Movie Review: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Andrew Berry
ENC1101
Instructor Robert James
Keiser University
March 19, 2013
Movie Review: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
In the elegant murk of "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow slip into comic book archetypes of the dashing aviator and the intrepid girl reporter with supreme confidence. Superman, Lois Lane and a flight-suited Errol Flynn, not to mention Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and even James Bond, pop to mind as you watch Mr. Law's suave airman, Joe Sullivan (a.k.a. Sky Captain), and Ms. Paltrow's sexy tomboy swap teasing banter en route from New York to an Asian Shangri-La. In smaller roles, Angelina Jolie, playing Franky Cook, a fearless British air commander (and ex-fling of Joe's), and Giovanni Ribisi as Joe's gum-chewing lieutenant and wizardly tech engineer, Dex Dearborn, sustain the same glitch-free tone of pulp nostalgia updated with the gentlest hint of irony.
Can "Sky Captain" establish a swashbuckling franchise as commercially potent as the Indiana Jones movies? That's asking a lot. But when the movie — conceived, directed and written by Kerry Conran, in a remarkable filmmaking debut — remembers that storytelling and characters matter more than design and special effects, "Sky Captain" charms as well as impresses. If nothing else, "Sky Captain" is a landmark in computer-generated imagery. Its actors cavort through an entirely synthetic, computerized retro-styled future world that fuses Art Deco, Futurism, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and the spirit of the 1939 World's Fair into an all-purpose eve-of-World-War-II environment extrapolated into a science fiction limbo. Its cheerfully ominous scenario of a planet invaded by robots that systematically set about stripping the earth of its natural resources resonates in any number of ways without seeming strident or promoting a political agenda. But the visual elegance of the movie comes at a price. If...