We take a look back at 2004’s Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, starring Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.
There’s nothing more disheartening for a movie fan than when you go see a movie with a bunch of your friends, and while you absolutely love the movie, when the lights come on, and you walk out, you realize your friends absolutely HATED it. Sometimes this is justified, such as when my group of buddies rightly accused me of being insane for loving Die Another Day. At other times, they’re dead wrong, such as when one of my best friends tried to convince me Rushmore was bad (believe it or not – this also happened at The Matrix – but with a different friend). Another time I was totally disheartened by the reaction of a group of friends was back in the fall of 2004 when a group of us went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on opening night.
Wait a second, some of you might be asking. What the heck is Sky Captain? It’s a movie that – twenty years ago – was pretty heavily hyped by Paramount Pictures, as it was shot in a revolutionary way by director Kerry Conran, with it all shot against virtual sets and green screen. Before this came out, people were saying Condon was maybe going to be the next George Lucas because he seemed to be a total VFX pioneer. Still, audiences ended up not caring for the cartoonish world our live-action heroes find themselves playing against. What happened was that Conran was too early with his use of the technology, which was used to better effect by Robert Rodriguez on Sin City and Zack Snyder on 300, and nowadays is standard.
Of course, it likely wasn’t just the visual style Sky Captain had going against it. The film, which aims to recreate old Saturday afternoon serials from the thirties, albeit with a Dieselpunk/ quasi-futuristic spin, was another failed attempt by Hollywood to make a pulp-style movie. Indiana Jones had done this brilliantly, but movies like The Shadow and The Phantom tried to mould pre-existing pulp characters into modern action heroes, adopting this high adventure style. Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow would be more like Indiana Jones in that it was Conran’s original creation, but while those movies were grounded by amazing stonework and action, Sky Captain was deliberately artificial in an extreme way.
In it, Jude Law plays the titular Sky Captain aka Joe Sullivan, who heads his own private airforce and acts as a kind of superhero protector of this alternate history New York circa 1939. When mysterious robots invade the city, Joe teams up with his ex-girlfriend, a plucky reporter in the Lois Lane mode, Polly Perkins, to discover what’s behind the sinister plot. The next hour and forty minutes feature our heroes doing battle against all kinds of mechanical villains, including Bai Ling’s retro-cyborg henchman, with a little help from Angelina Jolie as a dead-sexy, one-eyed Navy pilot named Franky, and Sky Captain’s sidekick, Dex, played by Giovanni Ribisi.
The movie is highly stylized to a fault, with it very much in the “gee whiz” style of a movie made seventy years before this saw the light of day. More cynical audiences of the time dubbed it as cheesy, with only a few of us appreciating the retro pulp feel. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow had a visual style that likely turned off a lot of viewers, with it shot on primitive digital video and then manipulated to look like a highly stylized film. Some thought it looked terrific; others thought it looked cheap. Paramount swore it wasn’t the latter, with them saying it cost a pricey $70 million, although Conrad, years later, scoffed at this number, saying that if indeed it cost that much, it was spent on things other than the filming.
Some critics of the time appreciated Sky Captain, with Roger Ebert a notable defender. He gave it four stars and said watching it reminded him of seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. In theatres, it only grossed $37 million domestically and another $20 million overseas, meaning it was considered a flop and put Conran’s career on the ice, with him never directing another movie.
Yet, there were reasons other than the film’s quality that played a role in its failure. At the time, the movie’s two stars, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law, were considered very over-exposed. This was particularly true of Law, as it was around this time that Hollywood decided to make him a household name. This happens now and again, where every once in a while, an actor or actress becomes the toast of Hollywood and makes a whole bunch of high-profile films is quick succession with the idea that they will be future megastars. Sometimes this backfires, as with Armie Hammer or Jai Courtney, but sometimes it works too, such as what seems to be happening with Glen Powell right now or Jennifer Lawrence back in the day. Law made too many movies back-to-back, with this his sixth film in 2004, with many of them, including his ill-advised remake of Alfie, being notable flops. The failure of all these films put a notable chill on his career for a while. Still, Law was smart and doubled down on being a character actor first, eventually gaining new fans in more complicated roles, and his career has endured well in the twenty years since Sky Captain (the week you can see him in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and The Order).
If you haven’t seen this movie, I urge you to check it out. It’s a fun, old-fashioned adventure with a great score by Edward Shearmur, who never entirely became the A-list composer he should have been. It has a bouncy pace and even an early example of post-mortem casting with Laurence Olivier playing the bad guy despite having died 13 years before this came out. Give it a shot!