With its spectacular visual imagery and retro sensibilities, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” is one of the best major studio films so far this year — and one of the most blatantly derivative.
Yet that’s what will make “Sky Captain” so appealing to many film fans. Virtually every frame of this film is drawn out of some other reservoir of film history, whether it’s sci-fi serials, German expressionism, or detective noir. Imagine Dashiell Hammett writing the screenplay to Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis,” and you’ll have a pretty good grasp of where this film’s coming from.
To quickly review, hard-boiled Chronicle reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) wants to know why scientists are mysteriously vanishing. She gets an inkling that something’s amiss when monstrous robots invade downtown and just as quickly disappear. Polly turns to old flame Sky Captain (Jude Law) for assistance, and with the help of airship commander Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie) and retro tech geek Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), the race is on to reveal Dr. Totenkopf’s evil master plan.
That plot summary might seem pretty pedestrian to today’s more sophisticated movie-going audience, which is why the film may find more fans in the over-35 demographic. If you have a fond recollection of watching old 1940’s serials like “Commander Cody,” “Flash Gordon” and “The Adventures of Smilin’ Jack” when Seattle television station KSTW broadcast them on Saturday afternoons in the 1970’s, this is the film for you. If you don’t realize that “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” are themselves homages to those action-adventure serials, then you may quickly lose interest.
The most significant feat of “Sky Captain” is the filmmaking process itself. Director Kerry Conran created more than 2,000 effects shots using live actors against blue screen background, then painstakingly filled in the atmospheric details digitally. The result is a past-meets-future world of Art Deco grandeur, framed in the sepia tones of a hand tinted antique photograph. It’s simultaneously unprecedented and nostalgically familiar. That’s quite an accomplishment in a medium where the expression “everything old is new again” seems to be more appropriately described as “everything old is stale again.”
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