Movie Review:

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

   Kerry Conran basically came out of nowhere.  After producing a six-minute clip of CGI robots trampling city streets, Conran was snatched up by Hollywood and now brings us his first feature, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  A graduate of Cal Arts, Conran clearly has extensive CGI knowledge, but he was also allowed to write and direct the film, and this may have proven its undoing.

   Sky Captain opens at breakneck pace.  Even though we learn that giant robots have been turning up in various remote areas for the better part of three years, we don't find this out until after the sequence where they march through Manhattan, destroying a good portion of the city.  We don't get a lot of information, in fact; Conran leaves the viewer to fill in a lot of the blanks, though at the same time there are scenes in which parts of the story are explained by the protagonists in checklist form.  ("It says here the bad guy ran this program!  And here's all the work they did!  And now no one's seen him for years!")

    Though the irritatingly quick transitions in the opening sequence let up soon enough, the film's pace remains quick, as it has to if the entire plot is to fit into a 107-minute box.  Sky Captain plays like a handful of serials strung together, with cliffhanger-type shots demarcating the end of one chapter, after which Captain Joe Sullivan (Jude Law) and reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) move on to the next part of their adventure.

    Conran appears to be going for as much of a duplication of the serial style as he can with a 21st century cast.  What no one appears to have mentioned is that the serials of the 1930s don't translate especially well today.  The relentless pace is better than a sluggish one, but it doesn't elevate the material.  The plot is still pretty vague and the characters one-dimensional - certainly typical of a serial adventure.

    It's possible to make a film in the serial style and fail to fall into this trap, however.  One need only look at the Indiana Jones films, particularly the first and last entries, to see the process in action.  Indiana Jones is actually realized in multiple dimensions, and the plot has a serial feel but is much more specific. Sky Captain presents us with a lot of robots blowing things up, and then a couple of "experiments gone awry" - we never really learn how things tie together until the last ten minutes of the film, which wouldn't be as much of a problem if we weren't asked to take so much of the explanation on faith that it makes sense.

    The actors are game enough, but it's hard when you're just working in front of a blue screen.  Paltrow is particularly flat at the beginning but regains her composure once she joins up with Law.  Like a lot of 1930s characters, the always hinted at but never shown backstory seems more interesting from their standpoint than the story they're stuck in, but then it wouldn't have made a very good serial.  Instead, dropping hints about previous adventures is just a half-hearted and mostly unsuccessful attempt at filling out the characters.

    As for the CGI-driven style, the backgrounds are solid enough - frankly, I was expecting a slightly more cartoonish look based on the trailers.  The actors don't always interact perfectly with things moving past them, looking on occasion like they're dashing around Toontown, but Conran does a pretty good job combining the actors and the environments.  The whole film is also bathed in something of a light glow, presumably trying to be evocative of some vague notion of the past.  It works fine, though it doesn't really add anything to the mix.

    Of course, while it's theoretically innovative on a visual level, Sky Captain really proves why films shot on location will never go out of style.  Interesting as the CGI can be, there's rarely a question that it is in fact CGI.  It's not that it doesn't look good, but looking good and looking real are two different things.  Just looking good is enough for the ambitions of Sky Captain, but other films would no doubt be unsatisfied.

    Despite all this, Sky Captain deserves some points for never losing its watchability.  The frenetic plot is distracting enough that the mistakes are rarely magnified onscreen, and the lack of lulls means that audiences aren't left with enough time to wonder if what they just saw made much sense.  It isn't Shakespeare - not even with the insertion of a long-dead Laurence Olivier - but it could be worse.

    In the end, Sky Captain is just forgettable fluff, but better light than leaden.  C

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a Paramount release.  Rated for sequences of stylized sci-fi violence and brief mild language.