Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow

Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow evokes a wonderfully senseless, but stunning, fantasia of visual delights. A peerlessly anachronistic movie full of wild ideas, inventively designed, realised and put together with considerable life and love for the Amazing Stories pulp books of the Forties. It takes the title of the 1939 World Fair and creates a masterly technological film, which echoes brilliantly the fiction of the time, while working to the formula of high-concept modern cinema.

There are movie-buff nods to Fritz Lang and The Wizard Of Oz. Whites glow, colours bloom and expressionistic shadow is used to great effect. More importantly, first time writer/director Kerry Conran just knows what makes a fun movie and delivers in complete spades, from imagination to solid will.

The story is as embarrasing as anything George Lucas has written recently - the Ed Wood comparisons are valid, but totally missing the point - but there's a heedless joy in the craftsmanship and pacing, the sight-gags and giddily intoxicating series of cliffhangers. The plot is simply an excuse for marvellous set pieces intended to keep a jolly grin on our faces - one after another - each perfectly timed to give us a freeze-frame moment of our next exciting adventure. Indeed, like the film's fine score, it's impressive and admirable in it's execution.

What adventures, indeed! Giant robots land and wreak havoc on a historically toyed Manhattan and Sky Captain (Jude Law) tries to figure out just why they keep showing up around the world, looking for various items. "A shopping list" for a Doomsday machine, we quickly discover, and, as such, we're sent around the world on the quest to uncover the truth and prevent a cataclysm. Essentially, distilled B-movie joy, given limitless imagination.

Along for the ride and the story of the century is plucky reporter Polly Perkins (Gwenyth Paltrow), who plays the resistant romantic interest. She has a delightful running gag about running out of film and choosing her shots carefully amid the sensational sights.

I realize I'm talking like the front of a 1935 pulp magazine here, but it's fitting. This is a film containing one set of joys after another, flying through a city, escaping from a cave stuffed with dynamite - the pacing in this scene is priceless! - onto a secluded island full of dinosaurs, spiders and Rivendell-like hideaways. And yet no one in the audience scoffs, no one jeers. We accept it with surprise and delight. It's very nearly like watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark again and Angelina Jolie's stiff upper-lipped Captain Franky is surprisingly sexy and asexual.

As has been covered in all forms of media already, the film was the first to be entirely shot without sets. There are moments when the camera is locked down, which scream "digital effect", but they also echo comicbook framings beautifully.

Indeed, the greatest compliment I could give Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow is that I would have watched it repeatedly as a child, so complete is its visual and kinetic glee - perfect for this 23-year-old child, in one of the year's most visually resplendent entertainments.