As for kids, there were about 6 of them, four 10 y/o boys in a group with one dad, and a couple of others here and there. I don't know what the movie company is doing with promotion and marketing, but if they were trying to make Sky Captain appeal to the teenaged box office that most action movies go for, they're not getting it done. At least it didn't look like it, judging by the audience in the movie we saw, and since the weekend estimates are only $16m for Sky Captain, after predictions in the low $20s, and since anything under $35m is bad for a $70m action movie... they're pretty screwed. Sky Captain won't be a complete box office disaster as Thunderbirds was, but as Ebert said about that film:

This is a movie made for an audience that does not exist, at least in the land of North American multiplexes: Fans of a British TV puppet show that ran from 1964 to 1966.

Of course he didn't like Thunderbirds, and gave it just 1.5/4 stars. He loved Sky Captain, gave it 4/4 stars, and didn't say a word about its commercial prospects. Funny how that works.  Then again, Sky Captain made more on Saturday than Thunderbirds made in its entire US commercial release, so there isn't too strong a comparison to be made.  I'm not sure what the audience is for a faux-black and white, 1930s evoking, almost-entirely CGI action picture with quality but sub-blockbuster stars, but apparently Malaya and me are in it, since we saw Sky Captain opening day.

How was it?

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 6
Humor: 6
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6.5

(Click here to see these categories explained.)

I wanted to like it, and I wasn't bored, but it never really grabbed me. Admittedly, I'm not a true film geek, and thoughts of 1930s type cliffhanger pictures give me zero thrill. Ebert loves that type of old-fashioned swashbuckling stuff, as do other amateur film geeks like Harry Knowles, and they both loved this picture to death. Loved it enough to overlook all of the flaws in logic and plot holes, and loved it enough to keep their disbelief suspended for the entire running time, no matter how heavy that disbelief got. I didn't, and frequently thought, "Well that was entirely impossible." but it wasn't so bad that it ruined the movie for me. It isn't as if Sky Captain is some perfectly-realistic movie with just a few convenient lapses in the laws of physics. The movie is, start to finish, unrealistic and unbelievable in almost every physical reality sort of way. But since it's so consistently absurd, you get into it and go with it. It's like an old Flash Gordon flick, or some other world-in-danger cliffhanger with mad scientists and devilish robots and astonishing future technology. And if you sit there and wonder where the army is, or how the robots AI is better than anything that can be built even 90 years later, or where these flying landing strips came from, or how there are amphibious flying planes that don't exist even now, you won't enjoy the movie at all. Don't take it literally, don't apply the same logic that exists in our world, and suspend your disbelief for the comic book aspects of it, and you'll probably have a pretty good time.

Sky Captain is running at 72% on RT now, with 91/127 reviews positive, so clearly most critics are okay with it. I guess I'd recommend it, but only if the previous paragraph doesn't turn you off entirely. You've got to have a lot of un-jaded ten year old boy in you to buy into the movie, but if you can unplug your logical nit picking for the duration, it should be good.  If not, you'll wind up like Michelle Alexandra of Eclipse Magazine, and spend your entire review embarrassing yourself with comments like this:

You have to have seen the movie to grasp why her comments here are so misguided, but trust me, everything she says here makes perfect sense in the film. To be fair, I only noticed her review for Sky Captain since it's one of the few negative ones, was on top of the RT reviews page, and since I remembered her laugh out loud comments about LotR:RotK where she was completely puzzled by why the film repeatedly cut between Faramir riding towards Osgilliath and Denothos messily eating tomatoes while Pippen cried and sang a sand lament.  Nevertheless, another one of those and she'll find herself compiled on my Wacky Movie Critics page.

One of the nicest things about the film is that they didn't give away the entire damn movie in the trailer. The best visuals, almost all of the plot info and twists, and pretty much every scene from the last 30 minutes is kept completely out of the trailers. As a result I had no idea what was going to happen next, and was actually interested in the plot. True, I didn't end up caring a great deal, and when the secrets were revealed quite a few of them were absurd or made no sense at all, but hey, at least I didn't know all of them in advance.

Script/Story: 4
This is my lowest score, since this movie was like most action pictures, and had a script primarily designed to drag the lead characters from location to location, so weird and wild things could happen once they got there. It served that purpose, but it was far too much of a coat hanger for me to rate it more highly. I'm actually going very, very easy on the logical flaws and plot holes here, and continuing to suspend my disbelief, or I'd have to give this film about a -3 here. A nit picking review with a full list of the plot details that were unexplainable or made absolutely no sense would be longer than the movie's actual screenplay.

Acting/Casting: 7
There have been a lot of complaints about the allegedly-wooden acting, but I think that's mostly since reviewers knew this whole movie was done in front of blue screens and were therefore looking for flaws. I knew it was all CGI as well, and I didn't think it was dreadful, but it wasn't perfect either. There aren't any full on CGI characters in Sky Captain; just various robots and such that they have to run from or fight, and those were done well enough. Human actors seem to be pretty good at pretending to be in terror of something that's giant and not there; see Jurassic Park and most other horror/action movies of recent years for examples. Apparently most anyone can pantomime terror of a giant lizard/robot/tentacle beast/etc while actually looking at a grip holding a tennis ball on a broomstick. 

The hard part is having the actors interact normally while in front of a blue screen. Or act terrified as if they're on a high ledge while they're actually just on a blue bench with a knee-high drop to a cushion. With today's computer technology, it's easy to paste in the background graphics and make it look like the actors are on the edge of a yawning chasm. The hard part is getting the actors to act like they're in tremendous peril, and that's why my low-water mark is Star Wars Episode 1 and 2. My high water mark is the way CGI and Gollum were handled in LotR:RotK, where you could really believe what you saw was happening. I never believed that in Star Wars Episode 1 and 2, and though much of that was due to the dreadful dialogue, the actors never looked confident in their roles.

Sky Captain was no LotR:RotK, but it was certainly head and shoulders above the high school drama class quality of acting in most of Episode 1 or 2, and it was never so bad as to be distracting. And when you're dealing with as much CGI as Sky Captain had, that's about all you can ask for.

Action: 6
There was a lot of action, but I didn't find it that thrilling, in large part since almost all of it was so unbelievable. And I don't mean that in a good way, I mean it in a "that could never happen" sort of way. The movie doesn't sink to Charlie's Angels levels of unreality, but I can't recall an action sequence where there weren't a few actions or events that took me out of the film. But as I said, I wasn't all that successful in suspending my disbelief throughout. The actual action sequences themselves were pretty good, but somewhat nonsensical or unimportant, as the things the heroes struggled to do made no real difference in the long run, until the very climax of the entire film.

Humor: 6
Surprisingly, Sky Captain had several good laughs, most of them prompted by two running jokes. The plane's fuel line mentioned above was one, and yes, it was funny, and yes it was enough to endanger the pilot. Of course it was, that was the whole point of the joke.  The other was when reporter Gwynneth lost her bag of extra camera film, and spent the last half of the movie seeing one incredibly-amazing sight after another, none of which seemed to be good enough to waste one of her last two photos on. When she finally brought herself to take a picture, right at the end of the film, it's played for one last big joke, and it was funny, but not as funny as they meant it to be in the script. Still, I laughed several times at things that were supposed to be funny, and that's several times more than most action flicks manage to intentionally amuse me.

Eye Candy: 8
As you can see from the trailer and still shots, the movie is all about eye candy. That's the whole point in doing so much of it CGI; they'd have needed a Lord of the Rings' sized budget to do the whole movie as it was done with actual sets, miniatures, etc. Sky Captain done in that fashion might have been a better film, but since it wasn't a realistic possibility, they did what they could with CGI, and it worked out pretty well. In an unusual state of affairs for a modern movie, the best stuff was not in the trailer and in fact, the stuff you see in the trailer is far from the best or most interesting stuff in the film, and it's far from the most eye candy-licious.

I didn't give the movie a really high score in this category because while there were a lot of really pretty things, there were other things that weren't pretty at all, and because a number of scenes were just too soft-focused and deceptively-lit to look real or satisfying.

Fun Factor: 7
I probably graded this one a bit high, but eh... The movie tries to be fun, and it keeps moving and switching venues constantly, so I can see that it was trying to be fun. That I didn't personally enjoy it all that much is probably more about me than the movie.

Replayability: 6
This is obviously a guess at a score, having seen the film once in the theater, but I'd like to see it again, someday. Just not any time real soon.

Overall: 6.5
I didn't enjoy the film enough to give it a high score, but it didn't suck either. As you know if you've read a number of my film reviews, I tend to grade pretty harshly, so from me, anything over a 6 isn't such a bad score.

September 17, 2004

I haven't talked about it very much, but I have grown interested enough in the overly-titled Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow movie to want to see it. Malaya's been super busy lately with 3 days a week of martial arts class and work and other things, but she's got some free time Friday afternoon, so we're going to hit the movie and then Home Depot, since we got a 60lbs weight bag on sale at Sportsmart earlier this week, but haven't yet been able to put it up since I need a drill to get through the inch of stucco and drywall below the wooden beams on our back patio. And Home Depot is rather known for their drills.

Anyway, Sky Captain is opening Friday, and we were interested in it, and the advance reviews are largely positive (42/55 now, for 76%), so off we're going. A glance at the quick review quotes on RT tells an interesting story, since most of the positive reviews are very positive, and most of the negative ones are almost angry in their dislike. Here are three basically random (pasted right in a row from the front page) positive reviews, and as you can see, they're pretty enthusiastic.

"So perfectly captures the sci-fi wonder of '30s serials...that watching it doesn't arouse a modern reaction of "wow!" or "cool!" -- it garners a genuine, awe-struck "golly!""
-- Rob Blackwelder, SPLICEDWIRE

"It's got dazzling visuals, amazing special effects and a fun story - a living, breathing comic book."
-- Jeffrey Bruner, DES MOINES REGISTER

"The must-see summer blockbuster of 1939, it's the new Far From Heaven -- only this time for nerds instead of gay guys."
-- Sean Burns, PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY

And here are a few of the negative ones:

"Crass and soulless."
-- David Sterritt, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

"It's a gimmick, it's not a movie."
-- Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE

"A glossy piece of humbug cooked up by well-intentioned amateurs as a science experiment."
-- Bruce Newman, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

The movie, if you know nothing about it, is set in a sort of sci-fi version of the 1930s, with incredible robots, mad scientists, intrepid female reporters, and it's got an Star Wars type of swashbuckling plot with aerial battles, dirigibles, undersea warfare, and more. The gimmick is that everything in the entire movie, including one of the actors, is computer generated. All of the backgrounds, special effects, lighting, etc. So it's basically like Episode 1 and 2, except with dialogue that's not LOL awful and acting that won't make your eyes hurt. At least that's the hope.