Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Directed and Written by Kerry Conran

Starring:  Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Giovanni Ribisi with Sir Laurence Olivier (archive footage) and Angelina Jolie

Rated PG for stylized sci-fi violence and brief mild language.

107 minutes runtime

USA Release Date:  September 2004

Rating (out of 5 stars):  ***

In what promises to be a journey into a brave new world of CGI computerized movie making, Gwyneth Paltrow attempts to play Veronica Lake (or is it Lauren Bacall?) in a film noir taken from the pages of the old Buck Rogers comics.  The first 30 minutes of the film lives up to the hype, with high velocity action set against the dark Art Deco streets of Gotham ca. 1939.  The screen is wall-to-wall action with creepy gray shadows and ghostly washed-out images of people who look like they are sweating it out under the lights at the local precinct station.

The CGI process employs live actors set against an animated background.  In “Sky Captain,” Kerry Conran started with a CGI “storyboard” that included the live actors as animation as well as the background.  This was used to show the actors where they needed to be.  Then those images were stripped off and the animated background was combined with the filmed actors in the foreground.  Because the Art Deco feel of the 1939 period translates well into animation, the result turned out great.

Paltrow’s Street wise Polly Perkins is on the move.  A reporter who is always at the right place at the right time, she is on the Hindenburg as it docks to the top of the Empire State Building on the darkest of dark city nights.  People are shadows, moving through the man-made miracles of flight and buildings that reach to the moon.  But we all know the fate of the Hindenburg, a Germanic invention gone terribly wrong, and as it docks like the Titanic on the crown jewel of skyscrapers the passengers scurry in silence to their appointed rounds.

The world’s top scientists are scared and on the run.  Why?  Because they know things you don’t want to know.  Things of unspeakable horror; experiments aimed at a superior race and robots that are, well, big.  And they shrug off mere bullets like, well, mere bullets.  And they are headed this way.  Technology has gone mad and it is up the common men and women of the world to fight it with the only tool they have: God-given human spirit.  They may not be rocket scientists, but they have guts.  And, in the case of Polly, really beautiful hair.

Polly refuses to take the advice of editor Morris Paley (Michael Gambon) and heads out into the black and white streets for the scoop of a lifetime.  When she gets there she knows her editor wasn’t just blowing smoke, because Godzilla has come to town in the form of car crunching iron behemoths that can’t be stopped. At least until Jude Law, playing the part of Joe 'Sky Captain' Sullivan, screams onto the set in his P-40 Flying Tiger.  But there are countless more robots, and P-40s are hard to come by since the war ended.  It doesn’t look good.

So goes the first 30 minutes of so of seat gripping action in “Sky Captain.”  The film mixes great action against the background of film noir and brings back the same sense of youthful wonder as “Spirited Away” in a backdrop of nostalgia like “Moulin Rouge.”  Unfortunately, the film doesn’t deliver on either of those promises and it’s a downhill flight from there as Polly and Joe travel around the world in a transparent remake of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  If only Joe Sullivan didn’t wear the same leather flight jacket as Indiana Jones.  Even after his clothes are burned in Tibet, he shows up in the next scene with the same jacket.  Was his wardrobe controlled by the same robots that crunched Manhattan?  He even has the same gun as Jones.  Thank heaven, like Jones, he loses it.

The ponderous music of the London Philharmonic pounds from the speakers in some vaguely martial theme during the battle scenes, but by the end of the movie you just want it to be over with.  We know the future of mankind is important, but do we have to be flogged about the head and shoulders with it?

The film careens forward from the excitement of the initial scenes and tries to stick to a plot.  There is a grossly disfigured man in Tibet who provides the required clue to finding the maddest of mad scientists, Dr. Totenkopf (played by Laurence Olivier in CGI altered archival footage).  There are more robotic creatures, flying, crawling, destroying labs and searching for the missing link that will make Totenkopf’s mad scheme come together.  Finally, Sullivan’s technician buddy Dex Dearborn (Giovanni Ribisi) inexplicably uncovers the entire story while Joe and Polly are flying around and running out of gas.

The plan is this: the earth will be incinerated soon, if it isn’t destroyed first by the iron Godzillas, the wiry robots, or the flying steel birds with lasers.  There are so many terrors, one hardly knows which to fear most.  Is it worse to be stepped on, lasered or incinerated?  Or crushed by the music of the Philharmonic?  Thank goodness there aren’t any man-eating beetles.

Angelina Jolie makes her brief appearance in the part of Captain Francesca 'Franky' Cook, an old war buddy of Sullivan’s with whom he has shared many a cockpit.  Polly’s jealously is well done by Paltrow, but unfortunately it is too little, too late.  When Franky unveils her fleet of depressingly cute fighter modules, any last semblance of originality vanishes like the Hindenburg in a puff of hydrogen.  The movie has entered into its final, “Star Wars” knockoff phase and there is nothing we can do but install earplugs to stave off the Philharmonic and wait for the final, terminally predictable, ending.

“Sky Captain” is worth the price of admission if for nothing more than the great juxtaposition of real gears and cogs with animated this and thats, and great noir settings in the dreamlike comic-book world.  The movie brings that comic book feeling to life, but, unfortunately, we outgrew comic books and it’s hard to go back.