Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow & DVD Notes

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - ****

I've just watched one of the year's great entertainments. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow evokes a wonderfully senseless but stunning fantasia of visual delights. A peerlessly anachronistic movie full of wild ideas, inventively designed, realised and put together with considerable life, and love for the Amazing Stories pulp books of the forties. The film takes the title of the 1939 World Fair, and creates a masterly technological film which echoes brilliantly the fiction of the time, and works the formula to high-concept modern film.

The film is just plain fun to look at (movie-buff nods to Fritz Lang and The Wizard of Oz, whites glow, colours bloom, and uses of expressionistic shadow.), and more importantly, director Kerry Conran just knows what makes a fun movie, and delivers in complete spades, from imagination to solid will. The story is as embarrasing as anything George Lucas has recently written (the Ed Wood writing comparisons are valid, but totally missing the point), but there's a heedless joy in the craftsmanship and the pacing, the sight-gags, the giddily intoxicating series of cliffhangers. The story is just an excuse for a series of marvellous set-pieces intended to keep a jolly grin on our faces. One after another. Each perfectly timed to give us a freeze-frame moment of our next exciting adventure. Indeed, like the film's fine score, it's impressive and admirable in it's pace.

What adventures, indeed! Giant robots land and wreak havoc on a historically toyed Manhattan, and Sky Captain (Jude Law) tries to figure out just why they keep showing up around the world, looking for various items. "A shopping list" for a Doomsday machine, we quickly discover, and as such, we're sent around the world on the quest to uncover the truth and prevent a cataclysm. Essentially, distilled B-Movie joy, given unlimited imagination.

And along for the ride, and the story of the century, is plucky reporter Polly Perkins (Gwenyth Paltrow), who plays the resistant romantic interest. And there's a delightful running gag about nearly running out of film amid the sensational sights.

I realize I'm talking like the front of a 1935 pulp magazine here, but it's fitting. It's a film full of one set of joys after another, dogfighting and weaving through a city, escaping from a cave full of dynamite (the pacing in this scene is priceless!), a secluded KongIsland-like place full of dinosaurs, spiders, and Rivendell like hideaways. And yet no-one in the audience scoffs, no-one jeers, we accept it with nothing but surprised pleasure. It's very nearly like watching Raiders again. And Angelina Jolie's Captain Franky was like a bloke with great tits. At home bellowing out orders with her stiff upper lip, she's just as much of a boy (She's both surprisingly sexy and asexual) as the film is intended for.

Indeed, the greatest possible complement I could give Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is that I would have watched this film repeatedly as a child, so complete is it's visual and kinetic glee. It's perfect for this 23 year old child, too. As has been covered in all forms of media and print review, the film was the first to be entirely shot without sets. There's moments where the camera is locked down which scream "digital effect", but they also echo comic-book framings beautifully too. The cost of the film was also brought down considerably, just south of $40million.

It's just so easy to forget that the world of Sky Captain wasn't physical, so bring on the movies without actors. I hope they're as successful as this.

--> DVD Notes

Effortlessly stylised, and very pleasing would be my short review of the video. Simultaneously sharp as a tack, and softly photographed. It's like nothing you've ever seen before in a movie. A rich mad-scientist's lab of retro tones and styles, with modern sensibilities. Light blooms, pastel colours used in highlight, from near-black and white all the way to broad saturated near-Technicolor for the film's climax. Compression artifacts, artificial sharpening, aliasing and other anomalies are not present. Astonishing mastering work.

The audio is near reference, a gorgeously prepared Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track (No DTS, I hear the naysayers whine.) with outstanding fidelity, soundstage pans, and discrete effects galore. The sound mixing and editing is not touched upon in the supplementary section, but like most animated films, the dialogue track is about all the mixers have from the set. Everything else has to be artificially created and mixed, and it's as good as any great mix I've heard all year. Edward Shearmur's grand score is well recorded and integrated into the mix. Totenkoph's island, to take a good example, is full of life. The dogfighting has gunfire whizzing through the air, and deep bass makes itself known early. There's nothing quite like giant robots pounding your subwoofer. :)

There are two commentaries present, one is nothing short of an audio making-of by producer Jon Avnet. He's a confident, interesting speaker talking about all aspects of production, from research, to seeing Kerry Conran's 6 minute short, through coaxing Conran into directing actors (describing his reluctance as "watching molasses go uphill in winter") and only occasionally stopping to make note of what is onscreen at a time. It may be a non-screen-specific commentary, but there's a film-school wealth of information there. Go enjoy.

The second commentary is that of Kerry Conran and his leading digital artists. There's a few solid nuggets of information here, but most of the track is silence and repetition. I'm sure, that if he was sufficiently prepared to speak about his work, Conran would be a highly entertaining commentary leader, if indeed like myself, very geeky and cheerfully obsessive about things he likes in the film.

The Brave New World making-of documentary is spread over two video segments. It's a roughly chronological piece, detailing the film's production from concepts to finished work. The 6-minute short, Pre-production, animatics, casting, and suchlike are covered with brevity and entertaining behind-the-scenes footage. We see early glimpses of Kerry Conran knitting together his short on his Apple II, and pulling together the cast on the George Lucas stage at Elstree. The art-department wallpapered in Kevin Conran's (Kerry's brother) sketches for everything. It's one of those breathlessly well-made documentaries that leaves you wanting more from these fascinating and self-deprecating people. I kept wishing that they'd be just a little bit more proud of their sterling first work.

The Art of the World of Tomorrow is a short 8 minute featurette detailing the art-department, costume designs and how the look was influenced. Another terse and well-made piece.

There are two deleted scenes, which in reality are scene extensions. The first is Totenkoph's Torture Room, where we learn what happened to the enslaved Tibetian people after being infected by radioactivity. This scene is completely rendered. The other scene, The Conveyor Belt is a large scene extension which is largely composed of animatics. Neither scene belongs in the film.

The now-famous 6 minute short is also present on the disc, and it's easy to seeearly shots which have been transposed from this to the finished film. It's also been augmented by Shermur's score. I was somewhat flabbergasted at the work, the eye for a great shot or sixty, and the dedication needed to see through the short, with four years of work.

The entertaining Gag Reel is also present and correct, and you'll get a chuckle from it.