by Duane Spurlock
I'm probably 'way behind the rest of pulp fandom in seeing this movie, but what the heck.
I saw the DVD version of this movie, so I also got to watch the extras – the "Making Of" featurettes that are included on the disc. Silly me, I realized afterward that I'd spent nearly four hours watching the movie and its extras; and although the nostalgia lover and pulp fan within me kinda reveled in that excess, it was still excess.
A viewer doesn't have to watch the behind-the-scenes featurettes to know early on that Sky Captain is a labor of love -- specifically, a dream come true for director Kerry Conran and, by force of his enthusiasm avalanche, his brother Kevin (the production designer) and everyone else (all the techno-CGI-animation artists) who worked in post-production.
The lavish detail, the high quality of each digitally born set and prop, the retro-futuristic realism of the CGI devices and landscapes and – well, just about CGI-everything except the actors and a bubblegum wrapper – wave the Labor Of Love flag high over every Himalayan mountain peak.
But a labor of love does not always a masterpiece make.
I found the movie interesting, but it really didn't entertain me until the plot reached the scenes with the Royal Navy airships. Maybe because the coloring and lighting weren't so murky and dark at that point. And certainly the underwater scenes were marvelously created, but they returned a bit to the dark and murky atmosphere.
Sky Captain is technically marvelous. But its own technique gets in the movie's way as it tells a story. The CGI wizardry never stops being evident – it never takes a backseat, a background role. It continually throws detail, detail, detail into the viewer's face, as if EVERY single CGI detail was equally important. In a real photograph, unwanted or unnecessary detail drops out of focus. In Sky Captain, every texture of every brick and every rivet on every airplane are better defined than the pores on Jude Law's face. That bugs me.
The over-detailed CGI work reflects one aspect of the overall problem I have with the film: It tries to bite off more than it can chew. To be more explicit, Conran tries to squeeze into Sky Captain an entire universe – that is, every loved-in-childhood pop culture reference he knows – instead of just the defining references that are necessary to carry his film and drive his story. (For a literary equivalent, let's turn to old dome-headed Henry James and his instruction for writers to find le mot juste – instead of using 15 words to describe something, find the single, just-right word that captures that thing for the reader's imagination.)
To help me clarify, let's look at another pulp-related film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. If Sky Captain had come along before Raiders, it probably would have knocked my socks off. And don't get me wrong – Raiders has some flaws. But still – and I think I'm being pretty fairly objective here (hey, everybody knows that the subjective practice of movie reviewing is utterly objective) – Raiders remains a better movie. Or, more explicitly, Raiders remains a better-told story.
Raiders is probably most influenced by the old chapter serials of the 1930s and '40s. There is likely some pulp influence as well, but George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are steeped in movie lore and history, and film influences film within their universes. The two – who were, admittedly, more experienced filmmakers at the time – selected those elements of adventure films and scripting that best suited the telling of their story. (Further, Raider's characters have downtime from the action to interact and simply be characters. Conran's folks never stop barreling along to give the viewer a break.)
Conran's initial six-minute short, upon which the later big-screen version was based, was clearly inspired as well by adventure serials: It opens with a facsimile shot of an old Certificate of Approval that the British Film Board or whoever issued to films back in the day, and the opening credits display "Chapter 1: Mechanical Monsters" as the title for what the end credits describe as a seven-episode adventure. Other filmic influences obvious from the short: the animated Superman shorts produced by the Fleischer Studio. Again, to be specific, the second of the Fleischer Superman cartoons, titled Mechanical Monsters (1941). Conran's giant robots look very much like Superman's flying robots. In fact, he swipes the shot of a robot's shadow while its wings retract into its arms after it lands on the city streets.
So, right from the start, two influences – movie serials and old superhero animation. (The coloring for Sky Captain seems also to borrow from the Fleischer Superman cartoons – murky, muted colors. I wonder if the cartoons looked bright or murky in their original cinema releases, or if that's just the quality of the prints as they've reached us today?)
I think the proliferation of influences is detrimental to Sky Captain. "The World of Tomorrow" was the name of the 1939 New York World's Fair; King Kong and other early adventure movies join the serials as filmic influence (one CGI artist even added a silhouette of Kong climbing the Empire State Building in the background of a scene); pulp fiction (Buck Rogers, plus the many exotic locales visited by the heroes, among other things) and comic books are clear influences (in one instance, Jude Law/Sky Captain mentions that his gadget-whiz assistant Dex got a particular idea "from one of his comic books," and surely the Royal Navy's airborne battleships are lifted straight from Marvel Comics' Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD helicarrier); and the plain ol' nostalgic love for New York City at that period and its iconic qualities as romanticized in movies, books, and comics contemporary with that time breathes throughout the city scenes.
Sky Captain is stuffed – overstuffed – with this sort of nostalgic influence. It's like trying to turn a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese into a Seven-Course Meal On A Bun. I'm glad Sky Captain was made – it shows what technology can do for films (heck, it can raise Laurence Olivier from the dead!), but it makes too rich a meal, and leads to the visual equivalent of indigestion.
Link:
You can purchase Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Widescreen Special Collector's Edition) at Amazon.com by clicking here.
If you don't want Widescreen, but prefer Fullscreen, click here.
Posted by ds at February 10, 2006 03:23 PM
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