Betrailered Park, part 3: Sky Joey and the World of Tomorrow

I remember the first time I read Mark Waid's dedication of Kingdom Come, his wildly successful collaboration with Alex Ross. It reads "To Elliot S! Maggin, who gave me x-ray eyes and taught me to fly."

In a book ripe with "Oh. My. God." moments, with iconic images used far and wide in popular culture, small moments with world-destroying consequences ("And when the Seven Thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, "Seal up those things which the Seven Thunders uttered, and write them not,") Mark Waid pointed to one of the writers who inspired him and said "Blame this guy. He showed me a world of possiblity."

The first time I saw the trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow I became a boy of twelve. Not yet cynical, not yet "adult." There were ray guns! There were hot dames! There were swashbuckling swashbucklers! And giant robots!

The old man me was astonished by the behind-the-scenes: a guy working alone using his home computers to make a demo to get the money to have work on a feature movie. The sets, entirely virtual. And that feature movie had a "name" cast of people I could tolerate watching kinda!

You know how these go. I saw the movie, and it's "eh." It feels almost too manufactured. The look of the movie, and maybe it's a limitation of the virtual tech melding with the reality, the look is just "off." Not stylistic choices, but the real look of the movie. And that's a hard miss to reconcile.

The direction is kinda off too. I can't blame the guy, Kerry Conran, because he really has accomplished something. It's his first feature, and if anything it's a pretty ambitious movie.

The story is so-so. It's grade B, but that could be okay. You know, if the movie was even more grade B, it might've been okay. There's a joy to the movie, but it also feels manufactured. And, duh, movies are "manufactured" entertainment. But there should be more joy there.

Don't get me wrong, I actually own a copy of Sky Captain on the DVD. I haven't watched the features yet, but a lot of times it's more important to know what went wrong than right, what works and what doesn't. Sky Captain was something that could have been really really good entertainment, but fell short. Sometimes you gotta aim high for that "other world," and, like with everything, the possiblity is failure.