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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
This nostalgically futuristic fantasy has Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and extremely impressive digitally rendered scenery, but, alas, no heart.
Sep 17, 2004 | Kerry Conran's "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is so captivating to look at that you can almost forget there's virtually nothing to it. Set in a nostalgically futuristic fantasy version of New York, circa 1939, "Sky Captain" was filmed with live actors but no sets or locations. This means that its stars, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, are very real, but the zeppelins, toylike fighter planes and giant Machine Age robots -- not to mention the dreamy Radio City Music Hall interior used in one scene -- are not, no matter how much we may want to believe in them.
Every detail was filled in lovingly, or at least obsessively, after the fact, by digital means. The result looks like nothing you've ever seen before, compiled very knowingly from many things you probably have: film noir, sci-fi pulp adventures from the '30s with garishly exhilarating covers, old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, and last, but not least, German Expressionist masterpieces like "Metropolis."
"Sky Captain" has a ravishing, pearly-soft surface luster: It reminded me of those hand-tinted photographs from the middle of last century, pictures of World War II-era sweethearts that began life as ordinary black-and-white snapshots and ended up lovingly embellished pocket masterpieces, their subjects transformed from ordinary wives and girlfriends into Venuses with rose-toned cheeks and dream-colored blouses.
Those photographs, to me, have always represented the ultimate in romantic idealization, and similarly, "Sky Captain" looks more like the object of someone's affection than anything so ordinary as a movie. Visually, it has been labored over so meticulously that the reality of what's underneath has been obscured. In other words, the script (written by Conran), the story and the acting -- not to mention the picture's kitschy, maddeningly clever tone -- all fold themselves into a defeatist heap once you dare to hold them up to scrutiny.
"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"
Directed by Kerry Conran
Starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie
And believe me, I held scrutiny at bay for as long as I could. I loved the first 30 minutes or so of "Sky Captain," in which we meet plucky reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), who wears a charm bracelet with little P's and airplanes on it and whose hair falls down her back in glowing Varga-girl S-curves. (Her tresses look as if they've been lit from within.) Suddenly, New York City is besieged by massive art deco robots (they've flown in from God-knows-where in perfectly precise fighter-jet formation), who stomp through the streets, each footfall a menacing boom. Polly, bravely, snaps pictures of them. And when she finally does decide it's time to make a run for it, she lengthens the slit in her slimly tailored wool skirt by tearing the fabric fearlessly.
But as even the most sure-footed movie heroine sometime does, she falls down, directly in the robots' path, and we get a glimpse of them from a low-slung "camera" angle -- they're like radio-controlled monstrosities from some evil Brobdingnagian toybox.
Luckily, ace airman Capt. H. Joseph Sullivan (Jude Law), better known as Sky Captain, has been notified that his services are needed: He swoops down and saves the day, at least partially, and we learn that he and Polly have something of a history. They snap and crackle -- "I spent six months in a Manchurian slave camp because of you," Joe rails at Polly, referring to some previous instance of her overzealous reporting -- but you can tell that deep down, they love each other a bushel and a peck.
