Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow

Jamie and I went to see this tonight, and it was something of a disappointment.

It was a tribute to black-and-white Saturday morning SF serials from the 1950s, like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, King Of The Rocket Men... errr... Captain Planet... errr... Rocky Star... errr... (all right, that was radio)... Wing-Commander and The Autnots From Mars... (I'll, I'll stop.)

Whilst visually it was quite nice to look at, the story was very thin, and the characters, by comparison, aneamic. I could rattle on about the plot-holes (the monks take their clothes off them as being 'evil', but let them keep their gun, they forget all about the gun when they actually need to use it, the villain films himself before the invention of television), but people will just crow that those mistakes are part of the genre. Yet even the final line cannot actually mean what it is supposed to mean.

It's hard to review a movie like this without unfairly deconstructing it. By this I mean that movies are not meant to be deconstructed, they're meant to be watched and their obvious fiction taken as real. With this in mind, I am pleased that no-one had told me beforehand that Sir Lawrence Olivier was in it, even despite his tiny handicap of having died in 1989.


As a result, I could watch his scenes without breaking myself out of the illusion to look for the joins.

I liked the film's visual imagination, but even this suffers from modern digital fuzziness. There, I've started deconstructing it. I'm sorry, I just can't help it, it's all too obvious in this one.

6/10. Sorry. I really wanted to like this film.

Website: http://skycaptain.com