Never On Sunday

Seeking inspiration as a GM, I settled for Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow. While not exactly two-fisted pulp adventure from the serials, it seeks to imitate them, and it’s readily available. “Settled for” is the appropriate term: I could recall little of the movie besides not liking it, but thinking it looked pretty cool.

Now I remember why. Stiff dialogue, passionless acting, and a plot that manages to drag despite the air duels and robot invaders. Those robot invaders do look pretty cool, as does some of the computer-generated scenery, with one reservation: was it really necessary to shoot everything in sepia? Amazing historical fact: colors other than sepia existed before 1940, just not affordable color film.

Shooting in black and white I could respect, either as a challenge to recreate the feel of the old serials or as a homage, or a little of both. Black and white film could have contributed to a sense that we were watching historical events, or at least watching some treasure of film history. Shooting in sepia just makes Sky Captain feel pretentious. Playing a segment of The Wizard of Oz in the background was particularly irritating. It’s ostensibly supposed to frame Gwynneth Paltrow in a clandestine meeting with a super-scientist, and to set a timeframe for Sky Captain and his cohorts as well, but really it is just an unsubtle message to the audience: “Hey, look at our use of monochrome, but only mostly. Pretty damn cool how we captured the look of the ’40s with sepia, huh? This is just how really good directors of the era envisioned the world. We’re real art aficionados, here.”

The devices and designs of cinematography are generally supposed to be subtle, that they might do their job of adding to a movie without destroying the fragile state of immersion in the events the movie depicts. When the cinematography intrudes upon the scene—presuming the film isn’t an art flick that’s about the cinematography—the movie is weaker for it. When the director deliberately thrusts the camera work into the audience’s face, just to make sure they’re all participating in his self-conscious act of art, rather than enjoying the art itself, he’s doing it wrong.