Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Reviewed

By Jeffery Vail Sep 21, 2004, 13:37 GMT

Gotham, circa 1939. Snow is falling, and colossal Zeppelins dock gracefully at skyscraper-pinnacles overhead. Ace reporter Polly Perkins is investigating the disappearance of the world’s top scientists when, suddenly, a battalion of giant robots swoops down out of the sky and attacks the city! All indications point to a plot by the sinister mad scientist Dr. Totenkopf, and that can mean only one thing: Sky Captain (and his super P-40 Warhawk fighter plane) to the rescue!

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is the brainchild of novice writer-director Kerry Conran, who shot his lead actors in front of a blue screen and generated everything else in the movie via computer animation. More than anything else, Conran’s  film is a delightful paean to the comic books, sci-fi serials, movies, art deco style, and pulp magazines of the 1930s and ’40s. Its subtitle, “The World of Tomorrow,” was also the theme of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which epitomized the period’s touchingly naïve faith in the whiz-bang technology of the future.

The World’s Fair wowed visitors with such wonders as “Futurama,” a scale model of the miraculous America of 1960; “Elektro” the talking robot and his dog “Sparko”; “Mrs. Modern,” who demonstrated the dazzling power of Westinghouse washing machines; and a huge obelisk and orb called the Trylon and Perisphere (they appear briefly in the film, in fact—although they’re relocated to Tibet!). Sky Captain evokes this era in a fun-loving, boy’s-adventure, unironic way, and as you recognize one by one its multitude of visual references to the period, you can’t help but smile at the wit, inventiveness, and obvious love that brought these pre-WWII dreams of the future to the 21st-century screen.

The film features fantastic locales, creatures, architecture, and gadgetry inspired by Flash Gordon, Max Fleischer’s groundbreaking animated Superman adventures (especially the 1941 episode, “Mechanical Monsters”), The Wizard of Oz, Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (can’t have an homage to thirties adventure without a trip to Shangri-La!), King Kong, the newsreel footage of the Hindenburg disaster, the films of Leni Riefenstahl, Captain America comic books, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and many other high- and low-culture classics of the era. There are many lovely little touches to delight science fiction fans: for instance, the sound of the giant robots’ eye-beams are the very same sound that the Martian heat rays made in George Pal’s 1953 War of the Worlds (I’d know that sound anywhere)!

Because of the nature of much of the source material, it must have been tempting to do this film in black and white, but instead, Sky Captain’s color scheme is dominated by washed-out looking whites, greys, and gunmetal blues, which means the film ends up looking like a clever melding of black-and-white and color.  

Gwyneth Paltrow is done up to look like Veronica Lake, but her performance is a tad too whiny

Gwyneth Paltrow is done up to look like Veronica Lake, but her performance is a tad too whiny. She should have lowered her voice and gone for broke with a full-bore imitation, like Jennifer Jason Leigh did with her Katherine Hepburn impression in the Cohen Brothers’ marvelous Hudsucker Proxy. Jude Law plays the hero, Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan, who shoots a zap gun and pilots a fighter plane that can fly underwater. Law is fine, but his British accent and his rather cold eyes make him really wrong for this role; what’s needed is a super-clean-cut, square-jawed American. (My guess is that he was cast because when he stands next to Paltrow he can sort of remind you of Alan Ladd.) And as pleasing as this movie is, Law is too good an actor to be wasting his time with two-dimensional hero roles like this. Speaking of which, the brilliant British actor Michael Gambon is pathetically wasted in a tiny role as Paltrow’s editor. Angelina Jolie also has a very small part, as another daring pilot who is based in a sort of flying aircraft carrier with a giant Union Jack painted on the side. No acting is required from her in the role, and none is delivered. 

In a fairly weird move, the filmmakers represent Dr. Totenkopf by manipulating old footage of Laurence Olivier and dubbing in a different voice. Totenkopf only appears in crackly, distorted holograms which make Olivier’s face almost unrecognizable, so the trick seems rather pointless. I wonder whether the film wouldn’t have benefited by having a real live actor instead, cackling and hamming it up in true Saturday morning serial style. In addition to having a better villain, the film actually could have used a better hero as well, since Sky Captain is basically just a guy with a special plane. The great pulp heroes of the thirties, like Doc Savage or the Shadow, were a lot more distinctive and interesting.

Sky Captain is all visual style and flair; the plot and characters are sheer Golden Age comic book. But it’s done with such endearing gusto and joi de vivre, and is so fast-paced and buoyant, that the ride really is a lot of fun. It goes a long way toward proving that a movie thoroughly dominated by computer-generated effects can still have heart. Got that, George Lucas?