more complex plot, more story and character development between cliffhangers, a greater variety of precarious situations, more humor, and two talents named Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. Then again, "Sky Captain" is more deliberately like those old serials and comic books--much more so than "Raiders." The effect that the filmmakers were going for wasn't a film inspired by the old serials. They wanted to give us a new serial in a visual style that looked authentic.
The scene is New York City, 1939. From the moment you see a zeppelin dock at the Empire State Building and soon afterwards an air raid siren sounds as the skies fill with squadrons of flying robots (inspired by a 1941 Superman cartoon), you hop onboard and hang on. You position yourself mentally on the ground with reporter Polly Perkins (Paltrow) as she tries to photograph these gigantic robots stomping through the city, blasting things with their lasers and crushing everything in their path like gigantic, metallic King Kongs. And when an airwaves message goes out to Sky Captain, you can't help but smile. In the tradition of comic books and serials, only one person can stop such an attack, and in this film it's an ex-Flying Tiger named Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), aka Sky Captain. It's not clear how he ended up keeping his Curtis P-40 Warhawk with its distinctive tiger shark jaws painted on the nose, but Sky Captain zooms to the rescue and stops the attack using gadgets that were developed for him by a brainiac named Dex (Giovanni Ribisi).
Later in his office, sitting in shadows like a P.I. downing shots of Milk of Magnesia, he's startled by Perkins, who was waiting for him in the corner. He bends the desk lamp to shine on her, and she bends it right back on him. That kind of give-and-take is a part of the film. There's not much in the way of character development, so our ability to relate to and appreciate the characters is totally based on exchanges like this. Happily, there's good chemistry between Law and Paltrow and Ribisi, and the banter between them reveals plenty about their personalities. It turns out these two have a history, but then again Joe has a history with lots of people. She had been handed a slip of paper by a German scientist who was afraid that he would be next on the list to disappear. Six scientists were already missing, and when Sky Captain saw what was on that slip of paper--a diagram of one of the robots--he knew if he had a shot at tracking who was responsible for building and sending those robots to attack major cities around the world. More than that, it involves two vials that the scientist slipped Perkins, genetic engineering, and the demented idea that the world would be better off if it got a fresh start with two nearly perfect specimens of every creature.
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