Pulp Science Fiction
Sky Captain Returns to the Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

From the opening shot of the Hindenburg III docking with the Empire State building on a snowy, New York evening, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow completely pulls in audiences to a make-believe world. Set in the late 1930s, the world of Sky Captain is a romanticized one that never existed outside of comic books, science fiction magazines, and movie serials. This is a world of good versus evil, where an intrepid girl reporter and a hot-shot pilot can truly save the day.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Joe Sullivan (Jude Law, center) and intrepid reporter Polly (Gwyneth Paltrow, right) enlist the help of a friend (Angelina Jolie) in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. (Paramount, 2004)
Directed by: Kerry Conran
Written by: Kerry Conran
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Giovanni Ribisi, Angelina Jolie, Ling Bai, and Laurence Olivier

Rated PG (for sequences of stylized sci-fi violence and brief mild language)
Running time: 107 min.

FilmGuru's Rating : 9 out of 10.

Gwyneth Paltrow is Polly Perkins, a reporter for The Chronicle. When scientists begin disappearing, she is covering the story. It is no surprise, therefore, when a remaining scientist contacts her in hopes that she can aid him. Dr. Jennings (Trevor Baxter) fears that the other scientists were captured by a mysterious man named Totenkopf. Before Polly can understand the enormity of what is going on, the city is attacked by an army of giant robots.

Luckily the good guys have an ace up their sleeve. The Sky Captain, Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), wings into action and manages to halt the advance of the column of mechanized terror before it can finish its mysterious goal. After the skirmish, he tries to find out where the robots are coming from so he can stop them. Along the way, the Sky Captain will call on his numerous friends to assit him, including his gum-chewing engineer, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), and Capt. Francesca 'Franky' Cook (Angelina Jolie) with her fleet of British airships.

The city of New York has a sepia-like quality, as if the audience is looking at an old photograph. It is shaded in muted tones, giving it a feeling that it is always night there or always winter. The skies, by contrast, are a vivid blue where everything stands out in stark relief. There are more than earth and sky to be explored in Sky Captain, however, and each new landscape is more dazzling, more beautiful than the last.

Included in this amazing film are some very sublime nods to science fiction and fantasy films of old. The giant robots were inspired by the old Max Fleischer Superman cartoon "Mechanical Monsters." A newspaper headline from Japan has a distinct likeness of Godzilla's shadow in the photo. A tiny elephant (a tribute to Ray Harryhausen's work in Valley of the Gwangi) is in Dr. Jenning's lab. (The door of the lab is number 1138, as in George Lucas' THX 1138.) A view of a sunken ship shows it to be The Venture, the ship that brought King Kong back from Skull Island. And one camera shot in the Himalayas seems to be an homage to the end of Planet of the Apes.

There is also an homage of another sort. Sir Laurence Olivier, who died back in 1989, makes something of a guest appearance here. Using stock from old films and archive footage, the special effects crew made Olivier into the villainous Dr. Totenkopf, or at least his hologram. Much like the Great and Powerful Oz, Olivier is not the man ultimately discovered behind the curtain.

Other reviews of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow all center on writer/director Kerry Conran and his vision to use a computer to literally build the world that the actors inhabit for the film. His idea, however, is no more visionary than Walt Disney's use of animation and live-action in Song of the South or the 1982 computer world of Tron. The difference here is that for the most part it all looks so unbelievably real.

The beauty of the film lies not in the outstanding special effects, but in the amazing creation of a world that never existed. The universe of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is not a paradise, but it is a future we once were promised. As anachronistic as it may be, the world of the Sky Captain seems to be a brighter future than any we have now.