• Written and directed by Kerry Conran
• Starring
  • Gwyneth Paltrow
  • Jude Law
  • Giovanni Ribisi
  • Angelina Jolie
  • Bai Ling

If you had a time machine, what would you do? Save Kennedy? Kill Hitler? Find out what dodo tastes like?

Or maybe you’d gather up all of the most entertaining writers from the pulp era, the most energetic comic book artists, the talented young adventure film directors who despaired of ever realizing any of their visions with the cardboard sets and overbooked soundstages with which they had to work. You’d bring them all forward to the Hollywood of today, show them the modern tools to create literally anything on a movie screen, and stand back with a huge canary-eating smile while their jaws dropped and their dreams soared.

“Yes, Imperious Leader!”

Somehow, I think that’s what Kerry Conran would do. And since the technology to do so is beyond our grasp, he did the next best thing: he made the movie they would have made in the here-and-now if given the opportunity.

In a fantasy hardboiled-era New York, Polly Perkins (Gweneth Paltrow) is the sassy reporter on the trail of a story of disappearing German scientists. Joe Sullivan (Jude Law) is Sky Captain, charismatic private hero with a cadre of devoted fellow pilots and a fighter plane with a shark’s mouth painted along the nose. And their opponents?

Giant robots with laser-beam eyes!

Remote-controlled fighter planes with wings that flap!

Nepalese assassins! Monomaniacal dictators! Malfunctioning rayguns!

“NOBODY makes fun of my fuzzy cuffs!”

If you’ve heard anything at all about this movie, then you’ve heard the novelty of the production: Everything, with the exception of the actors and a few props, was created by computer. And that may be sending up warning flares in your mind, flares that bear the LucasFilm brand. Let me set your mind at ease: Where George Lucas was drunk with the allure of CGI and thus used it without rationale or purpose simply to cram the screen with eyecandy, Conran went into the enterprise with something that dear Mr. Lucas left behind somewhere between 1983 and 1997: a point to it all. Conran’s CGI sets and setpieces are not entities unto themselves, but tools of top-flight production design, recreating a world that never existed except as a fantasy version of the world of the original pulp readers, and the solidity with which it is rendered easily co-opts our suspension of disbelief in this stylized world in a way that Lucas’ flashing cartoons never could.

That’s right. Not just giant robots, believable giant robots striding in lockstep through Manhattan.

Yes, the gun is actually saying, “Ooooooo.”

The computer graphics aren’t entirely flawless, but the moments that leap out at you as being very obviously digital are few and far between — and honestly, those of us who grew up with bluescreen lines around everything shouldn’t complain about a few seconds here and there which fail to fool the discerning eye.

Just as the visual motif is one which combines those familiar but never realized images of Golden Age pulps and comic books, the story is drawn from a well fed by that whole seeped-down aquifer of classic pulp adventure stories. [Note to self: Edit that godawful metaphor before posting this review.] Every premise, from the daring dogfighter and the sassy reporter to the intellectual but retiring German scientists to the gum-chewing gadgeteer sidekick (Giovanni Ribisi) to the hidden world in the Nepalese highlands to the simple but all-important McGuffin to the final climactic reveal of the antagonistic mastermind’s plans (and I won’t spoil it by telling you about it, but if you really want to know, click here for a big clue), is delightfully familiar, drawing from that common store of stock elements that managed to appeal to readers over and over.

The lips! The lips are going to get me!

For that reason, almost as often as this movie invites comparison to (and contrast with) George Lucas’ recent misadventures, it is referenced as being the pulpier version of a Quentin Tarantino movie: recycled elements, given a new sheen via self-referential winking. But the more apt comparison (and again, not one original to me) is to Raiders of the Lost Ark, both in its sources of inspiration and the obvious respect with which those sources are treated. This movie is not a caricature or even a knowingly post-modern treatment of a cliched genre; instead, it’s a thank-you note, an honest homage to stories which, even in their repetition, entertained without the need for self-deprecation. Even elements which venture across the line into corniness, like the concentric circles radiating out from radio towers when transmissions are sent, aren’t signs of a spoof, but a hearkening back to visual shorthand symbols which would have been perfectly appropriate to the audience of weekly pulp magazines and Saturday morning serials.

Like the graphics, the story is less than perfect. I would surmise that the heady ability to render just about anything on screen is a powerful temptation to do just that, and thus a jaunt to Shangri-La, nestled high in the Himalayas, is no more than a passing five-minute interlude instead of the stunning occasion it rightly should be. Other deficiencies can’t be passed off as that kind of exuberance overwhelming judgment; there is a running gag about Paltrow’s character having only two shots left in her camera and thus abstaining from snapping any of the awesome sights they come across in their travels, just in case. Unfortunately, even a running gag can be run into the ground as this one was.

“Dang it, why can’t you just leave your keys in your purse?”

Taken only on its own merits, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a solidly entertaining movie, a stunning triumph in production design, and a noteworthy resistance of the modern urge to reinterpret all former media though a filter of irony. But in the larger context of an entertainment genre, this movie is both a fulfillment of the dreams of an industry anda sign of its worst nightmare: There is no longer any justification, if ever there was any, to blame a poor movie on technical deficiencies. There are no limits to what can be recreated convincingly on the big screen. One might even go so far a to say that film can now be considered an art without qualifications, right alongside poetry, fine art, and every other wholly creative enterprise. Which means that culpability for film failures is now squarely back where it has always belonged: with the strength of the screenplay, and the vision of the director. In other words, with the quality of the storytelling.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 75 (roughly — I may have missed a couple)
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Merritt Yohnka (”construction worker”) did stunts on Generations