Captain of the Atmospherics

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) came out last summer, and I really wanted to see it in the theater, but I just never got around to it. My action movie partner saw it before me, so there was no one to go with, and I had heard mixed things about it. I imagined that it was a really neat-looking movie that would end up lacking the umimportant things such as plot. Turns out I was right.

But this may not be a bad thing, at least not wholly. I watched the “making of” video that came with the DVD, and it was really interesting (and yet kind of sad) to see these guys work on a six-minute “trailer” for four years. Then they showed that trailer to people, and a major studio just ate it up. It actually turned out to become some of the first parts of the movie, where the giant robots invade. These scenes are by far the most memorable and interesting of the entire movie.

But the plot here is actually beside the point. Yes, there is a “world of tomorrow,” and the earth will be destroyed in the process, but all of this seems to have been created after the original movie short, which was just about robots invading.

And these robots, as well as everything about the film, are visually stunning. It’s not like War of the Worlds, where I asked “How’d they do that?” I ask that question because everything looks so realistic in that film. Sky Captain is more like Spielburg decided to make his remake look like the original film. It doesn't look realistic, but the creative way it is shot and even written makes it appear like a pre-WWII film.

Which makes me wonder the point of it. It’s really neat that a film can be made to look like one from the 1920s, but why not just watch a film from the 1920s? Everyone looking for style and creativity should watch this movie, but I don’t think there is going to be a slew of films copying it. It’s slicker than a 1920s film, of course, and there are the beautiful and funny people in it, but it seems like a one-shot sort of thing. There’s no point in doing it again if it’s already been done.

It’s kind of like listening to John Cage’s song where someone just sits at the piano and doesn’t play for four minutes. Yeah, it’s interesting and intriguing to listen to everything around you as music, but I don’t want to put this piece of “music” on each time I want to listen to something. There’s just no point.

As a side note, I have decided that my reviews will actually contain something about the movies themselves instead of just interpreting them, or at least part of the time. So I have decided to begin rating movies using the Rotten Tomatoes rating system of 1-10, where 6-10 means it’s fresh or good, and 1-5 means it’s rotten or bad.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow gets a six, just putting it in the fresh category. It gets this because it really is visually amazing, and it’s worth watching just for that. There are some funny parts, too, although they don’t really belong in the film. Nevertheless, they made me laugh.

And that can’t be a bad thing.