Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Sky Captain reminded me of the first Star Wars movie, which ordinarily wouldn’t be such a bad thing. However, the problem here is that Star Wars is almost thirty years old and very much belongs to that time. Sky Captain feels like a movie made in the late 70s that recalls the Flash Gordon space westerns of the 30s but using today’s special effects technology. That fits in well with the feeling of the movie itself, where we see the telegraph side-by-side with circa-2070 killer robots in late-30s NYC, but doesn’t help our enjoyment of the movie because we’ve seen all that before. To be sure, the visual effects in the film are great — but not moreso than those in Finding Nemo, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man 2, or any other recent film using extensive CGI — but in another parallel with Star Wars, Kerry Conran reminds me too much of George Lucas as a director…too much focus on the visual and not enough on the actors or emotional flow of the film.