Just because I enjoyed the look and feel of it so much, I’d like to say it was great. But, the characters were a little thin, and the story was nothing more than a globe-hopping adventure, maybe to be judged against something like “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
However, I thought it had more imagination than about 50 adventure movies put together. It was certainly an over-the-top homage, but it was an homage to something you haven’t really seen homaged too much. I think some people didn’t get past it being any more than that (and the numerious continuity errors).
The director picked out some great details to throw in, whether it was the “tick tick DING ka-chunk” of the typewriter, or the big antenna standing on the map, or the “wub wub wub” of the ray gun.
I thought the sound effects alone were worth the price and was really surprised not to see it nominated in the sound categories for the Oscars. Some of the creatures and battle scenes were very imaginative.
It moved along pretty good though. It was intriguing and dark in the beginning, with scientists mysteriously disappearing, and a few seemingly unconnected characters.
I don’t think they really tied things up though. Did I miss why Dex was kidnapped? Was he just doing “Noah’s Ark” and if so, why all the hybrid animals? How exactly was he using the energy he was stealing?
I too enjoyed it. It wasn’t great, but it was enjoyable. I too liked the look and feel of it. It made me think of an old time adventure (as it was intended.)
I agree, it wasn’t as good in that respect as Raiders, but I thought it was a fun movie.
Great imagination, and a good hommage to 50’s Sci Fi.
I think Dex was kidnapped because they the enimy thought he had one of the metal vials. Don’t have any idea what was meant to be in those vials though. I think the hybrids were an attempt to save humans by making them more animal, the mad professor seems to have considered Humans bad but animals good. I guess the miniturization was an attempt to make the construction of the space arc easier in that it could then be much smaller.
I got the impression that the director was blown away by the fact he got big name stars, and didn’t really impose himself on their acting, so he didn’t get much from Jude Law (not that many directors have ever got much out of him since Gattaga)
I see Kerry Conran the director is slated for John Carter of Mars (the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that wasn’t Tarzan) film in 2006, interesting.
Sky Captain was a great flick. We saw the movie, bought the DVD. I still dont’ know why it wasn’t a blockbuster. The gucks are hard to figure, sometimes.
I was traveling when this movie came out, so I saw it the first time dubbed into German, and then it was also playing of the little three-inch seatback TV screen on my flight home.
I think I liked it better the first time. It’s an absolutely stunning movie on a big screen, and you can follow the story pretty well just visually. But also, once I could understand the dialog, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character just came off as way too petulant for the fast-talking, no-nonsense girl reporter she was supposed to be. I’d have to see it again to cite anything really specific about that, but she was totally missing that Rosalind Russell, gives-as-good-as-she-gets quality that the role really needed.
She was, however, off-the-chart gorgeous in that movie.
I too liked the movie but it somehow it never rose to really good movie. I am not sure what it lacked as the look was wonderful and the little touches and 50’s sci-fi hommages were great. The acting may be where it never quite got together. The acting was not bad as such…just something kept this movie from turning the corner.
Bippy the Beardless:
[spoiler]“Don’t have any idea what was meant to be in those vials though.”
Towards the end of the movie they say “Adam and Eve” were in the vials. Essentially, the last two “animals” for the Ark were humans and the reason the spaceship would not go without those vials as they were viewed as the most important item. How the vials would have been made into Adam and Eve at their destination is not explained. [/spoiler]
I presume there was some sort of device on board to grow them once they reached wherever.
Sure, it doesn’t make much sense, but how much in that movie was actually possible?(not that I’m complaining. I wanted every single gadget in the film.
A fair film, to me more enjoyable for the texture moreso than the plot.
My favorite bit was the hero and heroine waking up naked in bed next to each other after having been knocked out. Then the camera panning to their burly side-kick in bed with them.
For a first-time director, spearheading a groundbreaking technique and with a very small budget (the actual budget was around 36 million, whereas the reported budget was closer to 80 mil) it was quite outstanding.
I liked the style, humour, and characters, as well as the sheer spectacle. The acting was a bit bland, though.
Visually astonishing, a technological watershed (the largest set actually built was Polly’s one-room office, the largest prop piece was the wing/cockpit section of Sky Captain’s Warhawk; everything else on screen was CGI), a marvelously entertaining and charming movie all around in my opinion. The only thing missing was Kirk Alyn swooping down to wrench the limbs from one of the robots. I can’t wait to get that bad boy on DVD, if for no other reason than to track down as many homages as I can. My primary quibble with the film is that they threw too many eggs into one basket (perhaps understandable given the sense that they were gambling on a risky cinematic venture with this enterprise). Clearly they wanted to cram every possible golden age science fiction archetypal image into the movie, but the end result is frankly overwhelming, like a dinner buffet consisting solely of dessert dishes. Giant robots, lost world monstrosities, ray guns, zeppelins, rocket ships, mad eugenics schemes, doomsday devices…they even managed to squeeze the lost continent of Atlantis in there, for no real good reason. What’s left over for the sequels, gosh darn it?! If they had had more confidence in the potential of the franchise, they could have spun the material in this one movie out over several films, not an unreasonable plan given the relatively low production costs. And such a plan would have made the adventure serial comparison that much stronger.
It’s really more of a '30s and '40s thing. The only real stand-out reference to a ‘50s movie is the War of the Worlds death ray sound effect, and that movie owes a lot Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre adaptation from 1938 when it comes to its presentation.
If you’ve ever seen Max Fleischer’s fantastic art deco Superman cartoons, you’ve seen the main influence of Sky Captain’s art design.
I loved Sky Captain, but then I’m nuts about '30s entertainment. It’s a shame it hasn’t been immediiately recognized as a gem. Hopefully it’ll get a bit of a boost after Peter Jackson’s King Kong comes out and knocks everyone’s socks off.
I didn’t like it. I thought it was slow and, though imaginative, everything had been done before. Imagine a CGI computer eating Indiana Jones movies, Dick Tracy movies, James Bond movies, and Sonic the Hedgehog, and pooping them out onto a silver screen and that is my interpretation of Sky Captain.
The previews for it were more fun to watch, i’m just weird.
I wish it were a gem. I wanted it to be great. I enjoyed it at a mindless level, but its flaws were as gigantic as its special effects.
The problem was the director, Kerry Conran. He showed he could not handle live actors very well and could not write acceptable dialog with an acceptable plot. (Did somebody just say “George Lucas”?) He was still thinking in the mode of the six-minute computer-effects short he made to convince people to allow him do the film. He did six minutes, then another six minutes, then another six minutes, stringing them all together until he had a feature length film. But none of the individual segments built on one another. They were excuses for a new background and a new set of robots, but they weren’t a film. I suppose they might have worked as a serial, if you went to see them one week at a time as people did in the 30s, but these aren’t the 30s.
I’m not sure why the movie wasn’t more of a hit. Obviously, lack of acting, characterization, continuity, and plot are no obstacles to a hit movie in these days of troubled times. (Hmm, I’m channeling the Firesign Theatre thread.) I have a theory that popular movies today have a consistent feel to them, a recycling of familiar tropes that comfort the audience. Sky Captain recycled tropes that used to be as comfortingly familiar but are mostly lost on younger audiences. It couldn’t build word of mouth because there wasn’t a collective vocabulary to support it.
Conran’s next movie is John Carter of Mars, which will come out after Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. What he does with it and how he distinguishes himself from WofW will say a lot about his future.
Put me down for another thumbs down. I was vastly disappointed by this movie. Great visuals and special effects, but without a good story you’ve got a bad movie.
The characters were all so… Flat. After a while, I found the tech stuff distracting. I kept ctaching all the cheats they used to avoid difficult/impossible shots and such.
I thought it was a terrible waste of money.
Instead of spending it all on CGI, they should have hired somebody to write a decent script with decent characters.
It was just so … bland.
Now I do realise it was supposed to be like a 30’s serial, but come on!!
We are not living in the 30’s.
I was amazed that a studio actually invested in this.
The thing with 30s serials is that they had all of the imagination and none of the CGI. Sky Captain was a wonderful excuse to update it now that technology has caught up – just as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, King Kong, etc, are. Personally I loved it and don’t get all the hate. Loved loved loved all the random bizarre 30s homages, the non-so-subtle Wizard of Oz parody, the really gorgeous Teutonic, Things-To-Come architecture and technology, the colourisation, the Olivier cameo, the Shangri-La/King Kong nonsense, the flying airport. I also adored the clunky storyline and cliched dialogue. It’s one thing to parody old cliched stuff, it’s another to do it in style. Plus for the first time ever I really liked Giovanni Ribisi and Jude Law.
I think the Box Office problems were mostly due to its amusingly bonkers title. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I would kill for a sequel, and personally I don’t think they’ve run out of references. Sky Captain and the attach of the 10-foot Women from Mars, maybe?
Not since Linda Fiorentino in Dogma have I seen an actress who appeared to not want to be in a movie as much as Gwyneth Paltrow in this flick. Jude Law was phoning it in as well. I guess acting against a giant greenscreen is draining (aka- Star Wars Syndrome).
'Though Giovani Ribisi and Angelina Jolie seemed to be having fun in their small roles.
The only sci-fi complaints I had were, the underwater scenes were a bit too ridiculous for even a silly movie like this, and why did the enemy fighters need to flap their big metal wings?
Either Iron Giant is paying homage to the same source material, or Sky Captain stole the giant robots from them. Practically identical.
I think that is one of the dangers of CGI. To really create characters, actors need things and people to play off of. They can just imagine things so much.
