Movie Recommendation- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (2004)
There is an argument to be made for style over substance. While I usually like my movies to plumb the depths of human experience and emotion, sometimes it’s just enough to be able to sit back and watch- mouth agape- as a director dazzles me. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow makes no real attempt to comment on society or the human condition. It just wants to give us a fun time at the movies. And, for me, it really delivers. Using many modern special effects that usually causes to roll our eyes, Sky Captain director Kerry Conran creates a world that is both past and future. In this world, we get plucky reporters and cocksure fighter pilots bantering back and forth just before an army of giant robots attacks the city. This film is a nice throwback to the science fiction movies of the 1950s, with more than a little 1920s German Expressionism mixed in for good measure. Conran clearly loves film and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a love letter to the movies of his childhood; the Saturday afternoon serials that have long been forgotten. So forgotten, in fact, that Sky Captain was a financial failure. The public simply didn’t know what to make of it. And so it, too, has been forgotten. And Kerry Conran has not made a feature film since. That is truly sad, because Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow deserves to be remembered.
Love this movie. I like to turn my TV’s color setting down to 0 and watch this in black and white (the way it was originally intended to be released). It’s really a shame how many people seem to have entirely forgotten about this movie.
I hadn’t heard that about the black and white thing, but I’m certainly not surprised. Either way, I think the director did a very good job with the color, giving it a Technicolor quality.
I watched this on the recommendation of the podcast a few years back. I love the idea of paying homage to those pulpy sci-fi comic book tropes of the 1940s, and Sky Captain certainly looked nice. The characters were fun, the situations imaginative. But it was missing something. Ultimately I found it to be a hollow and forgettable experience, like the fourth Indiana Jones movie. I appreciated what it was trying to do, but in my opinion it was less than the sum of its parts. Too bad–if it was just a bit more of a success, I could see it being one of my favorite movies.