Last night, Dave and I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I'd been looking forward to the film despite the lame previews (which, it turns out, only reveal scenes from the first half hour of the film) and the piss-poor novelization.
Sky Captain was neither as bad as I'd feared nor as good as I'd hoped. It was fair-to-middling: worth watching if the circumstances arise, but not worth going out of the way to see.
Nearly the entire film was created using bluescreen, a process in which actors perform in a studio, before a blank screen, and the background is added later through digital processes. The problem is that in this movie, it showed. (I cringed at a scene in which Paltrow and Law are looking at an animal in a cage. This scene was obviously filmed with bluescreen. Law is looking at one point, and Paltrow is looking at another point several inches a way. For ten or fifteen seconds. Painful.)
Also, with the exception of a small part from Angelina Jolie, the acting was poor. Gywneth Paltrow, Jude law, and the other five people in the film seemed to be performing in a void. (It doesn't help that I'm not a Jude Law fan. And Gwyneth Paltrow, whom I usually like, here seems out of her element.) Without other actors to react to, and without a physical environment to interact with, the performances seemed hollow.
Also, the digital animation bugged me. We all know how much I hate digital scenes in Peter Jackson's Helms Deep and in Attack of the Clones. There are times I don't like them here, either. Digital animation often looks fake. More often, filmmakers try to make things look far too busy. "Why have a thousand orcs when we can have ten thousand?" Because it looks awful, is overwhelming!
Don't get me wrong. I quite enjoyed parts of the film. There were moments when I could just sit back and bask in the world that writer/director Kerry Conran has attempted to create. I liked the ray gun effects. I liked Franky's flying fortress airstrips. I liked Totenkopf's island and the creatures there (even if we never get an explanation as to the presence of dinosaurs). It's just that these enjoyable moments were eventually overshadowed by the moments that bugged me.
The things that bugged me most were all the little errors. I'm okay if a movie has one or two errors, but any more than that and I'm jolted out of the picture, I lose whatever suspended disbelief I've been able to obtain. This film is riddled with errors. What kind of errors? You name it.
Here are just a few examples, the bits that pop easily to my head:
- Franky: "Look! An island there that's not on any of our charts." Moments later our heroes are plotting a plan of attack using a chart that features detailed information on the water depth, etc. around the island. WTF? I thought it wasn't on any of your charts!
- As our heroes assault the island from beneath the sea, Joe's submersible plane gets a rock stuck in its rudder so that the steering will not answer. Franky comes to his rescue. "Thanks, Franky," he says and he goes on his way, suddenly able to steer thanks to the fact that the rock-in-the-rudder has mysteriously vanished. Again: WTF?
- Our heroes are trapped aboard a rocket ship. Something's going to happen when the ship reaches one hundred kilometers in altitude. For some reason, it takes several minutes to reach this altitude. So what? This ship would never reach escape velocity, never break free of the Earth's gravitational field. But perhaps that's for the best. Because otherwise, how would our heroes be able to walk around the ship during blast off? (I calculate the ship was maybe traveling 2,000 km/hour; escape velocity is twenty times that.)
- Dates, dates, dates. Early in the film we're treated to flying headlines for newspapers dated 17 March 1939 and 19 March 1939. (There are other papers earlier, but I didn't look for the dates.) Later, Sky Captain asks, "What's the date, Polly?" and she replies, "March second." What? They're time travelers? It's a little thing, I know, but enough of these and I lose my ability to suspend disbelief. (Along a similar line, we see two films playing during the story: The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights. The former was released 17 August 1939 and the latter on 13 April 1939. They're both anachronisms in this case. So is the reference to SHAZAM. Captain Marvel didn't make his debut until January 1940.) It also bugged me that the characters kept referring to "World War One", as if the second world war had already occurred. Sorry, Mr. Conran: World War One was still The Great War at this point.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow does not draw on serials in the same way that Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars do. In those films, one can almost imagine the chapter breaks, can see the sometimes blatant references to specific serials. (Especially in Raiders, which has some obvious homages.) These two films also strike a fine note, one that captures the spirit of the serials.
Sky Captain does not.
This review has, as usual, made much of the bad and little of the good. Perhaps that's because the good in this film is never great, and the bad is what tears the story down for me. Without all these complaints, I might actually be able to recommend the film, which is something I cannot do. I'd give the film a C.
On this day at foldedspace.org
2005 — Chapulines José recently received a shipment from his mother in Oaxaca. She sent him traditional Mexican food that he can't find in Oregon, not even in Woodburn. Yesterday he brought grasshoppers.
2003 — A Sense of Community In which I obtain solace from book group and from old friends.
2002 — Reed College 7, FC Saints 1 Another Sunday, another soccer match, another injury.
References I caught:
Most of these are not, as you say, Pulp Serials. They are 50s era SF movies. There were lots of Pulp artwork inspired visuals, though -- Frankies bubble helmet, frex.
(Jude "Sky Captain" Law is adorable, and so is Giovanni "Dex" Ribisi, so :P)