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Sky Captain and the World of
Tomorrow
I’ve Just Been to a Movie: Sky Captain
and the World of Tomorrow
Directed by Kerry Conran
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
I’ve just been to a movie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to be
precise. It wasn’t what I was expecting, well not quite. The trailers
had all indicated a film with the look of 40’s SF magazine covers, and
that was certainly the case. What I hadn’t expected was how much the
film is a nod to special effects masters of films past, unhappily
saddled with a script so lacking in coherence, with dialog so petrified
calling it wooden would be a compliment.
This is fantasy, science fantasy if you prefer, imagined as it might
have been from some visionary in the 1930s. Giant machines stalk the
earth and fill the skies, machines so fantastic they have no counterpart
even today. They are wonderful to look at, menacing, monstrously
proportioned, metallically malevolent, utterly unlike anything produced
in our real world. They come directly from pulp SF magazine covers from
the 30s and 40s and 50s, magazines with names like Amazing and
Astounding and Science Fiction Plus.
The look is remarkably well done. Colours are slightly washed, tinged
sepia, vaguely shadowed as if to remind the viewer that this is the
future after all, and the future is a murky business. Buildings are out
of all proportion to the puny humans that stalk through them. The office
of newspaper writer Polly Perkins’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) editor is
wonderful, with a ceiling so high it disappears beyond the screen. They
come from a day when people meant it when they said they dreamed big.
The film looks so good it begs for a script that will show itself off,
but there the problems begin. The film is set just prior to what would
be the Second World War. The dirigible Hindenburg III docks at the top
of a New York skyscraper, and within moments a man disappears. He is, it
turns out, the sixth scientist to go missing, but he did manage to get a
note of warning off to number seven.
Number seven contacts Polly Perkins, who favours the sleek lines of a
trench coat and the hairstyle of the drama queens from the heyday of
black and white films. She looks terrific, and the murkiness of the film
seems to draw out her classic looks. She is the intrepid reporter of the
fearless Lois Lane type, and she agrees to meet number seven despite the
fatherly concern of her editor (Michael Gambon). The two meet in a
theatre playing The Wizard of Oz.
Number seven vanishes, and the first of the dread machines appear, giant
robots that fly into the heart of the city, then stomp through the
streets impervious to anything the police can throw at them. Only one
man can help, Sky Captain, aka Joe Sullivan, played by Jude Law. Cue the
hero, the dashing aviator, flying in to save the day in his suspiciously
WW II* style aircraft, machine guns blazing. He manages to disable one
of the machines just as it threatens to stomp on Polly.
Later that day, Joe flies to his secret base only to find Polly sitting
in the dark waiting for him, which makes one wonder just how fast she
can drive from the rubble strewn streets of the big city over various
mountains to Joe’s secret (!) headquarters. They argue. They are, of
course, a broken romance in which the fire still burns. More or less.
Paltrow pulls it off, but Jude Law has always been curiously pale,
almost vacant on screen despite his angled good looks, and here in the
shadows and the overall brownishness of the film, he all but disappears.
When Angelina Jolie appears as Franky Cook, (after much destruction,
some detective work, a miniature elephant in a bell jar, the kidnapping
of Sky Captain’s sidekick, and a trip to Shangri-La) Jolie looks
positively lifelike next to Law.
Wait a moment – just how did Polly get to Sky Captain’s base before he
did? We’re not told, and that is a cheat. Indeed the entire script is a
cheat, as if the producers – and there are many, many producers, which
is never a good sign – couldn’t be bothered to worry about internal
consistency. Yes, the film might be adolescent fantasy wrapped in a
trendy yesteryear kind of look, but that doesn’t mean that inside the
fantasy things aren’t required to make sense.
The most offensive moment, offensive because the filmmakers are simply
insulting the audience, happens in Shangri-La. It is one of the few
scenes (the only one, actually) when character development might take
place. At which point the film just goes away. Joe and Polly have
tracked down a base of the arch-villain behind the giant machines
stalking and raping the earth. It is abandoned, but it was once a slave
mine, and all those forced to work in it have died but one old, horribly
disfigured, pain-wracked man.
The man gives the dynamic duo the location of the villain in return for
a favour: the man wants Sky Captain to kill him. How will Sky Captain
respond to the request? How will Polly respond to Sky Captain’s choice?
I won’t tell you, and not because I don’t want to spoil the surprise but
because there isn’t an answer. The film simply cuts from the request to
Sky Captain and Polly flying off to find the villain.
The film suggests that Sky Captain kept his word (he gets the hint from
the man, after all) but that makes both Sky Captain and Polly pretty
cold fish – not a thought for the mercy killing, straight back to the
low key verbal sparring. It’s a cheat, and it would really tick me off
if the film didn’t at least balance the cheating with some – many – nods
to films past, films that all have a special effects connection.
The Wizard of Oz connection is set up early in the film when Polly meets
number seven in the theater, just in case you miss the later reference.
King Kong gets a nod, Jurassic Park, Matrix, Star Wars, and – well, you
get the idea. All these films have their place in the history of special
effects development, and Sky Captain has been relentlessly marketed as a
watershed, the first of the new world of dominantly CGI films. Actors
will have to live and die from now on in front of the blue screen.
The tribute to film history at least made the film fun to watch. That
and the visual beauty of it: CGI can be fabulous. There’s been nothing
on film quite like Frankie Cook’s flying aircraft carrier or the
wondrous variety of robots so unlike Lucas’s anthropomorphized, bumbling
pair. Still, Sky Captain could have been so much more memorable an
achievement if the CGI had been bent to the ends of an internally
consistent story and not the other way around. But then that’s
Hollywood, too. Sadly, some things never change.
____________
* This is a problem. In the film,
it seems that WW II hadn’t happened yet, which makes Sky Captain’s plane
a problem, although he has a genius for a sidekick, so the anomaly can
slide if it has to. But it isn’t the only inconsistency: More than once
World War One is referred to as World War One, which wasn’t what anyone
called it until after World War II – which hadn’t started yet. It’s a
small mistake, but it’s annoying.
