A Review of Sorts

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow!" (Spoilers ahead!)

I saw Sky Captain at a last! It was pretty good. It was a fun movie, but not as fun as I hoped it could be. Even the special effects seemed about average. (The end really reminded me of the live-action Thunderbirds trailer.) It did look dark and semi-Film Noiry, but I had just seen "Citizen Kane" a few days before and had been really impressed with the compositions and lighting. Unfortunately, Sky Captain seemed to use the dark lighting and de-saturated colors as a way to hide the fact that the background was computer generated. It's interesting, because CK used many matte paintings and other cheats on the sets, and yet gave a real weight and depth to each scene. So much so that many scenes were long takes and had to hold the viewer's attention for long periods of time. I liked the fact that the director Kerry Conran was going for an old style and look, keeping an old style title, giving the main character the generic-sounding moniker of "Sky Captain," etc. But I would have liked him either to update certain elements of the film, maybe making a more complicated plot that kept us on our toes, or either pushed the themes way back into the era completely, making Jude Law's SC way more swashbuckling. It turned out as kind of a mish-mash. I like those old serials because of the energy and thrill that comes across, even though the concepts and special effects seem hokey now.

Since this is a "personal" blog :), I will add that seeing Sky Captain was a good lesson for me. In the film I'm working on, I'm doing a good deal of blue screen work and have set the film in the black and white past, too. I also have a bunch of gadgets, like everybody did, it seems, in "World of Tomorrow." So I've got to be careful not to fall into the similar traps I saw happen in Sky Captain. I have to ask questions like, "when do the gadgets go from cool to silly?" Then I think of Batman and how cool things like the armor on the Batmobile was. Hmm.... Well, it's interesting stuff.