Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2005, DVD)

Scientists are disappearing all over the world, and the seventh man knows exactly why it is all happening. He knows he can prevent a catastrophe from happening, and arranged a meeting with the one person he thinks can help him. That one person is a reporter played by Gwenyth Paltrow, in the role of Polly Perkins. Now why this scientist thinks a reporter can save him is a hole in the script we never figure out, but for the purposes of this review, we will try to suspend belief that she is needed to save the world. In the midst of a meeting with her, the city of New York falls under attack, and by putting two and two together, we are able to surmise that the missing scientists are somehow tied to these mechanical menaces. Enter action hero Sky Captain, played by none other than Jude Law. He flies in with his WWII style plane (that has been tricked out), and provides assistance in this situation, seemingly like Batman would, with distress calls and everything.

There are fundamental flaws in everything that this film tries to represent, and simply from that opening sequence many questions arise that just cannot be answered. The movie takes place in the late 1930's, well before the vast technology that we have today, but somehow manages to mix in lasers and impressive rocket engines that would make many other things in the film seem obsolete (like the use of blimps as a mode of transportation). Sky Captain controls his own force of "mercenaries", who come to the rescue of anyone that may need it, and in this case he comes to the rescue of his old friend Polly. They have a romantic past that never quite evolves into a complete development, and when they try to make references to moments of their past the movie takes even further wrong turns from becoming watchable.

Let's sum it up for now. Polly and Sky Captain must stop an army of robots, whose home location is unknown, who are trying to do something with which we have no idea, and are doing weird things to attain that unknown goal. Make sense? Well nothing from the movie will make sense until you are watching the final sequences, and even then you won't completely grasp what exactly is going on in this film. The "bad guys" have technology far superior to anything our "heroes" control, and there should be no way they can even survive any of the onslaughts, but what kind of an action movie would it be if the heroes didn't have dozens of close calls to add to the drama of the film. Laughable points that involve his little plane that is able to travel thousands of miles on a single tank of gas, and flying fortresses that nobody cares about protecting just further muddles an already failing film.

By the time the climax of the film roles around, nobody even cares that Angelina Jole has popped in with a role as a supporting character, and I no longer cared if the main characters survived either. The script was just that bad. One thing that the movie has as a saving grace, and as a main reason that I ended up renting the movie, was its great cinematography. The use of shadows, lighting, and darkness in the film made every scene seem like it was right out of the 1930's. This made the film beautiful in appearance, and if the script had been able to keep up with it, could have made this a great film in the end. It really impressed me how the use of this lighting was able to manipulate the level of emotions from scene to scene. Don't be fooled though, the lighting prowess could not save what ended up being a terrible movie. A weak script, even worse dialogue, and a terrible concept drags this film to the depths of bad, and leads me to urging people to avoid it.