Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: The Unreal McCoy

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow:
The Unreal McCoy
by Dileep Rao

Writing a review for this film is like trying to decide how you feel about a strange new dish. There are parts of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow that are thrilling and hair-raising. The chases through the canyons of parallax Manhattan circa 1934 or so are amazing. The dialogue is at times funny and moves at an exciting clip. The plot, for all its shenanigans, is fun. This is in many ways a fun movie.

The way I began this review must have you waiting for the other shoe to drop, and here it is: this movie isn't ready for prime time. The technology that Kerry Conran, the film's director, relies on is just not real. This is an animated film. It looks like an Atlantis or Final Fantasy much of the time. That which is supposed to pass for photographically real doesn't. There is, instead, a continuum that the filmmakers hope you buy; some of it almost looks real, some doesn't. But worse still is that the whole movie looks as if it's been shot through the Milk of Magnesia that Jude Law's Sky Captain is oft ingesting. In order to have the effects (of which this film is nearly entirely comprised) blend with the live action, the film has been shot in near murk; everything is clouded in a brown and gray haze, and white foggy bits obscure so much of the edges of all the objects, the whole thing is continually unreal.

This is the film's primary limitation: you can't cozy up to its characters or situations because none of it looks believable, yet you know it's supposed to be passing as realism. The cast, headed by Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, is terrific. Angelina Jolie is sharp in her supporting nod and Giovanni Ribisi is quite good, perhaps even understated (something he should learn to do more often). He is usually so thinly overacting as to turn his role into a caricature. Here he very nearly walks off with every scene he's in. It's a welcome change.

Conran's plot is also entirely unwieldy. Too much goes on in this picture to truly follow, and when you do, it's transparently (sometimes pathetically) overwound. Much is unmotivated and there is a large trip to Nepal that is utterly unnecessary, something that is a red alert in a film that's just one hundred six minutes long. I won't reveal too much except to say there are a number of scientists herded up by an arch villain (who turns out to be played by a resurrected Lord Laurence Olivier, surely a harbinger of doom to come if the digiticians have their way) who longs to destroy the world, but for an all-too-utopian purpose that is more far-fetched (if less ordinary) than megalomania. It's a hoot, but this is an adventure film. Where Raiders of the Lost Ark was fanciful, it was a passerby in history; it snuggled up to known facts and played them artfully in a passing fancy. This film suffers from its placement. There are stupid errors with history (a scientist says he was in Germany "before the First World War," but at that time, no one suspected a second one enough such that the first would need a reference) and it exists in an off-shoot universe that is explicitly not ours.

I'd like to make a mild, related digression. For all the whiz-bang effects imagery we are now asked to follow, one unmistakable fact has come through: digital is not ready to take over filmmaking. It has its place, and when used skillfully can add a heretofore unrealized imagination to a picture. As a substitute for sets, props, characters, actors, hell for production design, it is a failure. When it fills the screen, the whole enterprise seems shoddy and cheap, unable to bear the scrutiny of true focus (hence the ever present murk or fog) or stand up as a foundation for a story. Digital is like the aging beauty who begs to make love with the lights off: she doesn't get it--we want to see. That's the whole thing with pictures, we want to see, we long to focus to take in those sights and pleasures, not have them rounded off and squeezed into dizzying motions so we can't see the flaws.

The truth is, digital isn't here. In terms of the information it transmits, it isn't as good as 35 mm film. And Hollywood pictures were, at one time, shot on 70 mm film. Have you seen Patton or Lawrence of Arabia on a pristine 70 mm print? The sight will blow your eyes out.

Films like Sky Captain have very poor color saturation (they would have you believe that desaturated picture is a look, an aesthetic choice; it isn't). The blacks are never dark enough and the motion of objects is not true. The blur effect, as captured on film, is not replicated in the computer. Nothing has the life, yet, of a photographed object. Sky Captain is a moderately inventive dip into a pearlescent pool of fantasy. But it never lets us forget that none of it is here to stay.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.