Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

This is a throwback to good old-fashioned fun adventure films. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a paradox: a film that uses the digital technology of the future to build a hyper-stylized fever dream of the past. Filmmaker Kerry Conran has made a soaring action adventure that is also a glorious love story. Sky Captain not only looks like a 30's TV serial but feels like one, too. It has the same grand ideas, the crazy, hidden villain, the old camaraderie between characters and even the same standard catalyst of scientists in trouble, forcing the hero to get involved.

Jude Law plays Joe Sullivan, the Sky Captain, a heroic late-'30s flyboy with an airbase and a private force of can-do pilots settled in the mountains, just north of Manhattan, from where he emerges in times of crisis. He blends the action adventure hero of the time with the wisecracking heroes of today. And he looks just like an aviator hero from that time, just the right level of vulnerability. Law manages the trick: He's a believable and engaging two-dimensional hero.

The appearance of a squadron of giant airborne robots over New York has the audience ducking 10 minutes into the movie. Down on the ground, Sky Captain's once and future girlfriend, Chronicle reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), sighs. This part of the film evokes old comic books from the 1950s. Peek under the lurid exteriors, and there's an evil madman, of course, a mysterious individual named Totenkopf, whose robots are plundering the generators and oil refineries of the world for reasons revealed later.

I should probably point out that none of this is real. Well, Law and Paltrow and possibly some of the props are real — meaning they exist as tightly bonded melodramatic structures in physical space. Everything else here has been digitally painted by computer: the sets, the Art Deco cityscapes, everything. The film's opening scene, the Empire State Building, establishes gracefully impossible camera angles, and a breathless re-engineering of 1930s iconography. So you're left with the look of the film, which is mesmerizing, lit for black and white, then digitally colorized. Sky Captain glows with the curved chrome optimism of prewar design and attitudes.