That was because it didn’t have Adam Sandler, Will Smith, or Paris Hilton in it. 
I liked Sky Captain myself, though I agree it’s more “matinee” than “full price”. Very purty to look at, and the breezy plot was very in keeping with the whole '40s serial motif of the darn thing. You’re supposed to just enjoy it, not nitpick it to death.
I agree. It’s not a movie I’m can’t wait to buy on DVD, but I may tape it some time. It was a good, fun way to duck out of reality for a few hours, and the weekend I saw it, I needed that. By the way, Merijeek, I’m with you on the last line, especially since the fellow I’ve been seeing is a photographer! 
CJ
There is one thing I really - unreasonably perhaps - hated, and that was the stupid pseudo-leet writing that Sky Captain had on his plane. Right side up it appeared as “hll0d”, but later Polly saw the reflection in a pool of water and saw it read “p0lly”. The problem is, you have to rotate the first phrase to get the second. By inverting it vertically, you instead get “μll0q”.
This, to me, explains the unreasoning hatred some people have for this movie. It should have been fantastic. It should have been a hybrid of old-style swashbuckling adventure and modern action sensibility, as suggested by Mr. Voodoo Lou. Instead, it was just sort of middlin’. And when genre fans get rabid about a film (and you can’t tell me the anticipation for this movie wasn’t huge in certain quarters), it had damn well better live all the way up to expectations, or they’ll totally overreact the other direction.
In other words, if the target audience expected an A+, the B- it turned out to be feels like an F.
To nitpick the nitpick, it would read “p0lly” if you were seeing it from within/above the plane, which is how Joe presumably would have been looking at it.
Hey that’s a good idea! Someone should ask him.
I believe he is working on “A Princess of Mars”. Which could work for him.
Brian
who thought SK was a fun movie
The problem, i think, is that some film-makers seem to think that making an homage, with lots of in-jokes and genre references, is enough. They sometimes forget that the movie should also stand up by itself.
I found it tolerable, except for the extremely overused runner about the camera, which totally killed it for me.
And the special effects were poorly crafted. The computer animation was neat and all, but half the time the lighting in the background plates didn’t match the lighting of the actors. Most distracting indeed. It reminded me of the horrible Pierce Brosnan surfing scene in one of the recent James Bond disasters, but for the length of the entire movie!
I suspect that a lot of people were prepared to cut it a lot of slack. Coming out of left field as it did (i.e., this wasn’t a SW or ST production), there was no bar for it to fall short of.
But the story. did. not. work. Almost from the first. If Conran was paying attention to '30s newspaper movies, he would have known that Polly would not be writing her story in what looks like the office of the newspaper publisher. (And that scrolling headline behind her irritated me as well. We already saw that; why repeat it? Oh, I know why: Conran had it in his original trailer, and no one told him to lose it.)
And the ending didn’t make much sense to me, either: fire the Noah’s Ark rocket and destroy the earth behind it? Why? And how were they going to know which planet they were going to colonize. (It seems to me it would have been better to take the ship into the atmosphere, wipe out life on Earth, then return the rock to restock. Who knows, maybe they were going to do that and I missed it.)
And that last line? Weak. At least it was a line that was moderately funny, but still …
I saw the movie in the theater, bought the CD, I’m happy I did both. A great watch anytime. Between it and ATOC, I’m a happy camper. Sin City I’ll wait and rent the CD because of the violence, but I’m looking forward to it, too, because I’m really curious about the look of the film.
SCWT falls, I feel, into the same trap as The Last Starfighter, Willow, Dragonheart, Tron and numerous other films that were technically groundbreaking, but tended to lack interesting characters and compelling storylines. Contrast these to Star Wars or Terminator 2 and it’s clear that if your characters aren’t interesting, the movie won’t be, either.
I know it was a great technical achievement, but it was just too dark. I don’t know if it was the theatre I was in dimming its bulb, or if that was how it was supposed to look, but it was so dark I had trouble making out what was going on at some points of the movie. The story didn’t hold my interest either. I liked Dark City much more.
I think this was the biggest flaw of the movie. On many scenes, I wanted to run them through Photoshop and blow out the midtones until I could see what was going on. Interestingly, a lot of Poser artworks I’ve looked at have had the same problem – way too dark – and are improved immensely by being run through Photoshop.
Deux ex machina all over the god danged place!
Which is okay for a 1930s serial audience but today we want a bit more.
Raiders did it right and this is nowhere near in the same league.
Darn, wanted it to be good. Prefer Gerry Andersen over this anyday.
Beautiful look though.
Considering that Tron continues to be a geek cult classic after all these years (20th anniversary edition DVD boxed set, woot!), that’s not a bad fate to suffer. 
And don’t you be dissin’ The Last Starfighter. It had Robert Preston, after all.
Gotta agree with rjung here. Sky Captain might not have been “all it could have been” with reference to plot and acting, but it had just enough of the right elements to ensure that people will be watching and admiring it for years to come. Personally, I loved it. Showed it to my parents, who grew up watching the 1940s serial matinees every Saturday, and they declared it one of the best movies they’d ever seen.
And, yes, Robert Preston is a god.
Yeah, but c’mon. A young man doomed to a life of boredom in a dusty wasteland has a gift which will help him fight the evil invader and is guided by a wizened old codger who dies and then the young man strikes the main alien spacecraft in the one vulnerable spot, even though the main bad guy escapes and the codger who’d died reappears…
Geez, all it needed was Alex and Maggie turning out to be brother and sister.
I liked Preston, though. Minor factoid: Marc Alaimo, the oft-recycled Star Trek actor, appears as the hitchhiker.
I greatly enjoyed it. But then, I am also one of those people who greatly enjoys movies that everyone agrees are horrible just because it’s so fun to laugh at them. So don’t trust my judgement.