SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (2004) At last...ornithopters! Sky Captain has the look and feel of a high-end video game and the attitude of one of those early 80's adventure movies that tried to have the look, feel, and attitude of old serials. Apparently shot in its entirety on a bluescreen with real actors, costumes and a few props and using fairly rough CGI effects to paint in the rest, this movie will likely infuriate the brigades of people who are opposed to CGI on principle but are particularly set off by the CGI that isn't completely undetectable. Indeed, nothing here "looks real", but it is not supposed to. Even the close-ups on human faces are given a gauzy, overlit dreaminess to fit in with the movie's retro look, as well as (I suspect) to make less stark the difference between the faces and the pixels behind them. New York City, nineteen thirtysomething. When giant flying robots stomp down in Manhattan and make a mess of things, we are told that the world "Must once again call upon the private mercenary forces of Sky Captain and his army for hire". Actually they just call upon Sky Captain, because his little-in-evidence army for hire gets vaporized one or two scenes later by ornithopters, making this possibly the first live-action (more or less) movie I've seen ornithopters in. Jude Law is Sky Captain (AKA "Joe"), and Gwyneth Paltrow is Polly Perkins, the intrepid reporter who shares a turbulent past with him and wants to get to the bottom of the robot story...and the "top scientists from around the world have been kidnapped" story, which miiiiiiiiiight be connected to the robot story. That's all the ads promise, and there's no point to revealing more except to say that this movie delivers a lot more than the pretty narrow slice of the adventure genre (air combat) its ads would suggest. I wish the most prominent villain (Ling Bai, credited as "Mysterious Woman") had something to say once in a while, but she's agile and convincingly no one to mess with. Battles and chases take place all over the globe and under the seas (!), and a merry time is had by all. The re-use of footage of the late Laurence Olivier to play the film's villain is a decision of questionable taste; clever sure, grave-robbing, maybe. Otherwise Sky Captain is remarkably restrained in the taste department; there's lots of action and explosions, but little in the way of "violent" violence and aside from one unpleasant scene with a failed experiment who begs to be killed (and presumably has his wish fulfilled by Joe, between scenes) is very much a PG movie, without the standard shoehorned-in attempts to naughty it up into a PG-13. As a result, Sky Captain might only much appeal to children below a certain age, and adults with a keen fondness for the early 20th century via early 1980's adventure genre. Guilty on the second count. So the tone isn't too heavy, though many of the attempted laughs fall a little flat (Giovani Ribisi's role as Sky Captain's engineer/mechanic isn't much comic relief). But there is this running gag, involving a camera...I usually hate running gags in movies as they tend to exhaust their funniness in very short order, but Sky Captain has the best running gag I've seen in a while. I will say no more, except that the look on Paltrow's face at the end of the movie depends on it, and what a look that is. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE