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September 18, 2004
Half-Assed Movie Review Boy
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
You know it's a boring Saturday when I'm willing to go to a movie in a theater. Control Room was playing at The Ross but I was in the mood for a tricked-out P-40 Warhawk, giant robots, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie with an eyepatch.
I wasn't too impressed with the story since it's just another madman-wanting-to-blow-up-the-earth plot that we've all seen a hundred times. However, the story hung together well enough to not annoy so much that I couldn't enjoy the look and feel of the film. Because that's really what this movie is all about.
Kerry Conran wrote the script in addition to directing, so he had pretty solid control over everything, allowing him to create a vintage 1940's looking movie with elements of classic Buck Rogers, Indiana Jones, James Bond. The washed-out colors and soft focus will probably annoy some viewers but to me it just added an art-deco noir vibe to the whole thing.
What really impressed me was Conran's innovative use of CGI. Almost everything in the film is computer animated. According to what I've read, pretty much everything was done in front of a blue screen with just a few props. This might sound like it would look too fake or too cheesy but on the contrary, I think using CGI evenly throughout makes for a more even movie. Some films that use a lot of live-action shots and then just throw in some CGI when it was needed tend to look a bit jagged. The fake stuff stands out too much. A couple of movies that suffered this problem just off the top of my head are Spiderman and the last Bond film, whatever it was called.
Most of the jokes in the film worked well, too, which also helped cover up the hokey story. Paltrow and Jude Law showed some terrific chemistry, which may have been hard to establish since they were mostly working by themselves in front of a blue screen. Jolie looked dashing in her eye patch as the commander of an airborne British aircraft carrier. Oh, and a very young Sir Laurence Olivier also appears in the film thanks to some archival footage, the origin of which I have been unable to discover.
I could have waited to see this until it showed up on HBO or even PPV, but every once in awhile, even I want to go to the movies.
I'm excited for Conran's next project, A Princess of Mars, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' series of pulp novels from the 1910's and 1920's. I've read the series probably three times, and I might just have to dig them up again.
Posted by Half-Cocked at September 18, 2004 10:43 PM