_{Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow}

A George Lucas-ian pastiche of adventure serials from the 30s and 40s, Sky Captain is an alternate history dieselpunk (in aesthetic only) story following plucky reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) as she investigates the disappearance of several scientists, including one who just landed in New York City aboard the Hindenburg III*. Along the way she counters her fighter pilot ex Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan (Jude Law). Along with Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Gambon, and a brief appearance by Angelina Jolie, the billable stars globe-trot their way into a mad scientist’s plot to destroy the world.

This movie’s biggest claim to fame is the fact it’s one of the first theatrically-released films entirely shot on blue screen. The closest thing to a full set in the entire film is the scene screenshotted above, in which Sullvian’s office features both a real physical door prop and a desk with physical objects on it. Extravagant, I know.

Visually, Sky Captain brings a very Vaseline-on-the-lens 1940 soft lighting glow to every shot, and that’s by design. The movie was initially shot in color, but then a version was converted to greyscale and each alpha channel from the color footage was digitally layered back over to achieve the same effect as Technicolor did with physical film. It both looks period-appropriate and helps massage out the fact most shots have blue bleed-through as the lighting of the stage reflects on clothing and hair.

By virtue of not having to build sets and having an entire cut of the film already completed with basic animatics, principal photography of Sky Captain was finished in just 29 days, which is bonkers.

As you can tell from the trailer I linked up above, Paramount seemed to have a difficult time investing in marketing the film, despite the director’s implication at least 20 million of its 70m budget went to marketing.

Eagle-eared listeners might notice that instead of using any of the film’s score, the chosen editors opted to use the Stargate: SG1 theme song. You know, one of the longest-running sci-fi shows in US history? A show nerds who’d watch Sky Captain absolutely would have seen?

Yeah. That one.

That trailer has the same vibe of cutting a trailer for a Supernatural movie to the Sherlock theme. They’re completely different entities but the Venn diagram of the two fanbases is a circle. But I digress.

*Before you ask: no. The movie does not show a giant swastika on the tail of the blimp, nor does it ever directly address the Nazi party’s existence. Whether intentional or not, the movie wants to smash the toys together without woriying itself with such issues as “these are clearly Nazi toys.”

Reviewing the DVD

For better or worse, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is the ur-text for modern genre blockbusters. Director/writer Kerry Conran’s pursuit of aping cheaply-made adventure cinema from the 1930s ended up accidentally creating the “fix it in post” Marvel mentality by which most blockbusters are now produced. And, lucky for us, a dude with a camera documented the hell out of it for the DVD.

Before we get into that, though, let’s address the overall presentation. I’m going to break this down into holistic groupings (e.g. the ability to play the movie, scene selection, and Set Up aren’t getting their own bespoke sections.

To spoil at the beginning: the whole point of this newsletter is to put you onto movies that, if you see them out in the wild for a bargain, you should absolutely snatch them. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is absolutely worth nabbing so you can pop that sucker in and experience it for yourself. Or you can go watch copies the special features of this long out-of-print DVD on YouTube. You do you. Personally I find the experience of mousing around a goofy old DVD menu a fun activity, but no judgement here. It’s all data, in the end.

The Basics

One of the biggest complaints I have with modern physical media releases is the complete lack of creativity. For example, here’s the blu-ray menu of Birds of Prey (2020):

Congratulations, you’ve now seen the blu-ray screen for most theatrically-released films in 2023. A still image and a looping music track. And people wonder why there’s not much incentive to buy a physical copy of movies anymore.

Flash back to 2004. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow opens with a big action setpiece. Flying robots are attacking New York City, and Polly’s on the ground gettin’ the scoop throughout it all. Sci-fi menaces fill the sky, air raid sirens blare.

The DVD does a good job of capturing this vibe with a loop of air raid sirens and small, easily-loopable graphics showing silhouettes of the robots and enemy planes flying above. A good loop on a DVD is VERY important for the overall tone, and an air raid siren acts as something to urge you along into making your selection without being actively horrible. I’ve had to hear the loop several dozen times while grabbing screenshots of re-watching clips to write this newsletter, and it has yet to set my teeth on edge.

Each menu has a different theme, as you’ll see in future sections. Each section finds a fun little prop or setting that fits perfectly with the tone of the menu. There’s a sense of impending dread to it all. If you’ve never seen the movie, you want to get it started to figure out what the hell is happening. If you’ve seen the movie, it reminds you of the fun opening sequence, which kind of makes you want to load it up one more time.

While I’m on the Set Up screen, though, I need to address the accessibility of the movie. For a plain-Jane DVD release of a box office flop, it could be worse. It’s not as bad as the $5 bin at Walmart where movies that don’t even have subtitle tracks go to die, but it’s also not a full-fledged release with six dubs and subtitles to match. You get English and French. The latter feels like it’s there purely so the DVD can be sold easily in Canada.

The one thing that stands out to me is the fact Sky Captain is technically an Italian-funded film, as Futuro Media was producing it before Paramount committed, yet there’s no Italian dub or subtitles. I presume this is a side effect of Futuro distributing the movie in Italy, which might mean the Paramount-produced DVD wouldn’t have access to (again, I’m presuming) Futuro’s in-house dub. Or they just forgot. Who knows. I’m just a goofus with a 3,000 word review of a DVD.

The Bonus Content

That’s right, now we get into the best part of most DVDs: the sweet sweet behind the scenes footage. Sky Captain does not disappoint.

• A 2-part behind-the-scenes documentary titled Brave New World. Part 1 focuses on the selling of the concept and early production, while part 2 exclusively follows the animation team actually finishing it. The end is quite heartfelt. (60m)

• The Art of Sky Captain, an eight minute narrated montage of source material and concept art narrated by Kevin Conran, Kerry’s brother and the film’s production designer that crafted Sky Captain’s style. (8m 20s)

• The Original Six Minute Short - The original spec trailer for the movie that the Conrans spent four years producing. Worth watching first. (8m 19s)

• Deleted Scenes: two cut sequences. One’s nearly finished, the other got as far as animatic and pure blue-screen footage that has big home movie charm. (5m)

• Gag Reel: A mixture of your classic outtakes and goofy moments from the animatic. A significant portion of outtakes were generated by a crew member doing a silly noise and Paltrow/Law absolutely losing their shit. (2m 32s)

The original short that sold the idea of this movie was rendered on a Macintosh IIci. To put that into context, from what surface-level research I’ve just done, a best-case-scenario upgraded version of that computer would be rocking 132mb of RAM and a CPU running at a blistering 2 MHz. The first Apple Watch could render the original Sky Captain short quicker than Conran’s home computer.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow bridges the gap between eras in Hollywood. The early 2000s was one of the last times you could flag down a passing De Laurentiis and get your movie off the ground. They got initial funding, rented office space and a garage down in Van Nuys, nestled amongst dozens of fly-by-night adult content production houses, and got to work making a Jude Law sci-fi movie.

Though, let’s not get it twisted. This is very much a situation where a guy who happened to live in The Place They Make Movies and was already friends with multiple producers got to make a movie. This isn’t some hayseed with a handwritten screenplay under his arm meeting Jack Warner at the Brown Derby by accident. A lot of luck went into Sky Captain, but that luck was buoyed on the back of a lot of preexisting favors that were called in.

Now let’s talk about the dead person.

A brief tangent on using dead actors.

I wasn’t kidding when I said Sky Captain is modern genre cinema in a bottle. On top of the reliance on blue-screen that offloaded the majority of the effort and artistry onto a room of “very tired” VFX artists working at the limits of their rendering bandwidth, Kerry Conran also managed to pre-empt the trend of reanimating dead actors.

12 years before Disney created Toon Tarkin and ushered in a new era of ethically-sketchy simulations of people both living and dead to keep franchises alive, Sky Captain briefly revived Laurence Olivier in the form of a brief hologram sequence.

That said, it should be noted this reanimation is done with archival footage of a young Olivier with tons of distortion to disguise the fact his dialog has very little to do with what is happening in the scene. In practice it comes off as more of a nod to the fact Conran likes Olivier than the movie outright selling the idea we were seeing “Laurence Olivier as the big bad!” Still, in a production that eerily echos everything big-budget filmmaking was starting (and continues) to do, the fact that they use their computer-tools to clone a dead guy for a few seconds is noteworthy as hell.

For all the comparisons I make to Conran’s shooting style evoking the “shoot first, have VFX ask questions later” attitude found in some movies today, I find the guy endearing (in context). Much in the same way the narrative of Tim Burton can be charted around the fact that he was destined to be an animator but ended up making live-action somehow, Conran is a live-action director with ideas bigger than the confines of live-action shoots with sensible budgets.

On that note: the bit of the DVD where you can get information direct from the creative source.

The Commentaries

Producer Commentary: Producer Jon Avnet is the engine that drives Sky Captain from a short to a feature film. As far as the BTS content and (lovingly-written) Wikipedia entry are concerned, Avnet became Conran’s biggest cheerleader after seeing the short and made the calls that got the movie made. Usually with solo-host commentaries there are huge gaps of nothing and desperate attempts to find something to talk about, but Avent came prepared to dish out tidbits the whole way.

Director/Writer/Production Designer/Animation Supervisor/VFX Supervisor Commentary. There’s a lot of love in the room for this one. Both brotherly love between both Kerry Conran and Kevin Conran, but also a sense of bonding to the crew members present. Kerry seems genuinely excited to be able to share all of the multitude of homages and references to classic movies he loves throughout the movie. Most silences are punctuated by Conran slipping in something like “this is my Strangers on a Train shot reference.” A genuinely fun ride as you listen to a group of people in various stages of “how did I just get to work on an actual movie” share the deets on the project.

The Easter Egg(s)

If it’s a DVD from the 2000s, odds are the creators hid something in there SOMEWHERE for the nerds to geek out over on their movie forums and IRC channels. Sky Captain does not disappoint in that regard.

If you manage to find the secret button, you’re treated to a 1.2 minute short disguised as more behind the scenes footage. A camera tracks around the room while animators begrudgingly put up with an overly-excited cameraman. Then a robot villain from the movie bursts into the door and starts laying waste to the room. The whole thing is shot on a handheld, meaning the animation had to be an absolute pain to composite frame-by-frame, and it genuinely looks good for what it is: a bit of fun only a team of animators could pull off easily.

You know, the kind of fun and camaraderie that’s dead now that most movies have dozens of unrelated, often under-credited VFX teams working horrific hours?

Closing Thoughts

Someday I might figure out how to do tables in Beehiiv and set up some cool review rubric to break down what does and does not work about the DVD. Until then, you get a rambling final paragraph before the puzzle.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a movie that can’t really exist anymore. Not because it has particularly dated dialog or story concepts (though it absolutely does), more that there really aren’t many environments in which a special-effects laden movie made by a no-name nerd can land the budget to pull something like this off.

Is the movie worth watching now? Sure, if you’re into art deco and retrofuture aesthetic. Paltrow and Law genuinely have fun action-adventure chemistry, both having fully embraced the vibe of the movie while stomping around blue-screen stages for weeks. It’s a fun time.

But, when you add the secret sauce of the commentaries and the hour-long featurette, Sky Captain evolves into this beautiful nerdy moment trapped in amber. A moment just at the cusp of what we understand to be “modern” moviemaking. X2 and Spiderman 2 are the pinnacles of comic book movies. Nerd-friendly Genre films must be due for a huge resurgence. Sure, let’s give this no-name guy a movie. Who cares if it ends up looking like a Robert Rodriguez home movie from his “how to make movies” featurettes (stay tuned, Bonus Disc-erinos).

If you see a copy of Sky Captain at a yard sale, or perhaps languishing in the $3 bin at a used media shop, you grab that thing and hold on tight.

Unless it’s full screen, in which case you should stomp on it to prevent anyone else from being fooled into watching pan-and-scan ever again. It’s your duty as a human being to ensure fullscreen cuts of movies are not passed down to future generations.

Unless it’s full screen, in which case you should stomp on it to prevent anyone else from being fooled into watching pan-and-scan ever again. It’s your duty as a human being to ensure fullscreen cuts of movies are not passed down to future generations.