Originally published 9/20/04
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Director: Kerry Conran
Writer: Kerry Conran
Producers: Jon Avnet, Marsha Oglesby, Sadie Frost, Jude Law
Stars: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Bai Ling, Michael Gambon, the late Lord Laurence Olivier
It takes a special breed of creative audacity to conceive of images for the screen that, if you made them look too realistic, they’d somehow look less believable. That’s the best way I can think to describe the visual splendor of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, any shot of which you could freeze and use as the cover for some thrilling adventure book; or hang on your wall, for that matter. If for nothing else, this movie deserves a view simply because you have never, in your life, seen anything quite like it.
The color is washed out into a semi-sepia toned look, the camera pitches and whirls around impossible sights like an aerial chase passing through a factory warehouse, or hundred-foot high robots marching in murderous rank down the streets of New York, or aircraft carriers hovering in the clouds on giant propellers. First-time writer/director Kerry Conran made the entire film using a unique and painstaking approach, shooting all of the actors on a bare blue stage, then literally “painting” the sets, action, even many of the extras, around them using a computer program he spent six years tweaking and testing. In a way, Sky Captain could be considered an animated film whose lead characters just happen to be filmed and inserted in, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in reverse. But Toontown had nothing on this.
The New York City of 1939 towers out of the clouds like some retro-futuristic (if that isn’t a real term, this movie just invented it) post card memory. Snow swirling around it, a giant Zeppelin docks at the top spire of the Empire State Building. On it is a man who believes he is in danger. He passes a briefcase off to a messenger, then disappears.
And we’re off on a globetrotting adventure, where ace pilot Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan (Jude Law), and his one-time paramour, intrepid reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) find themselves neck deep in kidnapped scientists, those giant robots, the lost paradise of Shangri-La, an uncharted island in the middle of the ocean, and a fiendish master plan to bring about the end of the world.
The mastermind is mad German inventor Dr. Totenkopf, who is played by Laurence Olivier, and your eyes aren’t deceiving you. A blend of archive footage of the late Olivier acting in his younger days is painstakingly pieced together – and you wonder why they went through the ghoulish trouble until you see Olivier’s “performance”, and you’re reminded of the sheer power with which he was able to command the screen. And as you learn more about Totenkopf’s character, the casting makes a strange kind of sense.
If you’re getting the impression Conran left nothing in the toybox, you are right. You could build a long checklist just out of the movie references he makes – Star Wars and King Kong are the easy ones, it’s when you spot the Marathon Man joke that you’re really on the vibe. The movie is such an orgy of geek-dream images that you find yourself in deep sympathy with Polly Perkins, who is stuck with only two shots left in her camera and is constantly agonizing whether to take a picture of what’s in front of her, or wait on the chance that something even more stupefying is going to come along five minutes hence. It usually does.
So it pains me to confess that, although alone they are worth a lot to me as virtues, astonishment and excitement are the only emotions I take away from the movie. It’s striking, it’s utterly unique, but I never found myself emotionally plugged in to the story. Sky Captain and Polly Perkins arrive on screen as ready-made icons, it’s like you know in advance that, as people, they’re not going to change or grow in any significant way.
You knew Luke Skywalker was going somewhere. You were told Neo was going somewhere (and you wished, in retrospect, he had gone somewhere more interesting). You watched Frodo Baggins go somewhere. When Totenkopf’s scheme is foiled (and do you doubt it will be?) Sky Captain will still be Sky Captain, only maybe he and Polly will be back to smooching again, for the moment. That works for the Silver Age comic books and movie serial derring-do that feeds Conran’s mojo, but in a movie it hobbles any potential for gripping your heartstrings.
This is no fault of the actors, who do the best they can under unusual filmmaking circumstances. Jude Law cuts a dashing enough figure that you begin to think that, maybe he wasn’t a movie star back in the 30’s and 40’s, but maybe he should have been. Paltrow has a worse time, fluctuating between an accent that sounds like Katharine Hepburn at her well-bred city gal-sassiest, and the flat tones of someone who has no idea what she’s looking at, because it doesn’t exist yet.
It’s Angelina Jolie, who as Commander Franky Cook (in charge of the afore-mentioned flying aircraft carrier, and a happily forthright rival for Sky Captain’s affections) injects real pleasure into the movie in what amounts to an extended cameo. She seems to bond with the movie’s sense of pop wonderment on a genetic level, and has the audience in the palm of her hands right up to her showstopping exit.
I don’t know how many movies are ever going to get made using the techniques of Sky Captain. I don’t know if enough audience members will embrace its oddities, its awkward moments, and its ultimate chilliness to give Kerry Conran the chance to make another movie on this scale. But I know that he has made a movie that exists proudly and admirably outside of what the average movie dares try to show us. Somewhere in there, some fantastic thing you once imagined as a child has a close cousin splashed across the screen.