My husband and I found Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow<\/i> to be a fun film. My mom would have gotten a kick out of this homage to science fiction of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, because it takes everything she loved as a kid and puts it in one big, entertaining movie. There are a huge number of references to a huge number of classic golden-age SF books, movies, comics, and serials. Sky Captain<\/i> was particularly inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis<\/i>, the original Buck Rogers<\/i>, and Max Fleischer’s Superman<\/i> cartoons. <\/p>\n
The influence of Fleisher’s animation is imprinted on practically every frame. The giant killer robots are right out of the Superman<\/i> cartoons … and really, that’s no bad thing, because Fleisher’s loot- and lady-stealing robots were just cool.<\/p>\n
What was a little less<\/i> cool was the artistic decision to model the cars of the world of Sky Captain<\/i> on Fleisher’s cartoon cars. Since 1930s automobiles are real-world objects (and beautiful objects at that), seeing matte-finish, cartoony cars kicked me out of the scenes.<\/p>\n
Another possibility was that the filmmakers simply didn’t have time to re-render the cars to improve their specularity and make them look a bit more realistic. Sky Captain<\/i> took six years to make, and I can easily picture a studio boardroom conversation in which the producers told writer\/director Kerry Conran “No more rendering! You’re done! We’ve given you enough money, and enough time, and this needs to go to theaters. It looks fine<\/i>“<\/p>\n
And in the main, the computer-generated movie looks more than fine; much of the movie is breathtakingly gorgeous. However, there are places where rendering was clearly not quite ready for public consumption. There’s a scene late in the movie where a skeleton falls to the floor, and the skeleton just plain looks bad<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Also, the entire film is in soft-focus. That got really hard on the eyes in the movie theater, though on the small screen it’s not so bad. I guess the filmmakers decided to do this to give the film a glow of nostalgia as well as to cover up some lingering digital seams; either way, I wish the film had been sharper.<\/p>\n
But those are quibbles, really. A fight scene late in the movie that manages to reference both Star Wars<\/i> and Evil Dead II<\/i> mostly makes up for it.<\/p>\n
Seeing this movie without being familiar with the classics it’s based on is a bit like seeing the Kill Bill<\/i> movies without having any knowledge of 70s kung fu flicks or Sam Peckinpah’s creations — you’ll probably enjoy it, but not as much as the film geeks in the room who’ll be chortling at all the references.<\/p>\n
Oh, yeah: there are real people in this movie, too, and in the main they do a good job. Gwyneth Paltrow has seemed flat in many of her roles since she won her Oscar, but her sulky manner serves her well as Polly Perkins; in the old days, Carole Lombard would have played Perkins, and Paltrow fits the bill.<\/p>\n
And the use of Sir Laurence Olivier’s face and likeness to create a new character is surely the shape of things to come in digital cinema. In the world of tomorrow, I expect we’ll be seeing the resurrection of many a matinee idol.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"