Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

The Hindenburg III glides silently above the streets of Manhattan. I kid you not. It docks at the Empire State Building. A nervous passenger has a package sent on ahead of him. Then the passenger vanishes, and a name is scratched off a list. Meanwhile, over at the Tribune, ace reporter Polly Perkins (Gwynneth Paltrow) gets a cryptic message to meet someone at Radio City Music Hall. She goes and meets an aged scientist who's terrified for his life. He will say only one name - Totenkoff. Before Polly can find out any more, New York is attacked by a horde of giant, flying robots. An immediate call goes out to Sky Captain, aka Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), who flies to the rescue in his own P-40 Flying Tiger. After dispatching several of the behemoths, he flies off to his secret base, where Polly is waiting for him. Seems they once had the thing going on that ended badly. As they are hashing out old times, the base is attacked by bat-shaped aircraft that flap their wings. Joe and Polly fly after them, shoot down several and finally escape by diving into the ocean in Joe's plane which promptly turns into a submarine. By the time they get back to Joe's base, the place has been destroyed and Joe's loyal side kick, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), has been kidnapped. Polly and Joe, following clues left by Dex, fly to Nepal where they find Shangri La, then head out over the ocean in search of Totenkoff's secret base. When they get there, they find that Totenkoff (the very late Laurence Olivier) has been a very naughty boy indeed, and now the entire world is in danger. Folks, I repeat, I am not making this stuff up. Somebody else already did that for us. And they put it all into a movie called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Written and directed by Kerry Conran, Sky Captain is a loving homage to all of the movie serials of the 1930s and 40s - like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and The Undersea Kingdom - complete with mad scientists, robotic villains, secret bases, rocket ships and ray guns. The film was shot almost entirely against a blue screen background - only the actors were real, and the scenery and props were all added later digitally. This allowed Conran to create the New York that he wanted to, set in 1939, yet in some strange alternate universe, where the Nazis never came into power and where supersonic aircraft and ray guns were invented. It is a happy, mythical reality that begs us to forget the realities of history as we knew it and come along to a better place. The sub-title the World of Tomorrow is taken from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, as do the Trylon and Persiphere that they find deep in the Himalayas. In Conran's hands, the World of Tomorrow envisioned in 1939 actually existed and much of the world of then never materialized. Would that it had been the case. The sepia tone of the film lends it an air of nostalgia, and the dim lighting and deep shadows bring to mind the lighting techniques of film noir. Unfortunately, it also lends the film a cartoon-like quality that takes away from its magical realism. Probably the film's most memorable performance is by the late Laurence Olivier. Conran took archival footage of Olivier and digitally manipulated it to speak the words he had in his script. In some sense, we truly are in the world of tomorrow if we can get dead actors to keep right on performing years after their demise.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is not going to be to everyone's liking. It's just too fantastical for some people, who apparently have a difficult time suspending their disbelief long enough to enjoy a good adventure yarn. The acting is a bit formal and stiff, much as it was in those old 30s and 40s serials, but after a while you really don't notice too much. Probably the most difficult part of the film to buy is Joe's airplane, which has the ability to fly at near supersonic speeds over unimaginable distances and, as an added bonus, turn itself into a submarine when needed. My favorite World-of-Tomorrow gadget - if you will - was the giant, hovering aircraft carrier. I've seen something similar in old Mechanix Illustrated magazines from that period. They dreamed of it then. Conran's dreaming of it still. We can too, thanks to his movie.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is rated PG-13, and it is available in sepia-toned color.

Lost Horizon (1937)

Frank Capra's Lost Horizon introduced the world to a place that everyone knows implicitly - Shangri La, the Edenic valley where everyone is happy, where there is no toil or strife, and where life goes on and on. Given the position of this place in our collective conscience, it seems odd that relatively few people have ever seen the movie that inspired it, and I am going to hazard a guess that no living person has ever viewed the movie in its entirety. That's because soon after its initial release, the film was chopped again and again from its original 180 minute running time down to 95 minutes. In recent years, though, the film has been restored to 134 minutes, thanks to dedicated film preservationists who literally scoured the earth for variant versions of the movie. But why such drastic editing in the first place? Partly to speed up the film; after all, not many people want to sit through a 3-hour movie. But the film was also cut because the it contained a considerable amount of isolationist philosophy. Unfortunately for Capra, it came out at a time when the world was plunging toward war and the governments of the US and England were pushing the philosophy of engagement. The last thing they wanted was a popular film encouraging people to resist involvement in the war effort. The war effort butchered Lost Horizon.

When I started this review, I was going to write a lengthy summary of the plot, but I decided to scrap all of that. A plot summary would give you very little information about this film. Suffice it to say that Lost Horizon tells the story of British diplomat Robert Conway, played by the incomparable Ronald Coleman, who crash lands - along with several other people - in Shangri La, where he learns some incredible secrets about life and living. But Lost Horizon is really a story of Paradise Regained. It's the Garden of Eden or the Fountain of Youth. It's the desire in all of us to find someplace in the world where we can be happy, where we can live out our lives in peace, free from want, from disease, from the thousand ills that beset us in this mortal existence. But since that is not attainable in this earthly life, Lost Horizon is really a story about finding heaven. And as such, it is a story about the redemption. For all but one of the characters are redeemed in the end, because their hearts are no longer set upon the things of this world.

Lost Horizon was shot largely on Columbia Ranch on a massive and truly gorgeous set inspired by the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. The detailed sets and lavish costumes and props all serve to testify of Capra's scrupulous attention to detail. He's fairly faithful to James Hilton's novel as well, unfolding the story carefully, offering little bits of information at a time to keep the audience's curiosity piqued all the way up to when the secret of Shangri La is finally revealed at the climax of the film. Lost Horizon is a wonderful film, even lacking the 46 minutes that have not yet been found. With luck, they someday will be, and we'll have this entire classic once again.

Lost Horizon is rated G. Picture quality varies throughout the film due to edited scenes being spliced back in. However, the preservationists have done an excellent job restoring this black and white film to its original luster.