However, as the story gets going and the characters start to gel, a funny thing happens: Sky Captain becomes an imminently likable action-adventure throwback that reflects the saucy give-and-take of old movies as much as it does their visual schemes. Set in a fantasy version of 1942 (at least judging by a movie marquee advertising the melodrama Kings Row), Sky Captain features two main protagonists: Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), an intrepid reporter (is there any other kind?) for the New York Chronicle, and her former boyfriend, Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan (Jude Law), an ace fighter pilot/mercenary who leads his own private army. Sky Captain is called in when New York City is suddenly and inexplicably besieged by monstrous, building-sized robots who fly in from nowhere, crash through the city, and dig up the street in an attempt to steal the city's power generators.

Sky Captain wants to save the day and Polly wants to get the story, so they reluctantly team up despite not having seen each other in years after a bitter break-up in which Sky Captain suspects Polly of having sabotaged his plane and Polly suspects Sky Captain of having cheated on her. Their mission to discover the intelligence behind the marauding robots first takes them back to Sky Captain's home base, where we meet Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), an all-purpose sidekick who fulfills any technological needs and whose spirited goofiness makes Sky Captain seem even more suave and masculine than he already is. The base is attacked by more robots, these being bird-like flying machines that then give rise to smaller humanoid robots with wavy arms.

The story continues with Sky Captain and Polly trekking across the snow-capped mountains of Nepal and later seeking the aid of Francesca "Franky" Cook (Angelina Jolie), a sexy, one-eyed British naval captain who may or may not have been the woman with whom Sky Captain may or may not have cheated. It is then on to the climax on a secret island lorded over the mysterious Dr. Totenkopf (played in a sly twist of archival footage by the late Laurence Olivier), the film's requisite mad scientist.

On a purely visual level, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a hands-down masterpiece, an elegantly painted love letter to the art deco world of the past spun with the thread of film noir, jungle adventure movies, and the futuristic science fiction of H.G. Wells. The film has a soft, desaturated look that borders on the black and white, but maintains just enough color to suggest a faded photograph or one of those two-strip Technicolor experiments from the early 1930s.

First-time writer/director Kerry Conran, who spent several years laboriously producing a six-minute short film on his home computer in order to sell the idea of blending live actors with computer-generated mise-en-scene, has clearly absorbed a great deal of old pop culture, and he infuses his film with a giddy love of everything retro. He visually references everything from Georges Melies, to King Kong, to DC comic books, to Flash Gordon, and also includes bits that make us think of other modern retro pleasures, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Lord of the Rings (I could have sworn that the imagery used to create the fantastical Shangri-La was the same used to create the Elvish haven of Rivendell).

Sky Captain would seem just a technological gimmick if Conran weren't so complete in evoking not just the look of the period, but the rhythms and cadences of its entertainment. He selects a few gags and strings them out through the entire film, one of which involves Polly's remaining two shots on her trusty camera, the last of which is used in a surprisingly funny gag that ends the film in an unexpected way. He also throws in a few surprises with the characters, particularly the real identity of Dr. Totenkopf, which is foreshadowed by a theater playing The Wizard of Oz (1939), but is really better thought of as a twist on L. Ron Hubbard's "immortality."

The Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy-like banter between Paltrow and Law seems a bit forced at first, with the modern-day stars self-consciously aping the acting style of the past. But, as we settle in with their characters and the world they inhabit, their back-and-forth achieves a luscious sentiment all its own. Like the movie itself, there is no real depth to their characters, but their surface is so enjoyable that it's hard to complain that there's not much beneath. Paltrow manages to strike a nice balance between her character's tough resolve and emotional fragility (she is easily made jealous, but when that happens she doesn't look broken, just pissed), and Law performs all the dashing derring-do required by the script without every looking like he's exerting much effort (no wonder Martin Scorsese picked him to play Errol Flynn in The Aviator, his upcoming biopic of Howard Hughes).

Although it is completely different in its content and sources, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow may be the closest film yet to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), as both take the old and make it marvelously, gloriously-and sometimes bizarrely-new.

Copyright ©2004 James Kendrick

All images copyright ©2004 Paramount Pictures