Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
A Review By John David Ebert

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is the best imitation to date of an Indiana Jones movie. In fact, director Kerry Conran has made one of the best first movies ever made by a newcomer to the screen, a rich homage of references to the history of science fiction movies and pulp fiction magazines. The film itself is actually an elaboration of a six minute black and white short made by Conran as a tribute to the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers-style serials of the 1930’s, which of course was exactly what Lucas and Spielberg set out to do with their Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, and so, in a way this film is a double homage, both to Lucas and Spielberg movies, and also to the kind of movies that they were hearkening back to.

The film is preoccupied with the pop culture of the 1930’s: indeed, much of it can be regarded as a moving gallery of covers taken from pulps of the period like Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Astounding Science Fiction. In one shot of the Empire State building the silhouette of King Kong can be made out climbing the docking tower. But it is loaded with references to other decades as well. The film noir of the 1940’s, for instance, serves as a moody lighting model for many of the shots. Indeed, the film’s primary strength rests upon its visuals, which watches like a cross between Ridley Scott and Orson Welles. The filmmakers claim that the film was shot in black and white and then colorized, so the colors have an exaggerated, fantastic feel to them, like something out of a comicbook. When an army of gigantic marching robots lands and invades New York City, we can only imagine that the imagery is not far off from how Orson Welles might have set up his shots once, long ago. There are also references to the pop culture of the 1950’s, for at one point, a newspaper montage which features a headline story from Japan shows the unmistakable silhouette of Godzilla attacking a building. And the film’s final, climactic rocket ship is taken straight out of Destination Moon.

The music sounds suspiciously like a John Williams score, but this is appropriate since we find visual quotations in scene after scene from Lucas and Spielberg movies. The bringing down of the giant robots watches like a rerun of the ice battle in Empire Strikes Back with the giant walking cargo cranes. The cloud city of that film is reduplicated by a floating fortress in which our protagonist encounters an old friend whom he is uneasy about, reminding us of Han Solo’s relationship with Lando Calrissian. And the graphics display for us visual maps which track our heroes’s progress across the globe, as in Indiana Jones. Indeed, the witty repartee between the film’s romantic leads played by Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow recall the banter between Harrison Ford and Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it is all done in good fun, with taste, and, unlike The Mummy, without camp.

The story, on the other hand, succeeds less well, for it is a series of largely self-contained set pieces that have an episodic feel to them which seem disconnected from the larger narrative. Indeed, the framing narrative in which they are contained is so thin that sometimes one forgets what the individual scenes have to do with it. But all of that is forgivable, since the grandeur and epic sweep of the episodes is handled so expertly that one forgets the story’s flaws.

What, by the way, is the story? Well, let’s see: something about a mad scientist who builds an army of robots who go around stealing the earth’s animals in an attempt to build a gigantic space ark, leave the earth behind, and watch it explode from orbit. You know, the usual war against the machines with which our contemporary psyche has become so obsessed. Here, the planet’s ecology is surrounded and encapsulated by a mechanical environment that attempts to hijack it, like Biosphere II. As Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, ever since Sputnik, we have placed the planet inside an artificial environment, thus turning it into the world’s first global work of art. The ecological consequences of this act will be disastrous, however, but that is another theme handled by other films.

Spielberg and Lucas discovered the first upstart to their kingdom with James Cameron, who came along on their heels in the 1980’s and showed that you didn’t have to be a member of the film school generation of the 1960’s to do good popcorn cinema. But now, that generation must make room for Peter Jackson and Kerry Conran, the new kids on the block. What new tricks these two will have up their sleeves remains to unfold before us in the next decade or two.