No Tip for the Sky Cap
Movies like “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” really don’t have to work that hard for my enjoyment. As a die-hard comic and pulp fiction fan with a special affection for the 1930s, B-movies and art deco, I practically melted in my seat when I first saw the previews. The formula for success in these kinds of movies isn’t rocket science (or maybe that’s exactly what it is…). The most important ingredient is affection and respect for the source material, with enough internal consistency and appealing characters to glue a chase-and-shoot plot together for 90 minutes or so. Every few years when a studio decides to dump a ton of money on a big, loud period-piece adventure, it’s usually at least worth the price of admission. Considering the awesome visuals from the “Sky Captain” previews, I figured this could be the geek flick of the year.
The first warning sign that my hopes were about to be dashed came about five minutes into the picture. A brilliant scientist fleeing his pursuers runs into an intrepid female reporter, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. He explains that he and some of his colleagues are being hunted down because of some work they were involved in “at the end of World War I.” That, I thought, was an interesting turn of phrase. “Sky Captain” takes place in 1939. Why would anyone in 1939 refer to the 1914-18 war as “World War I” when there wasn’t a World War II yet? It was a tiny detail, but it was a dumb, careless mistake. Any true aficionado of 1930s-era adventure fiction would have caught it and pointed out the correct designation the scientist would have used (“The Great War”).
It was immediately troubling, then, that despite the cast of thousands who must have seen the script and been involved in the production, the line had made it into the final cut – not because it mattered a whit to the story, but because it betrayed a larger lack of care and lack of respect for the audience (e.g., the idea that, "hey, if they'll believe in giant robots, they won't care about the little stuff"). Sure enough, this tendency toward lazy storytelling quickly mushroomed into larger problems with the story that eventually brought the film down like a flaming dirigible.
Without giving too much away, let me say that as the film played out, the story was repeatedly hamstrung by weird and foolish inconsistencies, dangling plot threads, and poorly-constructed scenes that raised distracting questions, detracting from the impact of the action. The story and characters were pressed as flat as the blue-screen backgrounds against which the film was shot. By the end of the film, I neither understood nor cared what was going on. I felt the heavy hand of the writer-director pushing unmotivated action in my face, and was resigned to the fact that some of the more interesting questions raised by the plot and situation would never be answered. Despite all the spectacular wizardry and slam-bang action sequences, “Sky Captain” came across as a colossal waste of time and energy. Especially weighed against high expectations, it was truly one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time.
The problem is simple: Movies like “Sky Captain” don’t have to be plausible, but they do have to make sense. I’m happy to buy into giant robot armies, planes that can fly underwater, squadrons of freelance fighter pilots based on a secret island within driving distance of downtown Manhattan, and whatever other crazy stuff the writers want to put into the story, so long as there is an internal consistency to the fantasy world. A good web of fantasy takes some care to construct, however. It is a delicate tissue of implications proceeding from a carefully-thought-out body of assumptions, woven into a fabric of reality with a high thread-count of actual facts. A skilled fantasist will take great pains to avoid puncturing the suspension of disbelief with gratuitous errors of logic.
Lord of the Rings, to cite perhaps the most extreme example, is compelling in direct proportion to the titanic amount of background effort that Tolkien put into constructing the universe of Middle Earth. In places, the weight of history – made-up history, to be sure, but heavy nonetheless – almost threatens to drag down the primary conflict. But despite all the lore and legend Tolkien requires his readers to accept just as an ante at the table, one is never left questioning why anything in his universe is the way it is, or why his characters act they way they act.
You don’t have to write 2000 pages about your world to make it convincing, either. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – the gold standard for this kind of movie – clicked from the very first frame because it laid out a very consistent framework within which the characters and action could play out, and stuck to it. My very favorite moment in the film from that perspective is the scene where Karen Allen is held captive in the tent of the French archeologist who is collaborating with the Nazis. He tries to get her to divulge some information by getting her drunk, but, as we saw in an earlier scene where she drank a crew of burly Mongols under the table, this woman can hold her liquor. The audience is therefore led to believe she will turn the tables and make her escape. However, it turns out that they are drinking the Frenchman’s family-label wine. “I grew up on this stuff!” he exclaims, as Allen (and the audience) are wondering why he’s still on his feet. If that moment had passed without that line of explanation, the viewers would have felt confused, and, for some, the veil of fantasy would have been pierced. But Spielberg, Lucas and writer Lawrence Kasdan respected their audience enough to set them up with a delightfully-surprising twist. It is out of an accumulation of such wonderful moments that classics are made.
Over the years, successful fantasy films have displayed this same integrity and respect. “The Phantom,” “Rocketeer,” “The Shadow” and the 1999 version of “The Mummy” are all solidly in the genre of “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” and all, despite their flaws, are significantly more entertaining and substantial for the greater craft that went into their execution. Perhaps no heroic fantasy film strains the limits of how much backstory an audience will accept more than “The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension” (1984). There, the accumulation of fantastic invention is so dense and dazzling that the effect of its achievement is like the playing out of themes in a Bach fugue. By dint of a staggeringly great script, brilliant performance and flawless directing, “Buckaroo Bonzai” moves viewers right past the cheesy low-budget visuals and ridiculous complexity of its plot to a point of total immersion with the fantasy world. I dare anyone (except for the aliens, who were clearly not impressed) not to cheer at the end of it.
“Buckaroo Bonzai” and the other pulp-inspired movies of the past 25 years have proven that it’s possible to capture that thrilling vibe of yesteryear and get audiences to believe in (and care about) the most bizarro plots of pirates, aliens, reincarnated warlords, super-science, magic, mass hypnosis and whatever other whimsy crosses the writer’s mind, so long as it’s done with sufficient storytelling craft. Like “The Fifth Element,” another self-important spectacle brought down by inattention to the details of its own internal world, “Sky Captain” tries to bludgeon us into submission with visual shock and awe, but gets tripped up in its own tangle of foolish assumptions and poorly thought-through execution. Too bad. It coulda been a contender.
1:51:24 PM 
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