Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Flying high: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a fantastic, big-screen comic book

By Anthony Del Valle

The first thing people want to know about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is how does it look? Answer: a lot like Metropolis, a tad Maltese Falcon, a somewhat Wizard of Oz, with heavy shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars and those old Saturday morning short TV adventure serials. In other words: like nothing you've seen before.

The reason is 37-year-old writer and first-time feature director Kerry Conran's decision to shoot his comic-strip adventure almost entirely before bluescreens (in 26 days) and then digitally "paint" the backgrounds. The scenery--with no small help from Kerry's older brother, production designer Kevin Conran--looks watery; too solid to be a cartoon, yet so light and airy it feels like a vision through a dreamer's eyes, or a window during heavy rain. Naturally, the startling colors keep us from taking the story too seriously. The distancing allows us to stand back and enjoy this tradition of comic book adolescent pop without feeling as if we've been here too many times before. It's a perfect visual style for a childlike tale of 1939 bang-bang male heroics and tough-lady glamour.

Gwyneth Paltrow is our Lois Lane, or, maybe more accurately, our Lana Turner as Lois Lane. She's known here as Polly Perkins, obnoxiously mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper. She stumbles onto a story about the disappearance of some of the world's most brilliant scientists. While in a phone both making research calls, she finds herself in the middle of what appears to be a World War II air raid--until the "planes" come down to Earth and transform into an army of huge, metallic robots that look like erector sets gone druggie. Our boyish hero Sky Captain--Jude Law (whose exaggerated romantic eyes have always looked digital)--spots her from the sky and saves her with some quick action from his Warhawk. They become partners in going after the monsters. But it winds up, see, that they used to know each other (I can't really say they were lovers; the film seems too virginal for that). Things ended unhappily ("Did you sabotage my plane?" he asks her), and now their repartee consists of bitchy retorts laced with, of course, mounds of repressed affection.

Their pursuit leads them to a mad German scientist, Dr. Totenkopf (Laurence Olivier, digitally resurrected), a huge metallic ark that is squiring away two of every species; an evil, flying, bat-like Mysterious Woman (Bai Lang), and an island of an all-female amphibious squadron, commanded by one Franky Cook, in the form of Angelina Jolie, in eye patch and heavy English accent. Winds up Franky knows our hero very well, too, and that don't please Lois Lane none.

All the events lead us back to that mad scientist who wants to take over the world (I'm not giving anything away; in movies, mad German scientists are always trying to take over the world). The real question, of course, is will our Boy Scout and our uppity cosmopolitan diva cut the B.S. and get it on?

No point talking about the performances. The actors are playing intentionally one-dimensional figures; they frequently feel as computer-generated as the scenery, and that's part of the fun.

Things bog down in the second half because the script and characters run out of steam. There's not enough newness and twist to the plot, and the dialogue frequently mistakes sarcasm for wit. The relationship between the two leads remains unsatisfyingly vague. The film feels as if it just stops, rather than ends. But there's little doubt Sky Captain will have an enormous influence on films to come. Kerry Conran is an adequate writer, but it's his visual mastery that will, I suspect, make him a legend.