Kerry Conran

Drawing from a well of pulp fiction, film noir and comic book imagery--not to mention influences from "The Wizard of Oz" to Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"--Conran and crew evoke a highly stylized 1939.

But black-and-white classics rich with light and shadow, such as Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927) and Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" (1935), are also obviously major touchstones for Conran's sense of visual style, and there are also more recent influences such as the Indiana Jones series, the "Jurassic Park" series, and even "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" (1988).

Take a cultural grab-bag of such elements as art deco, RKO radio towers, sepia tones, dutch angles, expressionism, Max Fleischer cartoons, Superman and Flash Gordon serials, "Metropolis," zeppelins mooring to the Empire State Building, Manhattan of the '30s, P-40s with their Burma-battles Fei Hu nose art, and German secret-project scientists; add a dashing fighter pilot (Jude Law) shearling-sheathed in AAF garb and an equally mercenary and hard-boiled femme reporter (Gwyneth Paltrow) done in vintage Vogue duds—then attack the lot with huge airborne robots and batwing fighters letting loose with laser weaponry and you have "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."

Answer: a lot like Metropolis, a tad Maltese Falcon, a somewhat Wizard of Oz, with heavy shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars and those old Saturday morning short TV adventure serials.

From German Expressionism to screwball comedy, from The Wizard of Oz to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Conran's influences often make Sky Captain seem like the fever dream of a hopeless film buff -- it may be derivative, but it's never dull.

Like "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" - first-time writer-director Kerry Conran's CGI-fest which places live actors, filmed entirely against a blue screen, in a stylized New York of the 40s plagued by giant robots - mines the plots and characters of early movie serials to create the dashing titular hero (Jude Law) and his reporter love interest, Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Its world is from a design table and its figures owe much to Terry Gilliam's inventions, like his articulated and menacing machines in "Time Bandits."

Director Robert Rodriguez, creator of El Mariachi and the Spy Kids franchises, uses startling, stark animation with live footage, and achieves a different result entirely from last year’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or, for that matter, the original live-action/computer-animation blend of Tron.

George Lucas has done the same thing with the last two Star Wars films and Kerry Conran did the same thing with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but Rodriguez has one-upped them on two levels.

Sin City is a gleaming pop revelation, a completely realized vision in a way that the similar but sadly uninvolving Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow wasn't.

But too much of the movie feels bigger without necessarily expanding the scope of the characters or story, and often seems to forget it’s not just a big-budget action movie but a supposedly game taken, well, to the next level (a finale set in a steampunk dirigible comes more from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow than any game I’ve ever played).

The accomplishments of “Gravity” arrive right on schedule, representing the culmination of several years worth of purely green screen storytelling in Hollywood productions that include “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” as well as Zack Snyder’s Spartan battlefields in “300.”

In fact, it quickly joins the dubious ranks of great-looking dull movies (see 1992's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow").