"Look out, Joe! It's a--"
"Yes, Polly, I see it! It's a review!"
HAMSTER RATING:
DIRECTOR/WRITER: Computer nerd extraordinaire Kerry Conran. Born and raised in Flint,
Michigan, hometown of liberal documentarian Michael Moore.
STARRING: Jude Law (Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Enemy at the Gates) stars as
Joe Sullivan, the indomitable Sky Captain. Gwyneth Paltrow (View from the Top, Shallow
Hal) is Joe’s snippy reporter ex Polly Perkins. Giovanni Ribisi (Gone in Sixty
Second, Saving Private Ryan) is tech-head Dex Dearborn, Joe’s mechanic/best buddy.
Angelina Jolie (Tomb Raider, Gone in Sixty Seconds) plays one-eyed Captain
Frankie Cook, one of Joe’s former lady friends who has a knack for saving his seat.
SYNOPSIS: It’s the 1939 of the comic books. Giant robots begin attacking cities around
the globe, including New York. Reporter Polly Perkins sets out to figure out why. She
reluctantly teams up with her ex-boyfriend, hot-shot pilot Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan, who is
fighting to stop them. When they eventually uncover a sinister plot to destroy the world,
it’s up to them, surprise!, to stop it.
PRESENTATION NOTE: Only the actors and a few personal props are real. Everything else is
computer generated. George Lucas, eat your heart out.
REVIEW: So what do Quentin Tarantino, George Lucas, and Kerry Conran have in common?
Answer: all have made ridiculous sums of money by stealing styles (and plots) from animated
sources and old movies.
Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction display material
straight out of comic books and films of his ’70s childhood, and his latest dialogue-and-gore
heavy Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 are Americanized retoolings of Hong Kong kung fu
films and NC-17 Japanese animation. George Lucas based Star Wars on World War II movies
of the ’50s and ’60s, as well as 1930s Flash Gordon serials and comic books. Mr.
Conran pushes the “acceptable material to rip off” date back even further with Sky
Captain, a heavily filtered, near-sepia-toned foray into the world of Interwar superhero
comics and film shorts.
The results? Mixed.
Who is Captain Sky? What is his mission? What party is concerned? Stay tuned for next week's exciting conclusion (I have no idea who this is)!
There’s no argument that Sky Captain’s presentation is unbelievable.
Everything but the actors is computer generated, and Conran’s attention to detail makes him
worthy of his ultrageek status. Nothing is neglected, from the facades of buildings, to 1930s
period automobiles, to dunes of wind-blown snow. Kerry knows his stuff – he wanted his movie
to look and feel like an overblown, Golden Age RKO production, and it does: the colors, the
lighting, the music, it’s all right on the nose. Even the giant robots, with their oversized
rivets and beaded radio antennae, are perfectly aligned with the aesthetics of the period.
Unfortunately, Kerry’s story and screenplay aren’t equally meticulously rendered.
They’re peripheral and shallow at best, awkward and distracting at worst, and display very
little originality. As awesome as the giant robots look, there’s no denying that Conran
yanked them from a well-known 1930s Superman short and thrust them, completely unaltered, into
his world. Captain’s plot, then, isn’t so much a story to be told, as it is a tangled
web of devices simply meant to pit Kerry’s archetypical Sky Captain against neat-o mechanical
men and giant monsters from someone else’s imagination. Imitation may be the highest form of
flattery, but it makes for a dull movie-going experience for the viewer who is familiar, and a
fan of, the original sources.
This doesn’t mean Kerry’s writing is bad, however. Some of the dialogue misses the
mark but is, in this reviewer’s opinion, significantly superior to both George Lucas’s angsty
whining in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and Tarantino’s incessant,
underdeveloped introspection in Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction. Captain’s
script just behaves like many other sci-fi/action scripts: it serves to connect explosions and
keeps unlucky female dates from walking out, but no more.
Fans of the genre may not care about such things. The general moviegoer, however,
will no doubt leave the theater feeling like a diner who’s missed the main course. Sky
Captain is served up with lots of delicious sauce and seasoning, but ends up as little
more than a bowl of gravy. Very satisfying gravy, but gravy nonetheless.
RATING: 4.5 out of 5 pellets
