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100In its heedless energy and joy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It's like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way.
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91Sky Captain is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty.
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90As an imaginative visual experience, there's nothing like it. Today, at least.
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90A triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste.
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89Everything here from costuming and production design to the note-perfect score from Edward Shearmur works in tandem to create not so much a film as a singular and joyous tribute to a vanished age when wonder only cost a nickel and played three time daily at the Bijou.
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Conran has got himself a looker, with Paltrow in soft focus, the whole world larger than life and a title that, said in the proper low-pitched voice, conveys the tone of the film: exuberant, idiosyncratic and timeless.
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88The film's save-the-world scenario may be the stuff of crusty cliff-hangers, its imagery may be borrowed, and its jaunty dialogue anything but deep, but there's something exhilarating going on here. It's darn sublime.
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88Conran's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a pastiche of everything from "King Kong" to "The Wizard of Oz," a movie that escalates to a breathless cliff-hanger every 20 minutes or so and reinvents itself with every reel.
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88Gloriously retro, unashamedly celebratory of the joy of moviemaking and the love of old-fashioned heroism.
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88The result owes a little to the 1927 "Metropolis," a little to film noir, a little to early depictions of H.G. Wells' science fiction -- notably the 1936 "Things to Come" -- and a little to lovably far-fetched sci-fi serials.
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80Other than the actors, their costumes, and a few props, everything in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is digital illusion, and the effects are often exhilarating.
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80An extraordinary technical achievement.
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75A collection of such dazzling digital illusions you can't wait for it to hit DVD so you can freeze individual images.
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75No one has really been asking for a fusion of "Independence Day," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and an old Buck Rogers serial, but here it is anyway, and the only thing keeping it from greatness is a good story.
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7570% style and 30% substance. It has a plot and characters, but those are almost beside the point.
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Despite its flaws, Sky Captain indulges that inner kid who always wanted a single movie crammed with robots, airships and dinosaurs, with World's Fair hopefulness and panache.
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70It’s an exhilarating experience, and raises the bar for the use of digital technology in film.
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70For Conran, after they finished shooting pesky actors, the real fun began at the computer screen with his delirious imagination in free-fall.
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70Conran takes the ghosts in his machine seriously, and the results appear at once meltingly lovely and intriguingly inhuman.
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70The filmmakers' investment in their weird visions is wildly unorthodox, but the payoff is oddly satisfying.
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70Too fixated on 1939 for its own good. Its passionate immersion in a past that only dimly resonates with younger audiences may be a badge of its integrity, but that immersion trumps its vision of the future and leaves us in a land of nostalgia.
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70Arresting at first but gradually trails off under the weight of its hyper-derivativeness and anxiety to please.
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63Missing beneath its fabulous surface, however, is anything like a beating heart.
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50It's a gimmick, it's not a movie.
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50For all its Buck Rogers-style derring-do, gorgeous vistas of an Art Deco New York and sepia-toned cinematography, Sky Captain is a static, uninvolving experience.
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50The movie is like one of those newfangled Vegas casinos, where what appears to be open sky is really painted ceiling. What's initially dazzling becomes stifling.
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50Worse, the story is so thin and clichéd, it seems as if a computer wrote the screenplay and a robot directed it.
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50So captivating to look at that you can almost forget there's virtually nothing to it.
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50A lovingly rendered visual treat struggles with indifferent direction and torpid plot.
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50Conran hasn't attached his technical virtuosity to a ripping yarn or infused it with behavioral brio. The first of its kind often doesn't work; Sky Captain may be the Moses that leads other directors to a blue-sky, blue-screen promised land.
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50The best way to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow -- if you see it at all -- is as an interesting experiment that failed.
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50This is a sophisticated movie, but one whose sophistication is surprisingly simple-minded.
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42For 12-year-old boys, period.
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40For its writer-director, Sky Captain was a labour of love. For almost everyone else - including the wooden cast - it’s just a labour.
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30Like so many technological marvels, at the human level it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.
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25Crass and soulless.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 38 out of 90
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Mixed: 15 out of 90
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Negative: 37 out of 90
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Alistair9
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Abby3When I saw this movie I almost died of bordem. If you have insomnia I would recommend this movie to cure it.