SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (2004)

— RANKING: 93 —

THOSE LIPS, THAT EYE! Angelina Jolie as the bad good girl (or is it the good bad girl?) in Kerry Conran’s ambitious sci-fi pulp-fiction exercise in style about a dystopian past (an alternative 1939). The film was digitally created by situating live actors in a computer-generated world. Courtesy: Filmauro/Paramount.

CREDITS

Paramount Pictures/Brooklyn Films II/Riff Raff Film Productions/Filmauro; Kerry Conran, dir.; Conran, scr.; Jude Law, Jon Avnet, Sadie Frost, Marsha Oglesby, pro.; Ed Shearmur, mus.; Eric Adkins, cin.; Sabrina Plisco, ed.; Kevin Conran, prod. design; Kirsten Conran, art dir.; Gary Pollard, special makeup effects; Judy Bradbury, set design; Jesse D’Angelo, Robert Myers, storyboards; Christopher Brennan, Jimmy L. Dyson, Trevor Wood, Peter Fern, F/X; Stephen Lawes, special photographic process; Mike Navarro, effects animator; Lindsay Adams, Tim Alexander/ILM, visual effects; Jorge del Valle, Duane Floch, James Guilford, Sammy Wong, animators; 106 min.; Color/B&W; 1.85:1.

CAST

Jude Law (Joseph Sullivan/Sky Captain); Gwyneth Paltrow (Polly Perkins); Angelina Jolie (Franky); Giovanni Ribisi (Dex); Michael Gambon (Paley); Bai Ling (Mystery Woman); Omid Djalili (Kaji); Laurence Olivier (Dr. Totenkopf); Trevor Baxter (Dr. Jennings); Julian Curry (Dr. Vargas); Peter Law (Kessler); Jon Rumney (German Scientist); Khan Bonfils (Creepy); Samta Gyatso (Scary).

MOST MEMORABLE LINE

Couldn’t we just for once die without all this bickering?

JOE TO POLLY WHEN IT APPEARS THAT THEIR JIG IS UP

BACKGROUND

Growing up in Flint, Michigan, Kerry Conran (1964–) loved the new breed of sci-fi films initiated by Star Wars. He also discovered the pop culture of the 1930s that had inspired Lucas: not only the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon series, but also King Kong (1933), Lost Horizon (1937), the various Superman cartoon shorts turned out by Max and Dave Fleischer, and films reaching back to Metropolis (1927). He became intrigued with the recording of Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

Conran attended California Institute of the Arts, where he specialized in animation. His dream project would be a visual pastiche of those nostalgic influences, redone for his generation. Whereas other aspiring filmmakers hoped to go to the expense of constructing alternative world “sets” or employing state-of-the-art computer graphics to achieve such an effect, Conran devised a striking alternative. He would “scrapbook” sights and sounds from the past, then have his actors perform their roles in front of blue screens, afterward combining the two in a computer. Conran shot a six-minute product reel with friends, using a Macintosh IIci. This trailer, which took four years to complete, convinced producer Jon Avnet to back Sky Captain as a major film.

THE PLOT

New York City, 1939—or a reasonable facsimile thereof in some parallel/alternative universe. At the same time that the mega-zeppelin Hindenburg III arrives at the Empire State Building, intrepid reporter Polly Perkins receives a request to meet a shady scientist in Radio City Music Hall, where The Wizard of Oz is playing. Polly learns from Dr. Vargas that an enigmatic figure, Dr. Totenkopf, is about to alter life as we know it.

Momentarily, gigantic robots attack the globe, causing authorities to send for Joseph Sullivan (aka Sky Captain), a man of adventure and mystery who, with engineer and assistant Dex, hurries to the rescue. This super-hero’s previous involvement with Polly had ended abruptly owing to his propensity to zip off for exotic adventures without her. The rekindling of their romance is complicated by the arrival of another old flame, the dark and deadly beauty Franky, who may be friend, or foe . . . or a bit of each.

THE FILM

Storyboards, often the essence of cinéma fantastique, were used here to a degree never before imagined. A team of approximately ninety animators, digital artists, model makers, and visual compositors worked under Conran’s supervision to create the most visually rich film ever produced without a single major set needing to be built. “Animatics” is the term for this process, which recreates sights and scenes of the past. Moreover, the audience is left with the impression that believable characters had entered not only a vision of the past, or even the past itself, but also the past as immortalized by what was once considered the fleeting popular culture of that era. As such, the sensibility of 1930s pulp fiction could be combined with the contemporary tastes for large-scale action. Though it was widely assumed that Conran created new technology for the film’s stylized look, he used a combination of Adobe After Effects plug-ins.

THEME

The film, by its very nature, deals with the concept of alternative history, an approach by which any narrative can open as anchored in a tangible past. Yet, as the story develops, the narrative gradually disassociates itself from reality as we know it to have occurred. This is a movie about movies and the manner in which films are appreciated not only on an individual basis but also for the manner in which they all run together in the collective memory, a concept that takes the popular notion of referencing a giant step further.

TRIVIA

The appearance of Laurence Olivier, via reconfigured images from earlier films, marked the first time a deceased actor played a new role in a current film. Even as Conran was creating his vision, two other 2004 films—Casshern and Immortal—were also being shot using what is now referred to as a “digital backlot.” The first such film to prove a success at the box office was the neo-noir Sin City (Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller, 2005).