The Unseen Movie Review

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

As anyone who has ever seen any films or photos of the era, the 1930s had a wonderful sense of style – a perfect blend of crisply stylised Art Deco and the emergent minimalism of the end of the decade’s modernism. Sleek airships drifted over a New York that saw the Empire State Building dominate the landscape; plush, jet black cars slid majestically along the streets; cinemas showed the futuristic worlds of Flash Gordon; the entire decade (well, bar that unpleasant Great Depression thing at the start and the nasty global war palaver at the end) seemed influenced by Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis. It is little wonder that the 30s have been so supremely influential in Hollywood movies over the last seventy-odd years.

Furthermore, as anyone who has ever read Biggles or who grew up on stories about the Battle of Britain knows, aerial dogfights between nippy propellored ‘planes are cool. Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, newly popular in the West thanks to the success of his Spirited Away, made excellent use of this dictum in 1992’s Porco Rosso, which revolved around a pig in a red ‘plane flying round a 1930s Adriatic tackling sky pirates. This was followed up a few years later by Crimson Skies, a bestselling computer game which followed pretty much the same plot as Porco Rosso and avoided being sued for copyright violation by making the central character human.

Sky Captain takes both these fundamental truths – 1930s = stylish and biplanes = cool – and adds another stalwart of Japanese animated movies: great big giant battle robots.

By rights, this should be the ultimate geek movie – giant robots, exciting action sequences and aerial stunts aplenty, a stylised, Fritz Lang-inspired 1930s New York as the background, a writer/director (first-timer Kerry Conran) obviously well aware of his film history and sources and so on and so forth.

The film does look amazing: bar the actors (well, most of them – Laurence Olivier appears in a cameo despite having been dead for fifteen years) and a few of the props, the entire thing is digital. It’s taking George Lucas’ experiments on the new Star Wars films to the logical extreme, and trying to do without any physical elements wherever possible.

So it’s a shame, really, that the two leads – Jude Law as the eponymous flying ace Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan and Gwyneth Paltrow as a typical Frank Capra-style feisty reporter – are so blandly wooden. (Angelina Jolie and Michael Gambon are far better, but their parts are little more than extended cameos.) It’s almost as if Law and Paltrow have also been created by a computer, so mechanical are their performances.

Nonetheless, the technical mastery and visual invention of Sky Captain, not to mention the sheer number of film references, ensure that this is a film which is not only well worth a look, but then worth a second, closer look. As it is so close to the cutting edge of digital film technology it will no doubt date very quickly, but for its sheer style this has to be up there as one of the films of the year.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM