Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

I saw this in the theater with my dad when it came out, and hadn't thought about it since then. As far as movies meant to evoke old adventure serials from the '40s go, I'd stick with Indiana Jones or the Rocketeer.

The heavy reliance on CGI runs up against the limits of that technology in 2004, so sometimes it looks pretty good, and other times there's just too many robots, or the interactions between actors and CGI looks off. The designs on the robots seem appropriate for the era; the giant robots in the initial attack on New York wouldn't have been out of place in one of those Fleischer Superman cartoons. And there was one shot of the flying machines before they swoop down on the Sky Captain's base that I would have sworn was drawn. It looked like something out of an old Disney film. Might have been my favorite looking scene in the movie. The soft focus gets old after a while. Maybe they were doing that to help cover some of the CGI's weakness?

As action heroes go, Jude Law is. . . OK. He has a good enough smug grin you don't mind when he gets shown up. He's very much in that Han Solo school of guys who think they're a lot more slick and competent than they are. Not that Gwenyth Paltrow's reporter, Polly Perkins, is an ace. She opens the film meeting a scientist who explains he was part of a team hired by a mad genius, and all the members of the team are being abducted. He says there is only one left, and Polly asks who it is. After he just told her he was one of the scientists and he is standing there, not abducted, but terrified. Like perhaps he expects to be abducted himself, maybe.

Paltrow and Law do alright as an uneasy duo forced to work together. They squabble and snipe at each other well, frustrate each other. The movie got a couple of laughs out of me there. I didn't buy simmering romantic tension that was supposed to be there, but you can't win 'em all.

I appreciate the attempt at what the film was going for, I'm not sure it was able to pull it off, though.