I've been looking forward to seeing Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow ever since James Lileks began the year by linking to a trailer of it and writing:

The movie I like, the movie that appeals to fx-addicted wobby-bellied dullards who’ve been trained by Hollywood to spurn nuance and storytelling for the brash percussive thrills of onscreen carnage, is called – seriously – “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” As far as I can tell it involves the invasion of New York by many gigantic Met-al Monsters. It involves zeppelins, dashing pilots, all that wonderful pulp-fiction rubbish. I wouldn’t be so enthused if it didn’t look like a Hugh Ferris sketchbook come to life. It’s a dreamworld Manhattan of the 30s, and I can’t wait to spend 100 minutes there. Even the unnerving sight of Angelica Jolie (Voted “most likely to pull a knife on you during sex”) doesn’t bother me.

So I did so yesterday; here are some quick thoughts.

Shot for shot, this is the most dazzling looking film I've seen in quite some time. It's a totally manufactured world, the equivalent of a Pixar Toy Story film, but with live actors blue screened into the settings.

...Which brings up part of the problem: there didn't seem to be much chemistry between the cast. Gwyneth Paltrow's acting appeared as stiff and unbelievable as Angelina Jolie's Laura Croft-style English accent. (Jude Law wasn't bad, and neither were Giovanni Ribisi and Omid Djalili in supporting roles.)

Roger Ebert has compared Sky Captain to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I think he'd be the first to admit that Jude and Gwyneth are a poor substitute for the winning chemistry of Harrison Ford and Karen Allen.

But even more so than Ford and Allen, they're simply there to add a human element to the knockout visuals.

And they are a knockout. It's a wonderfully stylized version of the 1930s, sort of a cartoon recreation of a Depression-era Hollywood film with a zillion dollar budget. (Any film that starts with a Zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building(!) while Christmas snow is falling gets big bonus points in my book. And I swear I saw a classic Raymond Loewy-designed GG-1 trundle through the corner of a scene.)

Watching the trailers, I was sure that the giant robots attacking New York was some sort of pretentious Hollywood statement on 9/11. But no, they're just there (I think) because stomping giant robots are always cool. And as Frederica Mathewes-Green writes in National Review:

The visual accomplishment of the film is so amazing that it takes awhile to get around to the plot. It's a good plot, a satisfying, comprehensive romp through every sci-fi and fantasy convention a lover of those genres would wish. As you read over a summary, little points of recognition light up in your memory with a happy "ding!" First, scientists are disappearing, and better yet, they're Germans. Turns out they did "terrible things" at an experimental laboratory "before World War One" (one of the movie's few anachronisms; in 1939 nobody knew there would be a Two). Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fearless gal reporter with a hat cocked over one eye, is on the case. That's about when the giant robots take their stroll down the avenue. I couldn't figure out later what purpose this plays, since the evil scheme that is finally revealed didn't require destruction of Manhattan. But, really, who cares? The movie's dreamlike mood of all-purpose foreboding accommodates any familiar-looking elements without asking too many questions.

The ending was a bit of a letdown. Sky Captain called for one last mindblower, but instead we're given something we've seen before in numerous James Bond films.

Visually, I'd like to think that Sky Captain represents the future of movies: total visual fantasy worlds, where anything is possible, and the more imaginative the better.

But it's a shame to watch writing (both dialogue and plotting) continue to decline as imagery gets exponentially more impressive.

Update: Guess a lot of other people liked Sky Captain as well--it's number one at the box office this weekend. But will it have legs?

Update: I like the way Wired puts it:

But Sky Captain doesn't seem newfangled. It's designed to play like a relic from some nostalgic, pulp- and comics-inflected past. Conran's film is the Restoration Hardware of movies -- manufactured to evoke our notions of cool stuff from some imaginary golden age. It's grainy and textured, and filled with nifty gadgets, storybook landscapes and Tinkertoy-looking robots.

It does have a Restoration Hardware/Ralph Lauren shiny happy reconstruction of the past feel to it, doesn't it?