The following is a true story-
Once upon a time, I went to the Dentist to get a cavity filled. It was just a routine day for the Dentist who hummed to himself and worked away on my tooth, while I laid back with every muscle in my body tensed, twisting the armrests of his chair with white-knuckle strain. It was just a routine filling, when suddenly the drilling stopped, and I heard the Dentist utter two words that you do not want to hear your Dentist say to you while he is poking around in your mouth with thousands of dollars of razor sharp instruments.
“Don't move”.
It turns out that the drill bit was not secured tightly in the drill, and had slipped out of the drill, and landed precariously at the top of my throat, where it hung there by a thin strand of saliva, much like a barrel caught on a twig at the top of Niagara Falls. One false involuntary flex of my throat muscles and over it would have gone. Of course I didn't know this at the time, I had taken “don't move” seriously enough that I wasn't even going to take a chance flexing my brain to think about the situation.
The Dentist retrieved it, and all was well once again. He told me what had happened, and we all had a good laugh of relief. The Dentist laughed because he probably wasn't going to be sued by a guy with a drill in his stomach. The Dental Hygienist laughed because she wasn't going to have to take the stand and provide testimony in a malpractice case. I laughed because everyone else was doing it and I wanted to be popular. That and I wasn't dead with a Dentist drill piercing my throat.
But still, the pain and suffering was quick and was over in brief moment. It's not like it took 2 hours to torment me and then scarred me for the rest of my life.
Like “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” has done.
It simply amazes me how much time and effort are put into really horrible movies that leave painful memories with movie audiences for years to come. Maybe it's that Hollywood attitude that if you are going to do something, do it big. Why just hurt the people who turn out to see your film, when you can scar them right down to their very genes, thus causing deformation and disfigurement for generations to come. An Oscar is a nice thing to have, but really all you have is a mantle-top dust collector when it's all over. Pain, on the other hand, will last decades.
Or something like that.
Still, no matter how you slice it, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” is simply a dreadful film. Let's break it down and find out why, shall we?
I have heard people say that while the movie is very thin on story, it is full of amazing special effects. To say the story is “thin” is a wee bit of an understatement. “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (or SCATWOT, and oh WOT SCAT it was), has a story that is so weak that you could set an infant down in front of it and after an hour or so he would turn to you and utter his first sentence, which would be a clearly audible “uh, am I supposed to be getting this?”. It seems more likely that the writer had a series of unrelated events involving an uninteresting guy in a plane and then threw the story together in post production. Or more likely, had some neighborhood kids come in and do it while he snoozed out back in the hammock. As for the special effects that are supposed to be amazing enough to not make us care about the story, while they are fairly impressive at times considering the entire world is digitally created, they are just so amazingly cheesy in other places that it's hard to believe that every major special effects team in Hollywood teamed up to make this steaming pile of offal. Then again, that could be part of the problem; too many cooks and all that claptrap.
Then there are the performances.
Oh good gracious me, the performances.
Jude Law did a great job as Sky Captain, provided every line he had to say was a cut and paste job of every Hollywood cliché ever written. I thought Gwyneth Paltrow was fantastic as the animated piece of lumber that accompanied Sky Captain on his adventures, until I later found out that her character wasn't supposed to be an animated piece of lumber. And Angelina Jolie, who has less screen time than it has taken me to type this paragraph so far, adds nothing at all to any aspect of the film. The film would have been better, and would have, oddly enough, made more sense, if Angelina had simply walked on screen, looked at the camera, and said “Hi folks! It's me, Angelina Jolie. Enjoy my large breasts. Well, that's all for me, folks. Goodnight!”, then winked at the camera and walked off set. The film also digitally inserts old footage of a veteran actor who passed away long ago, but I refuse to put his name on the same page as the title of this film, simply out of respect for the dead, and the talented. Even so, it is pretty damn funny that the best performance in the film is by a man who has been dead for over 20 years.
Yep, it's THAT kind of movie.
I can see some of you still don't believe me. Already I can see that some of you want to go rent this terrible thing and see for yourselves. Perhaps I can detail three key scenes in the film which show just how poorly this thing was written, and maybe then you'll dismiss those thoughts………
Example 1- “Manos: The Hands of Steel”:
In a marvelous action scene (joke) late in the film, our intrepid hero, Sky Captain, is running away from various huge flying robots that are hell bent on killing him. How does he elude these mechanized killer death machines? He punches them in the head, thus destroying them. Yes, the same mechanical robots that in a previous scene are tearing apart New York City, right down to the building foundations, are taken out by one punch from Sky Captain, who has no superpowers, just a plane and a dopey sidekick. I knew a guy who punched his locker at school once and had to be sent to the hospital. We called him “Macho Chuck”, mostly because he hated being called that. I think that's why he punched his locker. He should have punched robots instead, despite the fact that they can rip apart concrete buildings with their bare hands.
Example 2- “Liquid Logic”:
Sky Captain has a WWII era plane that can fly underwater. I can deal with that. After all, James Bond had a car that turned into a submarine. Still, his plane does not TURN INTO a sub, it's still very much an airplane, its just flying underwater. Take any old footage of planes dipping and diving around in the sky, taking into account how aerodynamics function, and then digitally insert water around them, and you've basically got the scene in a nutshell. Oh, and Angelina Jolie's character has an aircraft carrier that can not so much fly, as just hover in the clouds. It's the same type of stuff I got yelled at for drawing in school when I was nine when I was supposed to be learning about crap like the Boston Tea Party.
Example 3- “The Plane Truth”:
In an explosive moment of drama in an atmosphere charged with suspense, Sky Captain's plane begins the run low on fuel. This seems to upset him, as well as his passenger, since everyone knows that “Plane minus Fuel equals Crash”. When the propellers on his plane finally stop turning, it would seem that the plane should plummet out of the sky, and the movie should end (well, that's what I was hoping for anyway). Still, the plane continues on, flying quite level and smooth, for another FIVE MINUTES, until it reaches Angelina Jolie's flying air craft carrier in the sky, where it continues on course, circles around in a perfect 180 degree bank turn to approach the runway from the right direction, and has a textbook landing on the deck.
If this is how logic and the laws of science work in this film, had Sky Captain missed the flying aircraft carrier completely, his momentum should have eventually run out and his plane should have come to a complete stop in mid air, where a bored looking Gwyneth Paltrow could have turned to him and said “Great. Now we are stuck up here with no fuel”. Had he come CLOSE to the landing deck but stopped just short of it, Sky Captain and his passenger could have been rescued from his plane with a stepladder.
As I said, it's THAT kind of movie.
It could have been so much more. The idea is solid enough with futuristic robots battled by likeable heroes in 1930s New York, yet anything resembling a decent film is buried in an avalanche of clunky dialogue and poorly conceived ideas that seem thrown in on a whim. I believe that if someone in the production team had blurted out “Let's make them go to the MOON too!!”, the film would have been 15 minutes longer, with Gwyneth Paltrow's character walking around the moon surface in high heels, snapping pictures of rocks and shit.
Let's be glad it wasn't mentioned, shall we?
The movie trailer tagline was “Join the Resistance”.
I agree. Don't see this freaking thing. Save yourself the rental fee and just punch yourself in the face repeatedly for two hours.
Until next time, the balcony is condemned.
Dr. Torgo