Review: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Bob Bloom
Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Gambonm, Bai
Ling,
Omid Djalili and Sir Laurence Olivier. Director of photography Eric Adkins.
Production
designer Kevin Conran. Senior visual effects supervisor Scott E. Anderson.
Music by
Edward Shearmur. Written and directed by Kevin Conran. Rated PG. Running time:
Approx. 110 mins.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow uses the latest computer technology to
create a retro world reminiscent of old Fleischer Supereman cartoons blended
with
the thrills of a Saturday afternoon cliffhanger.
Sky Captain is fun to watch, especially for film buffs who will find
references to
everything from Lost Horizon to King Kong to the Superman cartoon, Mechanical
Monsters, to the Wizard of Oz.
Writer-director Kevin Conran, who also is credited as the film's production
designer,
uses live actors — for the most part — and blue screen to bring his story to
life.
The film looks like a reverse Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with real people
inhabiting a
totally computer-generated environment that has a multi-planed animated look.
It works very well. Only a few scenes go awry in which the actors and the
effects
don't mesh perfectly.
But special effects alone cannot carry a movie. And that is where Sky Captain
falters.
For such a project you need larger-than-life heroes and/or heroines, and of
the
three leads only Angelina Jolie rises to the occasion.
Both Jude Law as Sky Captain and Gwyneth Paltrow as the intrepid, Lois
Lane-like
reporter, Polly Perkins, lack the derring-do charisma to carry off their
roles.
Both are good actors and do adequate jobs, but in a film such as this,
adequate
does not work.
Their patter seems forced and scripted. They sound like they are merely
reading
lines. You don't get any feeling, any history from the pair.
They fail to rise to the larger-than-life level needed to complement Conran's
grand
adventure.
Law and Paltrow are too reserved and restrained. They fail to capture the
spirit of
the film.
Only Jolie does that as British flyng ace, Capt. Franky Cook who, with a
clipped
accent and devil-may-care delivery perfectly embodies and understands Conran's
overall design.
The master villain, a holograph portrayed by the late Sir Laurence Olivier,
makes for
an eerie presence.
The feature is filled with magnificent effects from giant mechanical robots to
flying
airstrips to a gleaming "Noah's Ark" rocketship.
The World of Tomorrow is an enjoyable look back at a make believe cinematic
world
that existed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The action is nearly non-stop
as the
plot moves around the globe to solve the mystery and purpose of the mechanical
machines.
It is too bad that Law and Paltrow could not reach the heights needed to
elevate
the movie and make Conran's dream world perfect.
Bob Bloom is the film critic at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, Ind. He
can be
reached by e-mail at bbl...@journalandcourier.com or at b...@bloomink.com.
Bloom's reviews also can be found at the Journal and Courier Web site:
www.jconline.com
Other reviews by Bloom can be found at the Rottentomatoes Web site:
www.rottentomatoes.com or at the Internet Movie Database Web site:
www.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Bob+Bloom
==========
X-RAMR-ID: 38662
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1321763
X-RT-TitleID: 1136138
X-RT-SourceID: 872
X-RT-AuthorID: 1363
X-RT-RatingText: 3/4
Mark R. Leeper
CAPSULE: The Art Deco future as it was seen from
the late 1930s is the background for this
super-paced sci-fi adventure. The plot is just a
chain of action sequences, one leading to the next,
and the characters are one-dimensional. Even the
artwork is a little too dark, but the images are
genuinely exciting and they are what make the film
worth seeing. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
Back in the 1930s people grew tired of the daily grind of the
Great Depression and looked to the future for some reason for
optimism. People embraced recent large-scale engineering marvels
like the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building with its (never
used) dirigible mooring at the top. The art style of the future
was Art Deco and buildings like the geometrically decorated
Chrysler building captured this spirit, as well as the Hoover Dam
and the Empire State Building. Capturing this mood is a new film
that seamlessly combines realistic-looking animation and live
action. SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW gloriously captures
the same art deco sepulchral futurism of the original Max
Fleischer Superman cartoons. But these images are presented in a
style that makes them almost look as if they have come to life.
The film is a terrific exercise in art and a visually fascinating
film.
The story begins with the kidnapping of a great scientist, one of
many who have disappeared. Then suddenly New York City is
attacked by a fleet of flying machines that turn out to be sixty-
foot-high robots who unstoppably march through the streets of the
city with some mysterious goal. Nearly killed in the onslaught is
pretty Polly Perkins (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), a daring
newspaper reporter who is known to take chances. Parker was once
the lover of Joe Sullivan (Jude Law) who under the name Sky
Captain leads a staunch team of great pilots and scientists who
offer their services to those who need them. Sky Captain destroys
the rampaging robots, but this is only the beginning of his battle
to destroy the evil schemes of the nefarious Dr. Totenkopf (German
for "Death Head").
The plot is on a comic-book level, but that is part of the idea.
The pace of this high-octane adventure is so fast there is no time
for a real story. But never do we get a chance to sit back and
bemoan the lack of consistent plot. This is a film paced for the
video-game generation with just one action sequence shortly after
another. There is no character to particularly like. Jude Law's
Sky Captain does not have a lot of personality. He is just a man
getting an important job done the best he can. That puts him a
point up on Gwyneth Paltrow's Polly whose small deceptions and
indignant poses quickly outstay their welcome to become
irritating. Characters are not the chief attraction of this film.
This is one of those films that a lot of the fun is finding the
allusions to other films. A background setting will be recreated
from one film, a sound effect from another. In the course of two
hours we visit several of our favorite fantasy films. The images
on the screen are nearly all huge. Doorways on Sky Captain's
island are twenty feet tall and must be really hard to move. Why
does it tweak our imagination to see machines that tower over us
and make us feel small? Maybe because we imagine using the power
in those huge machines. Maybe when they are destroyed we feel
like powerful Davids bringing down Goliaths of steel. In any
case, much of the spectacle is the scale of the robots and the
flying machines. The one complaint about the majestic visual
imagery is that so much of the film is shown in twilight of semi-
darkness. This may make the animation easier and cover over
errors, but it makes the images harder to see. What we see is
visually terrific, but it might be even better if we could more
easily see the detail in those majestic images we are looking at.
This film with the action and pacing of a super science fiction
serial on steroids is a unique film and even with some of the
story shortcomings is a real entertainment. It is interesting to
compare it to another super-science alternate history, the soon-
to-be-released anime feature STEAMBOY. And it is even more
interesting that these two films were made so close to each other
in time. Perhaps the time is right to look at our past and think
about what might have been. I rate SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF
TOMORROW a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.
Mark R. Leeper
mle...@optonline.net
Copyright 2004 Mark R. Leeper
==========
X-RAMR-ID: 38673
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1321884
X-RT-TitleID: 1136138
X-RT-AuthorID: 1309
X-RT-RatingText: 7/10
Karina Montgomery
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.
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
==========
X-RAMR-ID: 38701
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1323292
X-RT-TitleID: 1136138
X-RT-SourceID: 755
X-RT-AuthorID: 3661
X-RT-RatingText: 4/5