Saw it myself on Sunday with a group of my friends. Then three of us went back on Tuesday taking along a fourth member of our group for a second showing and one frneds first viewing.
I’ve been a fan of the 40’s and 50’s era SF for years. It was really great to see this kinda thing done right.
It would be interesting to see what this director would do with “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series. 
Hell, I’ve love to see him do a FAITHFUL rendition of War of the Worlds, since Spielberg looks like he’s going to do a completely pointless remake of Independence day with “nice” aliens.
When Jack and Polly happen upon the mine there is a shot taken from above that reminded me very specifically of when Charlton Heston first set eyes on the Statue of Liberty.
Great flick! I liked:
-those “cyclops-eye” robots (with the tentacles)
-the flying aircraft carriers
-the one-eyed chick in the black uniform!hot!hot!
-the giant robots crushing Manhattan
-the Hindenburg III zeppelin docking at the Empire Stete Building
Too bad the 1930’s vision of the future didn’t come true!
But…how DOES a P-47 fighter plane fly to Tibet on one tank of gas??
Dex cooked a little something up.
Daniel
I noted that, too, Exapno - really sends the message that word of mouth didn’t do the trick between weekends. I really enjoyed it, as did a lot of Dopers, but it doesn’t look like it will have legs.
Anyone want to bet it will do well in DVD and attain cult status, like, say, Iron Giant? It won’t back into legendary status, the way Blade Runner did (lousy reviews and box office, now hailed by many as one of the best), IMHO…
I thought it appropriate to see a Saturday afternoon show. I thought it was a great little movie, but not a classic. The visuals were all beyond first-rate, but the script was a little soft in that first-time-writer kind of way. He seemed to try and pack just a little too much into the movie to show off what he could do. Example? The dinosaur-island “Lost World” stuff took up so much time that
Our Hero neglected to actually solve the mystery. By the time he was reuinited with Dex, Dex had saved the scientists and had a plan worked out for saving the day.
And I’ll have to put myself in the anti-Paltrow camp here. She had a good look for the role, but she never quite sold me on Polly. I was left wishing for Jennifer Jason Leigh
But, having said that, I really liked the movie. I give it a solid three stars, have recommended it to everyone I thought would be interested in it, and am looking forward to Princess of Mars.
A big fat ‘meh’.
I figure this movie will fit nicely into the same category as Tron, The Last Starfighter and Final Fantasy as interesting technical acheivements that couldn’t overcome stilted dialogue and poor plotting. Paltrow’s character could have been killed off at any moment and it wouldn’t have mattered. For that matter, had the scientist gone directly to Sky Captain with the vials, Paltrow’s character could have been eliminated completely.
I also caught the reference to the “first” world war, which made me wonder when the second one had occured. This led me to speculate that England and France had perhaps moved on Germany in 1938, leading to a brief “world war” that ended Nazism but left Germany largely intact (and European military forces stretched “too thin” to deal with the robot crisis).
And, amusingly,
I figure there was no actual threat of the rocket destroying Earth’s atmosphere. The rocket’s second stage was presumably nuclear (hence all the Uranium mining) and some Manhattan Project scientists thought the first nuclear detonation might ignite the atmosphere, though those fears were unjustified
It would never work. “Doc” Smith used real physics.
I enjoyed it. I want a sequel. I’m disappointed by its lame box office reception. I hope it develops success over time.
No problems with Gwynneth & I’m not a big fan. Jude was great. But to me, Giovanni was the best!
Do you think Jude killed the mutated survivor?
I am sure, while other clues gave the time of the movie as 1939-early 40s, that the newspaper was dated 2000.
That’d be a surprise, since other newspapers were dated May, 1939, and when the villian’s personal journals were found, one character commented the ones dated circa 1918 were twenty years old, or so.
Actually, I kinda thought if they’d had the guts, the movie should have been set in 2004, but using art-deco technology, as though World War 2, the Atomic Age/Cold War and the breakup of Germany hadn’t happened. The Hindenburg 3 could have docked at an intact World Trade Center (in 1930s-style pulp fiction, swarthy foreigner types are exotic and often evil, but not smart enough to cause serious destruction) and there could have been a cool mix of realistic and fanciful technology, like a Jules Verne novel (Sky Captain lands on a flying aircraft carrier, but he coordinates with Frankie using a cellular phone, for example).
Apropos of nothing, I did a little research after expressing my concern with this very issue. It seems that in 1921 a certain Colonel Charles a Court Repington wrote a book about the late European conflict entitled The First World War.
The point being, of course, that this was the first, but surely not the last, conflagration worthy of being called a “World War” rather than a regional conflict. So the term had been applied to the Great War nearly twenty years before a second “World War” occurred.
I finally got to see it tonight and I thought it was wonderful. Literally. So many of the shots had me just astounded at what I was seeing. Ebert’s line sums it up perfectly: “It’s like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way.”
I’d expected it to be all like the New York section, based on what I’d seen in the trailers, but then it just opened up and went all over the place. Every pulp comic and sci-fi idea crammed into one movie and just gleefully thrown into the mix. It was almost surreal in the way it seemed to dredge up images directly out of my subconscious; the first time Dex fired his ray gun, I laughed because it looked and sounded exactly how a ray gun should sound.
Gwyneth Paltrow did bug me, and I usually like her. She had the perfect look for the part, but everything else seemed “off.” Her character was supposed to be plucky but annoying, but it just grated on me. Especially her voice. On the other hand, Angelina Jolie was perfect, and Jude Law did a great job as well.
I expected to come out disappointed, because I had such high hopes for it and knew that it couldn’t live up to that. But it was everything I wanted it to be. I’m already eager to buy it.
I went and saw it this afternoon.
Great fun, amazing effects.
Near the begining, when the robots are attacking, the radio operator says something about a 90206 authorization. I thought it must be a homage to something, but damned if I can think of what. 
Any ideas?
By the way, in Ebert’s “Ask the Movie Answer Man”, Tha sker interviewd the director and said “when we discussed the film’s budget, he quoted a figure – off the record – which was far below the $70 million…”. And Ebert says “I heard the budget was not a million miles away from $38 million”
Brian
Sounds like a ZIP Code to me.
I’ve beem Googling, but to no avail.
Maybe the acess code from Star Trek 2?
That was my thought in the theater. 90206 is a zip code in Glendale CA.
(The motto of the Sky Captain)…what does it mean?
Download the screen saver…cool!
Are you certain “fremetus” is correct?
The translator program I use finds no listing fopr that word, under a variety of spellings.