3.6.14 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

I just saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for the second time in a week because a friend arrived in town and I wanted him to see it, and the first time I saw it I loved every frigging minute of it. It, shall we say, rocked.

It is true that there were some plot issues. It is true that every time the heroes faced an unsolvable problem the writers solved it by bringing in some new technological element—well, a couple of times, anyway. But I loved it all the same. For all its cheese element, the film felt like something writer/director Kerry Conran hand-crafted with love. I loved it for the genuine, non-cynical innocence of its 1930s serial cliff-hanger matinee-style sepia-tone alternate-history—the same style of good-guys who are really good, and bad-guys who are really bad that inspired Star Wars. (It even had a sexy female Darth Vader.)

Special kudos go to Angelina Jolie, perhaps the only woman who could have pulled off the role of Franky totally straight—as the role demands. A lesser woman would have resorted to softening touches—that tongue-in-cheek irony the cynical use to mitigate the embarrassment of playing such a totally uncompromising hero’s part.

Whether today’s culture is itself too cynical for Sky Captain remains to be seen.

2004.9.27
Based loosely on an email to Steve Clarian