Saturday, August 2, 2008

Reviewing "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is not the sort of movie that gets made these days. The radical stylization of this movie was rather disconcerting at first. It felt rather cartoonish, vague if you will. It was also visually very dark, lots of shadows. But as it progresses, these issues became much less significant.

They did this in two ways. The first was that after the first little while, they slowly added more light to the world. The second was that I realized that this isn't "Star Wars." No, the CGI wasn't photo-realistic. No, it isn't even cutting edge. But, and this is a big but, Sky Captain has a theme, a feel, a texture it's trying to hit. And it does hit it. It hit's it dead center. It is an old feeling, sort of that 1940's comic book/black and white movie feel. I'm not saying that it's a two color movie, but it does convey that feel. It doesn't matter if it doesn't look real, because it doesn't try to make you think that it is real.

Sky Captain had a good story, if rather far fetched. But that's just par for the course with any movie that opens with robots the size sky scrapers. It was funny through out, and was "A lot of fun" as someone with me put it. I fully concur. It was a good ride.

This movie is rated PG, and was released in 2004.