Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a clever, masterfully executed melange of human and computer action, past and present, and a material world filtered through imagination.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published September 16, 2004
[Photos: Paramount Pictures]
In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Jude Law as Joe Sullivan, the sky captain, and Gwyneth Paltrow as journalist Polly Perkins are launched on a fantasy adventure straight from the imagination of a kid from the 1930s.
Special effects create an alternative reality for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
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It's tempting to say that Hollywood no longer makes movies like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but it never did. For all its resemblances to cliffhanger serials from Captain Midnight to Raiders of the Lost Ark, we've never, ever seen anything like Kerry Conran's dazzling debut.
No movie has ever been created so completely and credibly by computers. Anything that isn't flesh and blood in Conran's film is the product of boundless imagination and limitless pixels, even a taxicab dropping off a passenger. Acting against blue screens and authentically cornball dialogue takes an edge off the actors, but the world of yesterday that Conran and a legion of artists paints around them compensates with pure brilliance.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has an astonishing look, as if it were printed on nitrate film stock that might crumble at any second. Students of light and shadows will view this in film classes forever. Actors would kill to be always framed in the romantic glow and tilted angles that cinematographer Eric Adkins devises. Unlike a similar, overdone tack recently taken by The Saddest Music in the World, this movie isn't a smug stunt but a vividly realized fantasy.
It's a Saturday morning serial world in which sharp-jawed Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), the sky captain of an elite flyboy unit, receives pleas for help through radio halos from tall towers and flies over nations that look like maps, complete with the countries' names. It's a world in which an intrepid newspaper reporter named Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) risks being stomped by 100-foot-tall robots marching through Manhattan.
Like the daydream of a kid living in the 1930s, the movie is built upon touchstones that were cool way back when: The Hindenburg docks at the Empire State Building; Radio City Music Hall is a luminous place of intrigue; an airplane sailing like a submarine passes the sunken boat that brought King Kong to America. The Wizard of Oz figures into Polly's investigation of the deaths of seven scientists responsible for a world domination plan inspired by Sunday school. Conran makes a masterpiece from 1930s schoolboy doodles.
Sky Captain and Polly share a screwball romantic past, and having their hides saved twice by Capt. Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie) - another of Joe's past layovers - throws gas on the fire. But this isn't a movie about people, and gloriously so. The banter isn't up to Tracy vs. Hepburn standards, but it's fun, with a hint of contemporary humor so consistent that it becomes part of the overall fantasy. Law, Paltrow and Jolie play it just seriously enough - and, therefore, humorously - to avoid being overshadowed by Conran's vision.
This movie boasts retro-cool special effects - Joe's dogfight against wing-flapping robots through Manhattan buildings is the best - plus an abiding love for anything cinematic, from sly film references to photographic wipes, irises and double and triple exposures. Each hyper-styled frame has perfect period design that harks back to 1930s visual iconography: U.S. homeland defense posters, Germanexpressionists such as Leni Riefenstahl and Fritz Lang, and the original Superman comics drawn by Max Fleischer. Conran's marriage of past and present is completed with a computer-generated appearance by the late, great Laurence Olivier that, in context, isn't as arrogant as it sounds.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a perfect blend of excitement and artistry. I can't imagine anyone of any age who won't swoon or gape at something on display. This is what great filmmaking is all about: movies that thrill in populist ways, yet raise the standards of everyone who sees them. Conran, in his first time out of the gate, reminds us that it's possible.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Grade: A
Director: Kerry Conran
Cast: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Gambon, Laurence Olivier
