So I had actually been looking forward to seeing Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow, and I ventured out into the wilds of Northwest Las Vegas to do so yesterday. And I thought it was... just okay.

Certainly, it was visually stunning. I'm glad I saw it on the big screen, and I'll almost certainly buy it on DVD, for the spectacle alone. It lovingly recreates the feel of the old serials it pays homage to, but with a grandeur that would have been impossible without modern technology. Jude Law makes a great classic hero, and Angelina Jolie is fantastic in her small role as a plucky one-eyed British pilot. And there are times Gwyneth Paltrow almost manages to make me believe that she read her script before they started shooting. Unfortunately, where the story let me down were in the areas of character and plot.

Ah, if someone had written this movie! Then it might have made more of an impression than it did, which was a bunch of spectacular set-pieces with very little holding them together. What I do remember from the film are great images, not things that Sky Captain actually did. I do remember that throughout most of the movie, he keeps repeating his two main goals, and those two goals end up pretty weakly resolved (one much more so than the other), only to be replaced by yet another one ten minutes before the end of the picture. There really isn't anything for me, as an audience member, to get emotionally invested in, so all that's left for me to do is go, "Giant cast-iron robots riveted together; cool. Flying aircraft carriers with giant propellors; cool." And that's what separates a decent movie from a great one.

A friend of mine excuses these twin flaws by saying that it's just an old movie serial, but I say that's crap. It's not an old movie serial; it's an adventure movie made and shown in 2004. It's not an old chapter play where you can skip from one episode to the next because there's a week in between to forget what happened, it's a single 100-minute story. An homage should celebrate what's best about its source material, not use it to excuse its flaws.

Having said that, rumor has it that "writer"/director Kerry Conran's next project may be the film adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. That, I'd love to see. Clearly the man has a keen visual sense; hook that up with a real story and you could have something that truly is great. Shame that Sky Captain isn't quite there yet.

Oh, and here's another thing that irritates me. Most of the reviews I've see of Sky Captain agree that it's visually beautiful, that the filmmaking technology is fascinating, shame about the story and characters, but that's almost forgivable. And that's exactly the same complaint people have about the recent Star Wars movies, but those get branded things like "Worst movie of the Millennium," (Film Threat magazine's comment about The Phantom Menace). So why is Kerry Conran granted forgiveness, but not George Lucas? Please.