Tim's Toons: The CGI spectacle and unrealism of Sky Captain
Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 1:30PM Tim here. This week marks the ten-year anniversary of one of the most important milestones in modern feature animation, though it’s a form of animation that tends to make itself invisible. But when most of the sets, and several of the major characters in movies from Avatar to Gravity to Guardians of the Galaxy are created entirely in a computer by digital artists, can we really keep blithely calling these “live-action movies” without briefly wondering if our pants have just burst in flame? It’s not Disney/Pixar-style cartooning, but these are partially or wholly animated worlds by any definition I can come up with. And it was on September 17, 2004 that Paramount released Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which made history as the first Hollywood movie made entirely on green screens, with every single location created artificially in post-production...
(it was not the first movie overall: the French/British Immortal and the Japanese Casshern both premiered earlier in the same year, though neither found its way to North America).
Revisiting Sky Captain after many years, my first instinct is that it hasn’t aged very well. But that’s not correct: it already had some pretty considerable problems that were clear as day back in ’04, and all time has done is to suck away some of the novelty that made some of us grit our teeth and muscle through those problems. The leads – Jude Law, as part of his infamous Year That Wouldn’t Stop, and Gwyneth Paltrow – aren’t at all up to the challenge of plying up writer-director Kerry Conran’s obvious desire that all of this should have the playful, cocky insouciance of a ‘30s sci-fi serial, and both bring remakarable, fatal gravity and sluggishness to a frankly dorky concept that desperately cries out for a fluffy, light touch (Angelina Jolie, as an eye-patch wearing British Air Navy officer, does a hell of a lot more with not nearly enough screen time).
It’s obvious, in other words, that the film isn’t very interested in its human beings or its story, so much as the hugely ambitious world in which they exist. And that brings me back to the reason that we’re all here, since even with the march of a decade of technological advancements, Sky Captain still looks as flashy and stylized as it ever did. Not always to its benefit: in a misguided bid for old-timey authenticity, or I don’t know what else, the film boasts a limited and frankly ugly color palette of various bronzes, blues and greys that manages to anticipated the dread Orange & Teal trend while being soft enough to look even uglier.
Still, Sky Captain at least sees fit to do something its entirely synthetic world that demands and justifies all those 1s and 0s, something that its many followers would often be well-advised to recall. The important thing is not the question “can we save time and money by doing this in CGI?” but “can we possibly do this without copious CGI?”, Sky Captain could not possibly be made any other way than it was. Taking place in an orgy of Art Deco design that recalls a gauzier, more romantic version of German Expressionism crossbred with the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons of the early 1940s, the film’s setting is unabashedly artificial and detached, there to be appreciated for how wild and imaginative and otherworldly it is, and not, certainly, because it to any meaningful degree mimics reality.
Other films have played in that sandbox, but not nearly enough of them, and that’s why, even after a decade when its technical innovations have been adopted by virtually every film with a budget bigger than the change in your car’s ashtray, Sky Captain still looks different. The invented, impossible world of unreal colors, lines, and textures that it has in place of functional dramaturgy connect it to the world of graphic art as much as to conventional filmmaking. It’s for that reason that I’m comfortable calling the film an important step in the development of modern animation: its victories are in design and rendering, in creating a bustling backdrop of broad creativity. It is boring and pretty stupid; I will not deny that. But I still kind of wish that more films tried to be a little bit more like it.
Reader Comments (9)
Agreed. Certainly a case of a film with eyes bigger than its stomach (or, computer processor as the case may be here).
I remember around the time this came out, Jude Law hosted SNL and did a skit where he struggled through green screen acting and increasingly inane direction (with, I think, Amy Poehler as a ditzy Paltrow who was more willing to react to thin air). I always wondered how much of that premise came from Law and how much was the writer's room.
Seems to me that if they were willing to dig up Laurence Olivier to play Dr. Totenkopf, they could have continued digging and come up with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow to play the leads. Or Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Hell, I'd have settled for Tina Louise and Mr. Ed. Anybody but the two stiffs they came up with.
I still remember the score the most from this film, which I guess says something about it's visuals. You're right, some of the color palettes are so garish they're hard to shake.
Also: RIP Kerry Conran's career. What happened to him?
He never got to direct another film, because he's a techno-geek, not a film director.
I dragged my kids to this when it was in theaters and own the DVD. As much fun as Sky Captain is to a Fleischer-Superman lover like I myself (I've owned these great cartoons on Super 8, 16mm, VHS, and DVD over the decades), the fact is, it's a one-joke idea blown up to feature length, and it bogs down pretty quickly. Once the novelty of the deco imagery and old-school plot wears off, it's a slog to the end. The things that you expect from a real filmmaker are beyond Conran's ability - things like pacing, actually directing the performances, and crafting a story that's not just raygun gothic imagery raided from old movie serials, SF pulps, B pictures, riffs on classics like Lost Horizon, and film-geek references. ("Oh wow, that ship is the Venture from King Kong!")
Anyway, I've always thought Sky Captain was a cautionary tale of what happens when a technological leap and hardcore film geekery far outstrip storytelling ability. It's fun - at least for the first third or half - but it's a failure as a good movie.
I enjoyed it a great deal.
Mainly because it was so unreal in everything. Everything was over the top, but strangely enough, I really liked it.
One of my "guilty pleasures".
I loved watching contemporary movie stars in retro SF. yes, it is style over substance, but so what? it is an adventure movie.I enjoyed it great deal.
The movie looked like an RKO picture from 1935 which is not a bad thing-- the plot seemed generic and it lacked true star power to pull it off- and yeah the visionary director was never heard from again...
I saw this for the first time a couple of months ago and I appreciated it a lot, but sort of in the way you appreciate an old Fred & Ginger movie, i.e. you put up with the deadly slow pacing and flat dialogue and performances for the beauty of the dancing and music.
I've always thought that Gwyneth is, er, limited as an actress and just doesn't have enough punch to pull you through the dead spots. Jude Law is almost there but like everyone else he seems so muffled.
If only it had had, oh I don't know, Daniel Craig and Cate Blanchett?