REVIEWED - SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW: Some dazzling visual tours de force cannot save this futuristic flick from its wooden plot and static stars, writes Donald Clarke
Kerry Conran, director of the first (sort of) live-action feature to take place among entirely computer-generated environments, has good cause to feel proud of himself. Set in an alternate 1939 of ray guns and mad scientists, Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow imagines how that era's film-makers might have re-worked their present in anticipation of a tantalising future and then does to that vision what only 21st-century movie technicians can do.
Featuring references to The Wizard of Oz, Bride of Frankenstein, Metropolis and plenty more besides, the picture features some dazzling visual tours de force - robots flying over Manhattan, a hovering aircraft carrier commanded by a one-eyed Angelina Jolie - and, in Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law, is fortunate to have happened upon two actors so cold and inhuman that they meld quite comfortably into the digital landscape. But the film is so indebted to its sources and, being constructed largely within machines, is so immune to the often serendipitous accidents that happen on film sets that it ends up with absolutely no life of its own.
Sky Captain begins in a sepia-tinted New York City with Polly Perkins (Paltrow), a journalist in the mould of Lois Lane, investigating the disappearance of a number of the world's top scientists. During a surreptitious meeting with an understandably frightened boffin in Radio City Music Hall, Polly learns that the mastermind behind the abductions is one Dr Totenkopf, an evil genius played (if that is the word) by an eerily regenerated Laurence Olivier. Just as she is getting her head around all this, the city is attacked by giant, killer robots.
Dashing aviator Joe Sullivan (Law), who, I need hardly say, was once in love with Polly and she with him, arrives in the nick of time to avert disaster and allow the city's burghers to benefit from the reassuring salve that only true heroes have at their disposal.
Bickering constantly - Paltrow works harder at being annoying than is strictly necessary - the reunited lovers set out on a journey that will eventually bring them to a distant island where Totenkopf is developing his plan to destroy the planet.
It may be true to say that the dialogue - "It's the truth Joe. You have to believe me." - is no more wretched than that in the depression-era serials to which the film plays tribute. And, yes, a similar argument could be made in defence of the leads' robotic performances. But what can the film offer to compensate for all that hokeyness? The wonder that its technical achievements invite will, in this rapidly moving era, fade very quickly. Indeed, by the time you read this, it may have already done so.
