MOVIE REVIEW VV

‘Sky Captain’ a Vain Grasp for the Past

A Loving Resurrection of Genres That Have Yet to Die

staff writer

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Written and Directed by Kerry Conran

Starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Bai Ling

Rated PG

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was initially targeted as an event for the beginning of the “summer” movie season. Paramount hoped the film’s combination of anachronistic aesthetics and cutting edge computer graphics would help it to stand out from the typical popcorn flick, but audiences responded to trailers with as much confusion as they did interest and the film’s release was pushed back. It turns out that the pulp/serial style Sky Captain emulates -- tongue firmly in-cheek -- actually, reverberates quite well with the summer formula, for to be self-consciously derivative is still to be unoriginal.

At the start, the zeppelin Hindenburg III is shown docking with an antenna-less Empire State Building, both fixing the film firmly in the past and yet parallel to our history. It’s the reappropriation of passe narrative conventions which takes the film beyond an alternate-reality period piece like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. Radio waves visibly propagate, a la the old RKO logo. Long distance travel is depicted by a plane traversing a map, albeit a CG one. There’s even a “Lucas”-wipe thrown in, but that may have been an easter egg from the Industrial Light & Magic team responsible for most of the CG elements. You might think of Sky Captain as an interpretation of the future pre-Pearl Harbor Hollywood would have concocted if it only had the technology, or you could think of hydrogen-filled dirigibles as a well-masked excuse to have modern-crowd-pleasing explosions.

It’s hard, after all, to get people excited about propeller-powered airplanes, even if they’re somehow tricked out. Sky Captain (Jude Law) has just such a fighter, but he is still unable to defeat a series of giant, anthropomorphic robots which strike Manhattan without warning. He does manage to save the life of intrepid female reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), who in turn demands that he carry her along in solving the mystery of the machines, which he agrees to for plot’s sake. Of course, the two have a romantic history, so on top of dogfights, science-fiction, and detective, we are treated the genre of screwball comedy within the first half hour.

There’s a lot more to the story than Perkins and Sky Captain, which is actually kind of unfortunate. Law and Paltrow are quite convincing as two characters that are essentially in love but effectively contemptuous, which isn’t a dynamic that actually makes sense and thus is hilarious to watch. Every other character around them is unapologetically superficial, existing merely to propel the pair from action sequence to action sequence. Perkins’ boss appears only to keep her from investigating the technological threat, then disappears for the rest of the film. Sky Captain’s comic-obsessed technician Dex (Giovanni Ribisi) pops up whenever the Captain himself lacks the expertise to move further in the story, but we know the nerd can’t perform solo heroics. Captain Cook (Angelina Jolie) exists for the sole purpose of bailing Sky Captain out at a point where even the loopy internal logic of the movie suggests he should lose. Bai Ling gets The Ray Park Award for playing a mysterious and formidable attache to the robots who in the end proves to be good for a few fights and nothing more.

For the film buffs in the audience, her character harkens back to the thirties serial villain “The Lightning,” -- who also wore all black and carried a stick that fired a powerful ray --further reviving an oldie but goodie. To everyone else, she just looks like another member of the legion of black-clad villains, a cross between fellow Lightning-inspiree Darth Vader and Agent Smith. Sky Captain is packed with such references that would have been clever if they hadn’t already been done. While the first wave of robots that attack the city are lifted in design and function from Fleischer Studios’ Superman short, “The Mechanical Monsters,” the same could be said of the far superior Iron Giant. Perkins and Sky Captain are betrayed at one point by a pair of unscrupulous Asians, with the joke apparently being that they speak perfect English, but if we wanted self-righteous exoticism we could watch the Indiana Jones trilogy. Even the film’s lovingly subdued tone of mockery is outdone by the utter camp of Flash Gordon (or, for that matter, Duck Dodgers).

Revisiting the old serial style is such an old trick in of itself that it is not enough to carry a movie. Sky Captain is little more than “The Rocketeer,” a decade later. No doubt the spectacle aspect of the former’s entirely CG backgrounds will seem as dated ten years hence as the latter’s special effects are now. Credit is due to first-time auteur Kerry Conran for convincing Law and Paltrow of the world he created in his head but was invisible on set. However it is a world composed of elements with which we are familiar. Perhaps next time he can concentrate on a dialog-heavy film, since the repartee between Perkins and Sky Captain is much more enthralling than the fuzzy, blue-screen Oz that seems to surround all cinematic characters these days.