Newest technology enhances film

Kerry Conran's debut film, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," reinvents the idea of cinema as we know it, taking it into a brave new future while remaining refreshingly steeped in the past. Conran created most of this ripping adventure on computers, filming the live actors and a few props against a green screen and plopping them into the already completed pictures. The humans in this story include the heroic Sky Captain, Joe (Jude Law), and fearless reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), who both hit the pavement when giant robots appear out of nowhere. The robots thunder down the streets of New York, dig up a power generator and disappear. Sky Captain's gum-chomping associate, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), finds the source of the robots, and so our hero takes off with Polly into foreign lands to solve the case. When Sky Captain's plane runs out of gas, who better to rescue them but the sultry, ultra-cool Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie - with an eye patch and a British accent). Of course, Sky Captain and Polly share some kind of sordid past that makes them argue all the time, even though they're clearly meant to be together. As the film moves along, it becomes clear that Conran is a child of the 1980s, as obvious remnants of "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones" and "Jurassic Park" turn up. Conran even made the film in some of the same London studios that George Lucas once occupied. But even if the images in "Sky Captain" have been used before, they've never been used quite like this. The digital pictures have a polished look, as though a person living in the 1930s were imagining a bright future. The film is basically done with all neutral colors, concentrating far more on lighting techniques and shadows than on a color scheme. Though these effects represent the movie's biggest selling point, they do, in fact, eventually regress and become secondary to the story. This is not a film about showing off. The story itself, on the other hand, has a hard time pulling off the feel of being as modern or as sophisticated as its presentation. It's a charmingly passionate adventure, but at the same time, a bit creaky. It's not hard to guess what's coming next, nor do we ever worry about our heroes getting out of their latest scrape. Nonetheless, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is an exciting debut that seriously deflates every ordinary-looking film. Grade: B-