DAC Episode 395 - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

sky dog and the lion of tomorrow

When Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow came out in 2004, much was made of the fact that director Kerry Conran had landed the job on the strength of a short film painstakingly made on his computer. The feature length film, starring a staggeringly audience-enticing combo of Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, arrived on a wave of hype and positive reviews (Roger Ebert loved it) that few movies could reasonably bear.

We may not have known it in 2004, but Sky Captain does grant a vision of the future - not one of mid-century retrofuturism with a blast of steampunk and a sprig of Hollow Earth-style pulp - but a world of green screens and artificial backgrounds. The Star Wars prequels had already demonstrated what it looked like when actors interfaced with tennis balls on empty, green-draped sets (like crap), but Sky Captain threw its A-list stars into a sepia-toned digital landscape and let them suffer there.

Their suffering is not completely fruitless. Jolie is particularly fun as the crisply accented Frankie, and Paltrow and Law do a good job of delivering some screwball banter amidst the giant robots and dinosaurs. The weak spot here is Conran, who is incapable of maintaining the tone or coaxing a grounded reality out of the digital backlot. It’s probably too much to ask of a first-time director, no matter how talented.

But what did Adam and Aidan think? Find out below or listen on your podcatcher of choice.