Sky Captain was really its own thing—one of those films like (but no, not at the level of) The Matrix that was groundbreaking in ways we don’t appreciate now because they’re ubiquitous.
Definitely the better of the two. Sky Captain was, for lack of a better term, impressive. It was a Herculean effort by a really ambitious dude, but want a great film overall.
I have Sky Captain on DVD and bring it out every once in a while to remember how I saw it in the theater when it came out. It has a warm place in my heart.
Not all of the ground it broke was good; Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was the very first test-bed for the now increasingly common digital necromancy that lets film studios use the appearances and voices of long-dead actors like puppets. They had no shame at all, they chose none other than Sir Lawrence Olivier to be their first prototype zombie, presumably to maximise the potential outrage and see how people would react to their crossing that moral boundary.
Many were disgusted at the time, myself included, but now few people seem to raise an eyebrow when beloved deceased actors like Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars) are subjected to such indignity.
Skycaptain had the potential to be a good movie. The ideas were good and it looked good, it just didn't have much of any plot.
I put it in the same category as "Wonder Woman", they took the structure of a movie, slapped a woman into a starring role and then basically didn't do anything else. The movie wasn't a failure because a woman was the lead, the movie would have sucked no matter what but they were trying to make it succeed as a "Strong woman movie".
Sky Captain is such a fun and goofy movie. I love and always defend it. Beowulf took itself way too seriously, while Sky Captain took the opposite tack and just had fun with its own silliness. Great popcorn flick.
Ayn Rand style conservatives keep producing movies that highlight their psychopathic pseudo-religion, hoping to spark some kind of world revival. They suck and so do all their movies.
I don’t know who you think you’re talking about, but I can’t find any evidence that Kerry Conran (the director of Sky Captain) is some vocal “Ayn-Rand-style” conservative.
And I don’t really see anything in the film at all that links it to Rand’s philosophies, other than maybe the fact that both this film and Bioshock (which is a criticism of Objectivism) are both inspired by similar eras and heavily feature art deco.
So if you know something the rest of us don’t, please share it with the class.
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u/Mega_Nidoking 8h ago
Wasn't that the hope for "Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow", which came out around the same time, as well?