"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"

As Polly and Joe try to track down the mastermind behind the low-tech high-tech robot attack -- and the other, similar invasions that follow -- their adventures take them out of Manhattan and as far afield as Tibet and beyond. Eventually, they're shot right into space, although, of course, they do come back. Along the way, Polly meets the woman who has occasionally wiggle-waggled Joe's loyalty to her. And what a wiggle-waggler she is: Capt. Francesca "Franky" Cook (Angelina Jolie) is a crackerjack pilot who wears a silver eye patch as if it were a pasty.

But by the time Franky saunters onto the screen, the zillion-and-one retro references and the nonstop capital-F fun of "Sky Captain" may have begun to wear you out. The beginning of "Sky Captain" has a page-turning swiftness. Its early scenes seem to have been designed to suit a little boy's attention span circa 1939. First, we get some giant killer robots, then some giant winged flying things with sparks zapping off them, then a bunch of mechanical monsters with big tentacles, and so on -- there's some boring stuff in between, with a guy and girl talking, but it doesn't last long.

But the zinginess of the picture's first half-hour is deceptive. The movie is actually designed for a modern attention span -- the damned thing never lets up. By the time we get to one of the movie's centerpiece effects -- Laurence Olivier's reconstituted image, shimmering from beyond the grave, an instance of high-tech grave robbing -- we've been so relentlessly dazzled that we're ready to cry "uncle."

"Sky Captain" is so insistently impressive that nothing as organic as magic ever kicks in. I adored one of the movie's early images: an elephant who had been shrunk down small enough to lounge casually beneath a glass dome. But not long after that, the story began to meander, sometimes at breakneck speeds, which only made things worse. I kept looking to plug into the movie's sense of wonder, but I couldn't find the outlet. Everything, and everyone, looked so right.

Paltrow, in her sharp-shouldered suit, has the comic-strip reporter-heroine act down cold, to the point that it means nothing. Law, who always looks to me as if his limbs are connected by wooden pegs, at least has the correct era-specific aura about him -- he has the stiff elegance of a J.C. Leyendecker ad illustration -- but he's joyless to watch. Giovanni Ribisi, as Joe's comic-book-loving sidekick Dex, gives a real performance here. Unfortunately, he's absent for a huge chunk of the movie, having been kidnapped by those dang tentacled monster-thingies.

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" began as a six-minute short film made by Conran on his computer, and if nothing else, the look of the film speaks of an intense conviction. Conran believes in his movie so much that he almost wills us to believe in it, too. The critic sitting next to me grumbled about the style of "Sky Captain," claiming that it was just a manifestation of a fascist aesthetic, consisting, as it does, of lots of big, gleaming mechanical monsters and modern buildings juxtaposed against small scatterings of tiny, insignificant people. I think that's being too hard on Conran. As I see it, his aesthetic has been shaped more by stuff than by, say, Leni Riefenstahl. From what I can see, I suspect he's in love with puffy tin Buck Rogers ray guns, with softly colored souvenir postcards of the Chrysler Building and the 1939 World's Fair, with Bakelite rotary-dial telephones.

Considering I love all that stuff too, I can't say his heart is in the wrong place. But I eventually realized that I wanted to live in "Sky Captain," not watch it.

It's disappointing that "Sky Captain" reaches so high and so far, and ultimately seems more like a fancy mechanical toy than a work of art we can warm up to -- it's so calculated that it has none of the throwaway, cheapy vitality of the old '30s serials that inspired it. If it's at all possible, Conran may have cared about "Sky Captain" too much. It's a movie with all its fur loved off, and consequently, it gives off no love at all.

• View blog reactions