Review of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

I highly recommend Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. If you haven't seen it yet, all I can say is that if you like serial-style movies, or Max Fleischer cartoons (the old superman cartoons), or movies set in a Pre-world war II era, go see it. Or even if you like Gwenyth Paltrow or Jude Law. That's all I can say without spoiling anything.

This movie is amazing. Angelina was fun, but wasn't in it much, and what they did with Olivier...I'd forgotten it was him until after the movie was over, and my husband pointed it out. You wouldn't even guess that the actor never actually played the part. Scary.

The flaws I saw were all of the kind that made me go, "did they do that on purpose, or to copy the style of the serials?" Jude Law was great, and Gwenyth was perfect. The thing that makes it especially amazing is that the entire movie, aside from the actors (minus Mr Olivier, of course), was all computer generated. If you sit through the credits, you see that just about every effects studio in Hollywood was involved with the making. And Gwenyth and Jude never make you feel like they're not seeing what's on the screen. I personally think that this stretches Ms Paltrow's talents as much as Shakespeare in Love did, and I thought she was excellent in that.

The movie could basically be split into three different sections: The beginning is the Max Fleischer bit, with the robots invading New York City (which was a touch too realistic after 9/11, despite the fact that it was robots). This was the "superhero" bit, with Jude Law as someone outside the usual official channels who helps the world in extreme situations.

Then, when his base is attacked, it falls into a war-hero serial mode, with the two main characters off to save the world from the evil forces before it's too late. Again, the scenes of destruction here are so realistic that it's a bit overwhelming. But the style keeps it from being to hard to handle. Just as everything gets to be too much, the hero or heroine pop up with a comment, or an action that is straight out of the old serials that could be considered a touch silly nowadays. It keeps the movie from getting too heavy.

The last section of the movie is when they wake up in Nepal (okay, I'm still not going to say exactly where, in case someone didn't listen and is still reading this without having seen the movie first). This is the Adventure/Fantasy type serial, and leads all the way through to the end of the movie, with glimpses of Dragons, underwater architecture, and even a space-ship.

I think what's most amazing to me is the fact that even though I can see the movie in those three forms, it still felt seamless. The scenes blended perfectly from moment to moment. This is a great movie, following the traditions started by Lucas and Spielberg in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and continued by Universal with the Mummy series and Van Helsing. I think, though, out of all of those movies, that this is the one that sticks closest to the original source material. And in doing so, it becomes the most intriguing of the lot.

8/10