Originally released September 17, 2004:

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow started as a six-minute home movie by Kerry Conran. He used computer software and blue screens to recreate New York City and depict a zeppelin docking at the top of the Empire State building. The six-minute short, which Conran spent several years completing, caught the attention of producer John Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes). He commissioned Conran to flesh out a feature film, where computers would fill in everything except the actors (he even used the original short in the feature film). The dazzling, imaginative results are Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Polly (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a reporter in 1930s New York. She?s investigating the mysterious disappearance of World War scientists when the city is invaded by a fleet of robots. The city calls out for the aid of Sky Captain, a.k.a. Joe (Jude Law), a dashing flying ace that happens to also be Polly?s ex. Joe and Polly form an uneasy alliance. He wants to stop Totenkopf (archived footage of Laurence Olivier) from sending robots around the globe and rescue his kidnapped mechanic, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi). She wants to get the story of a lifetime, a madman spanning the world to abduct scientists, parts, and the required elements to start a doomsday device. Along the way, Captain Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie) lends her help with her flying amphibious brigade. Together they might stop Totenkopf on his island of mystery.

Sky Captain is a visual marvel. It isn’t necessary a landmark, as actors have performed long hours behind green screen before (just look at the Star Wars prequels). Sky Captain is the first film where everything, excluding props the actors handle, is digitally brought to life inside those wonderful computers. The results are breath-taking, like when Polly enters Radio City Music Hall or during an underwater dogfight with Franky’s amphibious squadron. Sky Captain is brimming with visual excitement. The film is such an idiosyncratic vision that there’s no way it could have been made within the studio system.

Sky Captain has definite problems. For one, the characters are little more than stock characters going through the motions. The story also takes a backseat to the visuals. The dialogue is wooden and full of clunkers like, “You won’t need high heels where we’re going.” Generally the dialogue consists of one actor yelling the name of another character (examples include: “Dex!” “Joe!” “Polly!” and “Totenkopf!”). My father remarked that watching Sky Captain was akin to watching What Dreams May Come, because you’re captivated by the painterly visuals enough to stop paying attention to the less-than-there story and characters. The characters running onscreen also appears awkward, like they’re running on treadmills we can’t see, reminiscent of early 1990s video games.

Let’s talk then about those characters then. Paltrow’s character is generally unlikable. She’ll scheme her way toward whatever gains she wishes, but not in a chirpy Lois Lane style, more like a tabloid reporter. She whines, she yells, she complains, she berates, and she doesn’t so much banter as she does argue. Sky Captain is more enigmatic as a character. He seems forever vexed. Jolie’s Captain Franky Cook gives her another opportunity for her to use her faux-British accent. Jolie’s character is the strong-willed, sexy, helpful heroine that should be the center of the film, not Paltrow’s pesky reporter.

It’s also a bit undignified to assemble Laurence Olivier as the villain. It’s very unnecessary, but at least he wasn’t dancing with a vacuum cleaner.

Now, having acknowledged the flaws of Sky Captain, I must now say this: I do not care at all. This is the first time I’ve totally sidestepped a film’s flaws because of overall enjoyment. I have never felt as giddy as I did while watching Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. When the giant robots first showed up I was hopping in my seat. When I saw the mixture of 1930s sci-fi, adventure serials, and Max Fleischer cartoons, I was transported to being a little kid again. No movie has done this so effectively for me since perhaps the first Back to the Future. I loved that we saw map lines when we traveled from country to country. I love the fact that the radio signal hailing Sky Captain is reminiscent of the RKO Pictures opening.This is a whirling, lovelorn homage that will make generations of classic movie geeks will smile from ear to ear. I don’t pretend to brush over the flaws, with which story and characters might be number one, but Sky Captain left me on such a cotton-candy high that my eyes were glazing over.

One could actually make a legitimate argument that the stock characters, stiff dialogue, and anemic story are in themselves a clever homage to the sci-fi serials of old, where the good guys were brave, the women plucky, and the bad guys always bent on world domination. I won?t make this argument, but it could lend credence more toward the general flaws of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Sky Captain is an exciting ode to influences of old. It’s periodically breath-taking in its visuals and periodically head scratching with its story, but the film might awaken childhood glee within the viewer. I won’t pretend the film isn’t flawed, and I know the primary audience that will love Sky Captain are Boomers with a love and appreciation for classic cinema. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow will be a blast for a select audience, but outside of that group the film’s flaws may be too overwhelming.

Nate’s Grade: B+

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

When I first watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in 2004, I was dazzled by its gee-whiz retro-futuristic homages and cutting-edge special effects. I wrote it felt like an appeal to your “Dad’s cinephile dad,” tapping into adventure serials and quaint sci-fi of Old Hollywood like Metropolis and Flash Gordon and German Expressionism and Max Fleischer cartoons. It was a giant nostalgic bombardment to a cinephile’s pleasure center. Now twenty years later, re-watching Sky Captain leaves me with a very different feeling. I found the majority of the movie in 2024 to be rather boring, and the special effects, while immersive and something special twenty years prior, are now dated and flawed. The whole thing propping up this underwritten homage enterprise are these murky visuals, making the ensuing 100 minutes feel much longer and more strained. It was transporting for me back in 2004, but now it just feels like empty homage run amok and lifted by special effects marked with an asterisk of history.

Sky Captain reminds me of 2001’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a momentary breakthrough at the time of its release in special effects technology that was inevitably to be passed, thus serving as little more than a footnote in visual effects history. It’s now less compelling to revisit. At the time, entire movies weren’t constructed on giant green screen stages and completely in the powerhouse computers processing new worlds of imagination. Now, it feels like most studio blockbusters above a certain budget are completely shot on large, empty green screen warehouses. Now we have entire movies constructed in a three-dimensional play space inside a computer, like 2016’s The Jungle Book and 2019’s The Lion King. It wasn’t even that much longer before another artist would replicate writer/director Kerry Conran’s everything-green-screen-for-maximum-style approach. Just a few months later, in April 2005, Robert Rodriguez released the highly stylized Sin City movie, bringing to vivid life the striking monochromatic artwork of Frank Miller’s celebration of film noir, pulp comics, and busty dames. In that case, the visuals nearly pop off the screen, fashioning something that cannot be served through live-action alone. Re-watching Sky Captain, I found a lot of the visual effects to be dark and blurry, like the filmmakers added a grimy filter. Maybe it was an ode to making the effects less polished to better replicate its older influences, or maybe it was simply a matter of hiding its budget, but the effect is still the same, making the onscreen visuals that much harder to fully observe and appreciate. If the appeal is going to be the then-cutting-edge special effects, then don’t make choices that will mitigate that appeal.

The story is so episodic and flimsy, held together only by the references it bestows. I understand that Conran was trying to recreate the screwball banter of Old Hollywood, but I found the relationship between Sky Captain (Jude Law) and his ex Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) to be excruciating. The bickering is heightened, as the overall tone of the movie is generally heightened, but that makes all human interaction feel wrongly calibrated. Polly comes across as obnoxious, worthy of being booted at many points throughout the globe-trotting adventure. She gets into trouble repeatedly while whining about her big journalistic scoop, or rehashing who was at fault for the detonation of their relationship. I think Law has better chemistry with Angelina Jolie, who appears late as a flying navy commander, and even Giovanni Ribisi as Sky Captain’s trusty ace mechanic. These people feel like they understood the assignment, playing into the heightened pulpy nature. Paltrow is hitting the wrong notes from the start, so her character comes across as annoying and in constant need of rescue. There’s a reason that Conran keeps the plot busy and skipping from one set piece to another, because the more time spent with our two main characters the more you realize they would be better served as transitory archetypes in a short film.

In many ways, it feels like Conran was worried that he might never direct another movie again, and so Sky Captain includes just about every nod possible to his influences. It can become its own Easter egg guessing game, making all the connections to stories film properties of old, like King Kong, War of the Worlds, The Wizard of Oz, to lesser known titles like Captain Midnight and King of the Rocket Men. There’s hidden worlds with dinosaurs, spaceship arks for a fresh start, and Laurence Olivier reappearing as manipulated archival footage as our mysterious deceased mad doctor. It’s somewhat fun to watch Conran be so transparent about his passions and influences. However, all these reverent homages and special effects closed loops are attached to a thin story with grating characters. Again, for a very select audience, dissecting all the reference points will be its own entertainment. For most viewers, Sky Captain will be a tin-eared bore that keeps throwing more reference points into its ongoing stew. Any ten minutes chosen at random will have the same value and impact as any other ten minutes throughout the movie.

Perhaps Conran was prescient because he has no other feature film credits in the ensuing twenty years. There was a point where he was attached for the big screen John Carter of Mars adaptation (as was Robert Rodriguez at one point) but he eventually left for unknown creative reasons. Considering how much buzz Sky Captain had as a project from an unknown outside the system, you might think it would serve as a proof of concept to at least get Conran to helm some other mid-level studio project.

The lasting legacy of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow will be its look, now replicated by many studio blockbusters, though Conran and his team did so without the same studio coffers. The thing I’ll remember most about Sky Captain isn’t my own enjoyment but my father;s a man who grew up reading pulp sci-fi magazines, watching saucer men movies, and instilling in me a love of older movies. I remember the delight this movie seemed to unleash inside him, returning him to a euphoric sense of his childhood. That’s the association I’ll have with this movie, even if my own entertainment level and appreciation has noticeably dipped in twenty years. I know there are other fans out there who may feel that same childlike wonder and glee from the movie. I hope you do, dear reader. For me, for now, it’s like seeing behind the magic trick and wishing you could still feel the same current of exhilaration. Alas.

Nate’s Grade: C