Had Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow come out in 2011 or 2012, it may have been a blockbuster hit. If Sky Captain came out today, 20 years after its first release on September 17, 2004, it would probably attract a lot more attention than the film did back then. The reason? In the third decade of the 21st century, there’s an entire science fiction subculture primed to be interested in moody nostalgia pieces that casually assert an alternate timeline. From the Joe Johnston’s Captain America to Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, the 2010s were ready for a dieselpunk sci-fi aesthetics.
But in 2004? Not so much. Despite a critically acclaimed, arrestingly unique, specifically retrofuturistic noir style, a fantastic cast, and a fantastic score from Edward Shearmur, director Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain failed to capture the box office in the summer of 2004, denying us the possibility of future installments in the series. And yet just like how Sky Captain presents an alternate version of 1939, it’s tempting to long for an alternate version of 2004, one in which this movie was a bigger hit. Two decades later, Sky Captain remains fun as hell, smart with its own limitations, and better than most franchise films with similar goals.
Sky Captain is the ultimate example of a science fiction film that could only be a film and not exist in any other medium, period. Describing the plot of the film will make it sound exactly like what it is: a pulpy adventure with thin characters and outrageous stakes. In 1939, in a different timeline than our own, New York City reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) is trying to solve the riddle of various scientists disappearing when robots attack New York City. Quickly, Sky Captain (Jude Law) is called in to save the day.
From there, Polly and Sky Captain (whose real name is Joe Sullivan) embark on a global mystery to find a mad scientist named Dr. Totenkop, played by a digitally recreated Laurence Olivier. Along the way, they meet Commander Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie with an eyepatch) who runs a flying aircraft carrier complete with fighter planes that can turn into submarines.
Overall, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was, to the young 2004 viewer, a kind of live-action version of the retrofuturism of The Incredibles, which debuted just two months later. But for those steeped in the history of comic books, radio adventures, early animation, and pulp science fiction, Sky Captain looks and sounds like what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were pitching when they created Indiana Jones. The robots invading NYC at the start of the film are straight from the iconic 1941 Superman animated short “The Mechanical Monsters,” produced by Fleischer Studios. The island of Totenkop is intentionally reminiscent of Skull Island from the 1933 King Kong, while Law and Paltrow look exactly like themselves if they were cosplaying as characters from Casablanca.
Filmed in an unreal omnipresent sepia, Sky Captain is designed to remind you that you’re watching a movie, not to convince you of the movie’s realism. And yet it's precisely because it doesn't try to seem real that the movie is so gripping. Homaging a bygone era of storytelling is one thing, but fully committing to the bit is something else entirely. Sky Captain isn’t an enjoyable film because it convincingly tells an original story. It’s an enjoyable film because it convincingly feels like a piece of cinema from an alternate universe. As you watch Sky Captain, the world within the movie becomes more entrancing than the movie itself. This is an alternate past in which the Hindenburg accident never took place and where the world is maintained by well-meaning heroes with incredible sci-fi gear. Calling it cartoonish would be accurate, but also wouldn’t really capture the beauty and confidence of the production.
Sky Captain was released just one week before Spider-Man 2, and surely suffered greatly as a result. It wasn’t a summer movie, nor was it a big holiday movie either. It happened before the MCU craze, and during a time when people were sick of seeing Jude Law in every single movie that year. In 2004 alone, in addition to Sky Captain, Law starred in Closer, The Aviator, Alfie, I Heart Huckabees, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Had Sky Captain come out in 2005 just after Revenge of the Sith might it have fared better? Did it get lost before Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles and an overdose of Law at the box office?
We’ll sadly never know, but somewhere over the rainbow, in another time and another dimension, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow are reuniting for their fifth Sky Captain movie, each just as beautiful and deceptively simple as the original.
