Driving & Parking - SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (2004) - Review

It's Los Angeles, of course, and it's 1938. The adventure serial is in trouble. In some seedy down at heel bar he lights a cigarette, orders a bourbon, and tries to describe the problem. He describes it broadly, to no-one really in particular, though the femme fatale beside him is the most likely recipient.
"See, it ain't the 90s no more. You can't just draw a rabbit on a few frames of Chinatown and have some big tall drawn broad an' make a killin' no more."

People around him pause and wonder who in the 1890s was doing this. Drawing rabbits on picture frames. In Chinatown? Had he been to an opium den?

The adventure serial, it happens to all genres, is having a week where all the ideas in his head feel a little weird, unusual. One of those where out the other side come advances in the cinematic experience. Or regressions.
"What we need is," the adventure serial unaware of how strange this outburst is, "I don't know..."
"It's okay adventure serial," the femme fatale leans forward, shifts her legs in a way that lifts her skirt three, four inches, to just above her knee. She sees his eyes snatch away to it, and smirks. "You'll think of something."
The adventure serial is in a bind. Audiences just don't want to see grizzled, middle aged men swinging swords in cramped stage sets, or shooting revolvers at oily off screen foreigners. They don't even care about treasure in giant chests, or broads with same.

"Hey, you know," he says after a long silence, "you know what they've not done before?"
"What's that?" The fatales eyes moving semi frequently towards the empty highball glass, hoping that attention drawn to it will bring it closer to being filled, though not at her expense.
"Giant robots," he says, voice slowly gathering momentum, "yeah! There's some giant robots see and they're going for.. well not here. What about I don't know, New York?"
"What they gonna do there sweetheart?" she asks in a saccherine voice, tilting her head, looking idly at his hands for a wedding ring.
"They're gonna..."
"Take in a show?"
"Nah nah, they're gonna steal all the power from it. All the uhh.. generators..."
The fatale looks at him blankly for a moment, "why?"
"It's for some scheme doll, there's this genius and he's making a thing and the robots are his, right? And there's a ton of them.."
He grabs a bar coaster and emulates the motion.
"Swooping in!" his pupils are dilating slightly, "down into the city and someone handsome.. someone handsome has to stop them with a special plane."
"Honey," she taps her drink stirrer against the glass, as if trying to break a spell that's taken over her companion. She considers hiking her dress another two inches, despite it not being anywhere near midnight. She's no hussy but gawd just something to stop him talking about robots.
"Honey, we can't make them kind of things. How bout you just have a dame and a middle aged fella and he goes and shoot revolvers someplace foreign and they fall in love.."
"No," he's abrupt and resolute, "no more dames. None of that." adventure serial straightens up, taken over by purpose and intensity.
"That's too..." he wants to say cliched, but what he means is there's no robots, "well we're not doing it like that. We need clean cut. We need them to look like church going folk. They have to be vanilla, ya know? Clean living."
He gets a hankerchief and dabs his brow a little. He's sweating profusely, mostly with ideas.
"That radio play, War of the Worlds, that's where we gotta go."
"Orson Welles ain't no clean living, sweetheart. And anyway, he just read out some book you'd have to go make all these little things and film them and oh boy what a pain that would be..."

He takes a big sip of bourbon, catches the bartenders eye for another, but does nothing towards refilling his companions cocktail. The fatale sighs inwardly. She wonders, could she get the trolley home if she left now? Would she have the fare?

The fatale resolves to try again and smiles, overbrightly. "How are you going to film these things?
"We will..." the adventure serial is thinking hard. Ideas are seeping out of him, and he doesn't have words to associate with them.
"We'll use an adding machine. Yeah.. one of those, punch card.. things. So we get a bunch of them, right, and we put them through the machine, and then it makes the images," he pauses, running out of associations for what's in his head, "appear.... somehow."
There's silence around him, hoping for clarification.
"Oh, like an animation, right?" another patron of the bar, now involved in the conversation. Not willingly per se, but drawn in by its strange gravity, "like that Walt Disney. You flick through all the cards really fast."
"Um.." adventure serial is hesitant, "no. It'll be like a real thing but it won't be. We can just use a big room and paint it green and then the punch cards makes it an office."
"It's still just an empty room though, sweetheart," the fatale points out.
"It's okay, it doesn't matter. There's robots right.. and.."
"Won't it," the fatale is quick to curtail further robot talk, "just be people standing round an empty room though. They won't be able to do anything, right?"
"It won't matter, cos there's robots. And a guy in a plane, and he's gonna shoot them all."
"But the robots aren't real either huh? Not even little models?" the fatale asks.
The serial isn't listening. He's got his cigarette packet out and on the back of it he's drawing, more like divining, a picture of a giant robot. It looks like a freight train with legs.

The fatale watches him a moment, "the trouble is honey, it's too unreal. People don't care how good your robots look. There's no.. burning kiss, you know? No chemistry. It's just like a stage set but with no props either? Your punchcards maybe even look real but it won't feel it. It'll feel so weird. What's your plot gonna be?"
"One day," he looks around, at her, at the bar, other patrons, "we won't need plots. One day, we will have punchcard machines and we'll run most the movie through it, and then people are gonna say a few words and then we run some more. And.." he looks excited, "we'll have as many, one day, as many robots as we want to on a screen."

"Oh adventure serial," she chuckles to herself as she stands up, "that's the dumbest thing I ever heard."
"You'll see, it's just gonna be robots running.." he stops and looks at the drawing he made, "walking round. Slowly."
The fatale pays for her drink and makes to leave. Then, with a flowing practiced movement, flicks her hair as she addresses the serial from over her shoulder.
"Well, I liked that one about the rabbits better."