Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When we talk about streaming culture, we’re usually enthusing about what’s new, but one of the best things about streaming is how it’s made old and obscure cult hits available to a new generation. Presenting Cult Corner: your weekly look into hidden gems and long-lost curiosities that you can find on streaming.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow reminds me very much of a college course I took on books. That’s right: The course was about just books. We didn’t read these books to absorb their literary merit; We studied them as artifacts. What does the binding of a book or its typesetting lend to its meaning? How do authors use such pedantic things as footnotes, semi-colons, or appendixes to change their work? If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? Is it the first manuscript? First Folio Edition? Or is it in every paperback in a high school junior’s backpack?
What do all these very philosophical books have to do with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? Well, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow can’t be appraised as a film without looking at the way it was made. Its charm doesn’t come from its tried and true story, but from its ground-breaking blue screen and CGI effects. It’s as much a marvel of technology as it is a roaring action film.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was the passion project of Kerry Conran. In 1994, Conran decided to take his computer animation chops and transfer them to live-action film-making. He set up a blue screen in his home and spent four long years crafting a teaser trailer on a Mac. The result was spell-binding. Producer Jon Avnet got a look at it and the duo spent over two years working on the screenplay. As the years went on, it became a sort of crusade. Conran wanted to make it his way with as much creative control as possible. His enthusiasm for the project infected the likes of Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie. But was it a success?
On the one hand, it’s marvelous to see one writer/director’s vision for a story so eloquently brought to life. Conran spent over a decade bending burgeoning technology to his will so he could tell the story he wanted to tell the way he wanted to tell it. He paid homage to the pulpy adventure films of Hollywood’s Golden Age and brought Laurence Olivier back from the dead. It’s awe-inspiring to say the least.
However — and this is a big however — this film’s style naturally renders it oddly dispassionate. For all the heart put into Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, its computer generated gauze creates a veil of separation between the viewer and the screen. It suffers from the same intangible fault of all the major “CGI” films of this era: The spectacularly perfect visuals can never pass for real life. Today, we’re seeing directors circumvent this odd “uncanny valley” by blending digital effects with practical ones.
So, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow‘s biggest failure is that it’s such a resounding success. The people who love it adore how it harnessed new technology to fulfill a director’s vision. The people who don’t like it think it’s nothing without its splashy blue screen bag of tricks. As for me? I’m somewhere in the middle. I think it’s a fine, fun film and I’m mesmerized by the bold visuals. It’s a futuristic love letter to a storytelling style that’s fallen out of vogue.
For that, I think it’s worth celebrating. It’s a grand experiment – a leap of faith! Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a bold cinematic gesture that reminds us that the entire art form was born out of technological experimentation. It’s also a sweet escape.
[Watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on Netflix]
[Photos: Everett Collection]
