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. |
