MOVIES: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

I rented Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow last week, the movie where nearly everything but the actors is computer generated. Of the recent CGI-dependent movies, the Lord of the Rings films are at the very top, with CGI that enhances the story and the characters, and the Star Wars prequels are at the very bottom, with nothing to recommend them but the CGI. Sky Captain tries hard, but it still falls toward the lower end of that spectrum, I'd have to say.

Sky Captain is crafted like a long-lost 1930s adventure serial -- one with the biggest budget of all time, but still. The actors play the part as best they can, alternating between non-ironic heroic/romantic grandiosity and screwball banter, and the look of the film plays its part, too; it's in color, but tending toward a washed-out sepia tone, as though the film stock were evaporating color on its way to becoming black & white. And it worked for me, for about a half an hour. Then it just got tiresome. There were a few images that surprised or impressed me, but CGI tends not to hold my interest if there's nothing else to back it up, and Sky Captain has literally nothing else, save the actors.

It's a fine bunch of actors: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, and especially Giovanni Ribisi in a smallish but spirited role. But the story doesn't serve them well. The characters are all but blanks. Law's Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan is unimpressive; he's a fine actor, but I don't think he has the larger-than-life presence required here. And Paltrow's Polly Perkins is just an obnoxious pain in the ass. Her alleged moxie is supposed to make her endearing, I guess, but she just comes across as dumb, selfish, and shrill. She gets saddled with a running gag about how many pictures are left on her camera (which leads to a "wah-waahhh!" final joke) that despite never working is driven just mercilessly into the ground. She's horrible to Sullivan, while supposedly being in love with him; we later find out that they have a history of being horrible to each other: while previously involved, Sullivan spent three months cheating on her with Jolie's character, while Perkins eventually sabotaged a fuel line on his plane, leading directly to his interment in a prison camp for 11 months. Oh, those crazy kids! By which I mean, what a couple of unlikeable shits.

I was going to quibble a bit about the timeline. The fact that Perkins sits in on a screening of The Wizard of Oz at Radio City Music Hall would place the film in 1939, 1940 at the latest, but her later reference to "World War I" is then out of place -- I'm almost positive in 1939 they were still calling it "The Great War," since the U.S. had yet to join what would become known as World War II. But... it seems a little silly to pick on details like that in a movie with flying robots.

I see what the director was trying to achieve here, and I think he almost got it. It's tremendously creative visually, and the retro style almost holds it all together. But the visuals can't shoulder the entire burden, and with an uninvolving story that leaps from setpiece to setpiece without ever stopping to make sense, or even to breathe, coupled with mostly unpleasant or uninteresting characters, the film eventually collapses.