Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
| Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow | |
|---|---|
| File:Sky Captain movie poster.jpg | |
| Directed by | Kerry Conran |
| Written by | Kerry Conran |
| Produced by | Jon Avnet Sadie Frost Jude Law Marsha Oglesby |
| Starring | Gwyneth Paltrow Jude Law Giovanni Ribisi Michael Gambon Omid Djali Laurence Olivier Angelina Jolie |
| Cinematography | Eric Adkins |
| Music by | Ed Shearmur |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release dates | September 17, 2004 |
Running time | 106 min. |
| Language | English |
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a film released on September 17, 2004 in the United States. It was written and directed by Kerry Conran, in his directorial debut.
The film stars Jude Law, Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Giovanni Ribisi, and Michael Gambon. It is set in New York City in an alternative 1939 and is a science fiction adventure film. Along with Casshern, Immortel (Ad Vitam), Sin City (and later, 300), it is one of the first movies to be shot entirely on a digital backlot with actors in front of a bluescreen, with all the sets and nearly all of the props computer-generated. The actors spent only 28 days in principal photography. The role of the villain, Dr. Totenkopf, is "played" by Sir Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989; archive footage of him from the 1940s was manipulated by computer to allow him to make this posthumous film appearance, with dialogue from his reading of the Bible on tape.
Synopsis
Template:Spoilers The film takes place in an alternative 1930s where there is no sign of Germany preparing for war or that America is in the grip of an economic depression. The fantastic technology which is a mixture of super-advanced science and early 20th century (developed in science fiction works and comics of that age), points to alternate history, which some would classify as an unofficial subgenre of steampunk, known as "dieselpunk".
The film opens with the arrival of the Hindenburg III zeppelin in New York City, mooring at the Empire State Building. A frightened scientist named Dr. Jorge Vargas makes arrangements for a package to be delivered to a Dr. Walter Jennings, before vanishing.
Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), a newspaper reporter for The Chronicle, is looking into the mysterious disappearances of Vargas and five other renowned scientists. She receives a cryptic message, telling her to go to the Radio City Music Hall movie theater that night. She is warned not to go by her editor, Mr. Paley (Michael Gambon, enacting a variation on the 1940s character he played in the BBC's The Singing Detective). She arrives and encounters Dr. Walter Jennings, who is terrified, and tells her that Dr. Totenkopf (German: lit. "death's head", meaning "skull") is coming for him.
Just then, air raid sirens go off, heralding the arrival of numerous massive robots that prove all but unstoppable. (The robots are based upon the ones in the Fleischer Studios Superman animated short "The Mechanical Monsters".) In desperation, the police call for the aid of H. Joseph 'Joe' Sullivan (Jude Law), who is known as Sky Captain and commands a private air force, the Flying Legion (perhaps a reference to the British Legion of Frontiersmen, a similar historical 'private army', but more likely inspired by the Flying Tigers, as the P-40 he flies is painted in the same style). Sullivan's attempts to stop the robots are successful in that they leave after he knocks one of them over, and he helps save Polly, who endangered herself while photographing the robots.
The wreckage of one of the robots is brought back to the Legion's airstrip, so that the Legion's mechanic Dex (Giovanni Ribisi) can examine it. Polly arrives as well, hoping to get information for her story. She and Joe are ex-lovers, who broke up three years earlier due to a fight, which each has a different account of. Joe constantly accuses Polly of sabotaging his airplane, which led to him spending six months in a Manchurian labour camp; Polly accuses Joe of fooling around with another woman while he was in Nanjing. Since Polly has some useful information, Joe agrees to let her in on the investigation.
This takes them to the laboratory of Dr. Jennings, which has been ransacked, and Jennings near death. The culprit, a mysterious woman (Bai Ling), escapes, while the mortally wounded Jennings warns of Dr. Totenkopf's plans. He also gives Polly two vials, which he says are crucial. Polly doesn't tell Joe about the vials, presumably so that she can keep her edge in the investigation.
They return to the Legion's base, which comes under attack by squadrons of ornithopter drones. In the ensuing battle, Dex manages to track the origin of the robot control signal but is captured. However, he succeeds in leaving behind a clue as to where Totenkopf's base is located.
Joe and Polly find the clue and head to Nepal. Venturing into the Himalaya, they find a mining outpost, long abandoned. They are nearly killed by two of Totenkopf's goons, but instead Polly gives up the two vials. Joe and Polly escape but are knocked unconscious by the explosion in the mine that was meant to kill them. They wake up together in the mythical Shangri-La. The monks who live there tell of Totenkopf's enslavement of their people, forcing them to work in the uranium mines. Most of them were killed by the radiation, but Totenkopf experimented on the survivors. The final survivor of the mines and experiments is horribly disfigured, but provides another clue to where Totenkopf is hiding.
This leads them to rendezvous with Joe's other ex-flame, Captain Francesca "Franky" Cook (Angelina Jolie), who commands a flying aircraft carrier (which resembles Captain Scarlet's Cloudbase, the craft in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier.) in the Royal Navy. Frankie helps them get to Totenkopf's hidden island. Getting in requires an extended trip underwater, making use of amphibious aircraft. (The wreck of the Venture can be clearly seen with a large animal cage still on the deck.)
Joe and Polly find themselves inside the mountainous island, which contains numerous new creatures created by Totenkopf, many of which appear to be variations of dinosaurs. They travel to the very centre of the island, where robots are loading domestic and other animals, as well as the contents of the mysterious vials, Totenkopf's genetically engineered humans, onto a massive "Noah's Ark" rocket. Joe and Polly are nearly killed, but Dex arrives with the missing scientists who have survived (they escaped from the robots), and spirits them away. Dex explains that Totenkopf has given up on humanity, and seeks to end the world as he begins a new one: the "World of Tomorrow".
The group goes to Totenkopf's lair, aiming to end his evil scheme, only to discover that Totenkopf has in fact been dead for two decades; his machines have carried on his work begun in "Unit 11". The only way to stop the rocket from incinerating Earth during its launch (presumably with the aid of the uranium that Totenkopf had mined and refined) is to cause an internal malfunction; unfortunately there is no way to escape from the rocket before it explodes. Polly insists on going along but Joe knocks here out with a punch. Joe then goes to sacrifice himself, while the others escape. Polly recovers and goes after Joe, arriving just in time to save him from the mysterious woman (who turns out to be a robot). The two then go into the rocket just before it launches, ready to stop it before it reaches 100km altitude (at which point the atmosphere will be incinerated). They succeed, releasing the animals in escape pods, and then use a pod to flee from the exploding rocket.
Influences
The Conran brothers were influenced by the designs of Norman Bel Geddes who was an industrial designer and did work for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and designed exhibits for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Geddes also designed an Air Ship that was to fly from Chicago to London.
Another key influence was Hugh Ferriss, one of the designers for the 1939 World’s Fair and who designed bridges and huge housing complexes. He was an American delineator (one who creates perspective drawings of buildings) and architect. In 1922, skyscraper architect Harvey Wiley Corbett commissioned Ferriss to draw a series of four step-by-step perspectives demonstrating the architecture consequences of the zoning law. These four drawings would later be used in his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow (Dover Publications, 2005, ISBN 0-486-43727-2).
Production
Kerry Conran grew up on films and comic books of the '30s and '40s. He and his brother, Kevin, were encouraged by their parents to develop their creative side at a young age. Kerry studied at a feeder program for Disney animators at CalArts, and became interested in 2-D computer animation. While there, he realized that it was possible to apply some of the techniques associated with animation to live-action. Conran had been out of film school for two years and was trying to figure out how to make a movie. He figured that Hollywood would never take a chance on an inexperienced, first-time filmmaker. So, he decided to go the independent route and make the movie himself.
In 1994, Conran set up a bluescreen in his living room and began assembling the tools he would need to create his movie. He was not interested in working his way through the system and instead wanted to follow the route of independent filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh.
Initially, Kerry and his brother had nothing more than "just a vague idea of this guy who flew a plane. We would talk about all the obvious things like Indiana Jones and all the stuff we liked." Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser trailer in the style of an old-fashion newsreel on his Macintosh personal computer. Once he was finished, Conran showed it to producer Marsha Oglesby, who was a friend of his brother's wife and she recommended that he let producer Jon Avnet see it. Conran met Avnet and showed him the trailer. Conran told him that he wanted to make it into a movie. They spent two or three days just talking about the tone of the movie.
Avnet and Conran spent two years working on the screenplay and developing a working relationship. Then, the producer took the script and the trailer and began approaching actors. In order to protect Conran's vision, Avnet decided to shoot the movie independently with a lot of his own money. The producer realized that "the very thing that made this film potentially so exciting for me, and I think for an audience, which was the personal nature of it and the singularity of the vision, would never succeed and never survive the development process within a studio."
When it came to casting actors in the movie, Avnet used his connections and reputation and started looking for actors. In 2002, he showed Jude Law the teaser trailer and the actor was very impressed by what he saw. He remembers, "All I got at that early stage was that he'd used pretty advanced and unused technology to create a very retrospective look." Avnet gave him the script to read and some preliminary artwork to look at.
Law: "What was clear was also that at the center was a really great cinematic relationship, which you could put into any genre and it would work. You know, the kind of bickering [relationship]. I always like to call it The African Queen (1951) meets Buck Rogers."
Avnet wanted to work with Law because he knew that the actor had "worked both period, who worked both having theatrical experience, who worked on blue screen, who hadn't hit yet as a major action star." The actor had just come off doing Cold Mountain (2003) and was intrigued at going from filming on real locations to working on a movie done completely on a soundstage. The actor believed so much in Conran's movie that he also became one of the producers and used his clout to get Gwyneth Paltrow involved. Once her name came up, Law did not remember "any other name coming up. It just seems that she was perfect. She was as enthusiastic about the script and about the visual references that were sort of put to her, and jumped on board." Paltrow said in an interview, "I thought that this is the time to do a movie like this where it's kind of breaking into new territory and it's not your basic formulaic action-adventure movie."
Giovanni Ribisi met with Avnet and, initially, was not sure that he wanted to do the movie but after seeing the teaser trailer, he signed on without hesitation. Angelina Jolie had literally come from the set of Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) and agreed to work on the movie for three days. Despite her small role, she had conducted hours of interviews with fighter pilots in order to absorb their jargon and get a feel for the role. Her British accent was cricised by some reviewers as "improbable", but it is actually a completely authentic 1940s English upper-class accent.[citation needed]
Avnet went to Aurelio De Laurentiis and convinced her to finance the film without a distribution deal. Nine months before filming, Avnet had Conran meet the actors and begin rehearsals in an attempt to get the shy filmmaker out of his shell.
Ten months before Conran made the movie with his actors, he shot it entirely with stand-ins and then created the whole movie in animatics so that the actors had an idea of what the film would look like and where to move on the soundstage. To prepare for the film, Conran had his cast watch old movies, like To Have and Have Not (1944) with Lauren Bacall for Paltrow's performance and The Thin Man (1934) for the relationship between Nick and Nora that was to be echoed in the one between Joe and Polly. Avnet constantly pushed for room in this meticulously designed movie for the kind of freedom the actors needed, like being able to move around on the soundstage.
Conran and Avnet were able to cut costs considerably by shooting the entire movie in 26 days (not the usual three to four months that this kind of movie normally takes) on high-definition video using a Sony HDW-F900 and working entirely on blue screen soundstages. After filming ended, they put together a 24-minute presentation and took it to every studio in June of 2002. There was a lot of interest and Avnet went with the studio that gave Conran the most creative control. They needed studio backing to finish the film's ambitious visuals. At one point, the producer remembers that Conran was "working 18 to 20 hours a day for a long period of time. It's 2,000 some odd CGI shots done in one year, and we literally had to write code to figure out how to do this stuff!"
Avnet cultivated a calculated release for the movie by first moving its release date from the summer (it was supposed to open a week before Spider-Man 2) to September, then courting the Internet press and finally making an appearance at the San Diego Comic Con with key cast members in an attempt to generate some advanced buzz.
Homages
Conran incorporated many elements of classic genre films into his. Some of them are not simply homages/easter eggs, but also hint that the world of Sky Captain is actually a crossover world where several fictional events and elements like Shangri-La and King Kong, coexist as actual facts (a universe similar to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Here is a partial list.
- Metropolis (1927)
- King Kong (1933)
- Flash Gordon (1936)
- Things to Come (1936)
- Lost Horizon (1937)
- The War of the Worlds (1938)
- Buck Rogers (1939)
- Wuthering Heights (1939)
- The Wizard of Oz (1939)
- His Girl Friday (1940)
- Superman (1941)
- Citizen Kane (1941)
- Godzilla
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
- The War of the Worlds (1953)
- Dr. Strangelove (1964)
- Zeppelin (1971)
- THX 1138 (1971)
- Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1977)
- Moonraker (1979)
- Jurassic Park (1993)
- Forbidden Planet (1956)
- Castle in the Sky (1986)
- Star Trek: The Original Series (1966)
- Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
- Battlestar Galactica (1978)
- The Iron Giant (1999)
There are also significant visual elements from the pulp fiction series Biggles and Doc Savage. The graphic novel Luther Arkwright probably provides the origin of the movie's British craft, but there are other possible sources. Frankie Cook, Angelina Jolie's character, seems to have some elements of characters like Nick Fury and Honor Harrington. The Microsoft air-adventure game Crimson Skies (2000) is also set in an alternative 1940s with huge zeppelins and advanced planes.
Although this was not confimed or acknowledged by Conran, the character of Sky Captain (Joe Sullivan) seems to have been inspired by none other than Red Albright, aka Captain Midnight.
The name of the lead heroine is Conran's reference to the famous British song Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.
The line of poetry "... all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by ...", quoted by the hero, is from the famous poem "Sea-Fever" by John Masefield.
- Sky Captain also seems to be partially based on the Fawcett (later DC) character Spy Smasher
Performance
Although the movie had high box office expectations, opening at #1 on its September release date, the movie was a flop at the box office grossing only about $37 million in the United States from a reported $70+ million budget.[1] Critical reviews, while leaning positive, were mixed. The film scored 74% on RottenTomatoes.com, a film review aggregator site. The Canadian network Space: The Imagination Station awarded it the 2005 Spacey Award for Best Film, an accolade voted upon by network staff. The film is also one of few to be awarded five stars by IGN filmforce.
Trivia
- One of three Jude Law films released by Paramount Pictures in 2004, along with the 2004 remake of Alfie and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.
- During the newsflash scene, several newspapers from various countries flash by. In the picture from the Japanese paper, Godzilla can be seen in the corner.
- In the scene where Polly meets with Dr. Jennings in the theater, he says he was assigned to a research-unit outside Berlin before the First World War. This is a factual error; it's 1938, there hasn't been (and in this universe probably will not be) a Second World War. Before WW2 times, "WW1" was referred to as the "Great War". It is conceivable, however, that this was intentionally done; modern audiences might not know what would have been meant by the "Great War".