In 1941, Dave Fleischer directed a nine-minute Superman cartoon entitled Mechanical Monsters, in which a mad scientist employs the use of flying robots to empty bank vaults and squander jewels. Viewed today it comes across as an enjoyable piece of retro-Americana, but it equally evokes a moment in the onward surge of cinematic time when movies catered to a sense of the fantastical, of adventures and voyages to secret islands and concealed hideaways in search of deranged criminal masterminds. This 1941 short was, in part, the inspiration for Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a sci-fi adventure set in the 1930’s in a world of trench coats, cocked fedoras, zeppelins, and yes, flying robots controlled by an elusive evil scientist.

The story? A mad scientist, Dr. Totenkopf, (who through digital manipulation of old footage was played by the late Sir Laurence Olivier [1907-1989]), desires, in a god-like gesture, to destroy the world because he has decided that humankind’s moral bankruptcy is so gross it cannot be ignored. With somewhat less divine originality than we may have hoped for, Totenkopf decides to build an ark which takes the form of a doomsday rocket which will harbour specimens of every living creature on Earth, including an Adam and Eve. While some European or Asian filmmakers offer a serious treatment of the theme of humankind’s moral bankruptcy and the need for some sort of renewal, Hollywood does not. In Sky Captain, what Hollywood does do is to use this moral bankruptcy as a backdrop against which it can play with its favourite theme: love, or the possibility of love even under difficult circumstances. Thus, Sky Captain’s (Jude Law) heroics initially seem to arise from a desire to help humanity, but ultimately become the desire to protect the woman he loves, roving Chronicle reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), who in yet another nod to Mechanical Monsters is more than a little reminiscent of Lois Lane. And herein lies one of the major differences between Hollywood cinema and the European and Asian art cinemas which are increasingly being represented on Australian screens: Hollywood reassures, European and Asian art cinemas question. Hollywood placates us with the assuring mantra that Love Endures -- European and Asian art cinemas unsettle us by placing a question mark over a person’s place in the universe, and letting it hover there like a shimmering anti-rainbow that is no longer a symbol of promise, but calls into doubt the possibility of love and hints that each person is alone in the cosmos and doomed to forever be in want to human connection. Hollywood tells us what we want to hear, and all that varies in its productions is the manner in which its favouite themes are packaged -- not unlike a fashion show in which the same people circulate in an endless procession of new clothes and personas. So it’s not surprising that it is Sky Captain’s look which gives it its verve.

Filmed entirely against bluescreens, almost everything in this film apart from the main characters and some props are computer-generated, (a technique which at least three upcoming films are employing). And if Sky Captain doesn’t quite look CG, it also doesn’t quite look real. It has the not uninteresting appearance of a creature that seems to occupy a region somewhere between these two domains. Conroy’s direction harkens back to Hollywood of old with now-obsolete techniques such as rapid-montage of newspaper headlines, and maps overlayed onto an ocean to trace a plane’s route. There is also the constant presence of rain, mist, lightning, cloud cover or snow -- inclement atmospheric elements that function to layer the otherwise fairly flat CG images and inject them with added visual interest. The same concept of visual enrichment underlies a strategy of constantly shifting locales: we begin in Manhattan, soon move to the skies, the mountains, underwater, to tropical jungle, and finally to the outer limits of our planet’s stratosphere. Actually, Sky Captain has an incredibly soft look, reminiscent of those silent movies where everything is slightly misted, silky, blurred round the edges, or of Hollywood glamour lighting from the 30’s, and this look stands in appealing contrast to today’s super-crisp super-saturated images. Sky Captain appeals to the eye, not the mind, and it capitalizes on the nostalgic allure of old films, and peddles escapist entertainment that promises to transport you for two hours or so to weird, fantastical, phantasmagorical worlds that only ever exist on the Silver Screen.