Kerry Conran's film, six years in the making, is not so much the world of tomorrow as the magpie borrower of many of our past memories. There are echoes here of comic books, serials and cartoons, sometimes from as far back as the Thirties and HG Wells's The War of the Worlds. It looks incredible, and has a screenplay that approximates those bubble captions which flow from the mouths of comic book characters.
Presumably it was hoped that the casting of Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Michael Gambon would jazz up the movie's box-office returns. But I fear film-goers may want tomorrow's world more modernist and less determinedly nostalgic; they may also accuse its leading characters of the one-dimensional status they quite deliberately inhabit.
The giant flying robots, mutated dinosaurs, spaceships and city skylines are all age-old familiar as Law's brave Sky Captain, with Paltrow's ace reporter as his companion, saves the world from evil. It doesn't require much acting and Jolie and Gambon have very little to do in smaller parts. But it does require the right looks, including clothes, and this it has. Paltrow, in fact, looks so much like Garbo that she is almost certain to be cast as her sooner or later.
Fans of this sort of retro sci-fi will admire the digital splendour of the artwork and production design. But the world of George Lucas and co it is certainly not. This comes as a considerable surprise, in my case a more than passably pleasant one.
But I have a horrible feeling I will be in the minority.
Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow
Cert: certPG
