Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow
dir. Kerry Conran

Sky Captain is director Conran's life project, a feature film made entirely with blue screens and CGI, and the results are better than I would expect, manufactured from a cold digital machine. Conran imbues the film with the spirit of yesteryear, as the locales, characters and the filmmaking itself lend a lot of nostalgia. Even the title itself is a nod to the serials of the 1930s, something that George Lucas tried to evoke with Episode II - Attack of the Clones. Six minutes of footage in six years (with a Mac) catapulted Conran into investors' lists, surrounded by a dream cast, and landing in the director's chair.

Jude Law takes center stage as Joe 'Sky Captain' Sullivan , a mercenary pilot with a good heart, who functions as mankind's (or particularly Americans') protector in a seemingly pre-World War II world that has futuristic technology at its fingertips. Robots (the clunky, boxy old ones, not even Voltes V class) have attacked New York City and made off with the city's power sources. A mystery for the Captain and his on/off gal, photojournalist Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), who, for all the high tech gadgets around, doesn't even have a digital camera. Maybe she's old school. Which comes back to haunt her in the end (two words: Delete feature).


before GPS, people used to write country names across the land

The robot attacks seem to be directly connected to the mysterious disappearance of famous scientists of the time, and Polly seems to be withholding information from the Captain that might have solved the problem like halfway into the film. The trail leads to a Dr. Totenkopf, who sounds like a mad German scientist bent on world destruction, but its only Laurence Olivier in B&W grainy footage (snicker). Dr. Totenkopf has holed himself up in his own amazing Shangri-La (believe me, you should probably stick to the hotel chain - if you own them), and according to all signs, plans to end the world as they knew it (then).


the real cause of Jude Law's failed relationships

The Captain is not bereft of allies, as we have his trusty brainiac sidekick Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), mountain guide Kaji (hello again, Omid Djalili), and of course, the hubba-hubba devil-may-care almost-superwoman pilot Franky (Angelina Jolie) who doesn't appear till halfway through the movie (dammit!). It turns out Totenkopf has been dead years ago, and they have to stop his ticking doomsday machine and the Noah's ark/rocket that's meant to restart earthly life somewhere, 'cause no one knows where the off-switch is. Talk about the ascendancy of machines.


contrary to speculation, Ms Aniston did not scratch out Ms Jolie's right eye

For all its digital pedigree, Sky Captain still has a soul, with its eye for nostalgia and feel for interesting characters. For the length of the movie, I felt like I went back to my Tom Swift days (who shared reading time with the Hardy Boys) - that kind of tongue-in-cheek sci-fi adventures that sounded so cool for a pre-teenager. I probably couldn't remember any of those books, but they had the exact same effect. The moment I saw Franky's 'helicarrier' fleet in the clouds - I just went, damn. Conran probably opened the doors for more blue screen/CGI-to-death films, but as long as you got a cool story, it'll find audiences.

Yes, it's been a huge backlog and I've only seen this recently (after the DVD came out, which really isn't normally that long after the theatre run). And yeah, it was worth the wait.