By Matt Zoller Seitz

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Directed by Kenny Conran

Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye
Directed by Andrew Repasky McElhinney

Silver City
Directed by John Sayles

SKY CAPTAIN AND the World of Tomorrow is a dull movie. It depresses me to write that, and not just because I know it takes as much effort to make a bad film as it does to make a good one. Sky Captain is no ordinary first film, but a test case of sorts. Set in an eye-popping alternate universe circa 1939, and referencing nearly every significant sci-fi and fantasy film made during the first half of the 20th century, the film's dependence on imaging software and bluescreen technology exceeds that of any previous feature, including the Star Wars and Matrix pictures. Its existence also amounts to a once-a-generation triumph for its writer-director, newcomer Kenny Conran, who realized every aspiring genre filmmaker's secret wish.

A decade ago, Conran and his brother, special-effects expert Kevin Conran, worked up a six-minute prototype with consumer-model computer and video technology. Paramount fell in love with the concept and banked on Sky Captain as both an historically notable movie and a potential franchise. Several years and $70 million later, Sky Captain is one of the most anticipated films of 2004. The impressive cast includes Jude Law as the P-40 Warhawk-flying, space-robot-battling title character, Gwyneth Paltrow as his ex-girlfriend, intrepid newspaper reporter Polly Perkins, Angelina Jolie as a one-eyed British air commander, Giovanni Ribisi as a gum-smacking technical wizard and, in a computer-manipulated cameo, the late, great Sir Laurence Olivier. As if to make the Conrans' triumph sweeter, their bosses let them keep control over every aspect of Sky Captain, from its sepia-toned color scheme to its blimps-and-spires, Art Deco/German Expressionist details to its cheerfully berserk robot designs, which evoke cover art from pre-1950s pulp magazines.

The result is surely the most expensive, technically complex, esthetically pure feature-filmmaking debut ever made within the American studio system—a Citizen Kane for the PlayStation era. If only it weren't dead from the eyelids up. The movie is already being acclaimed as a visionary classic that belongs on a short list with Metropolis, The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner, Brazil and Tron. Of all the titles on that list, I'd compare Sky Captain with Tron, because both films are historically significant, visually striking and strangely cold. Like The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones—which, like Conran's movie, cherry-picked visuals from pre-World War II sci-fi—Sky Captain seems hermetically sealed, less a landscape of the imagination than the bigscreen equivalent of a snowglobe's interior. Establishing shots lack the dramatic converging lines that suggest depth—a standard tool in the kit of every visionary director from F.W. Murnau through Tim Burton—and in tighter shots, the images lack the sharp separation between foreground, middleground and background that signifies something other than virtual reality.

The characters are flat, too. They're bare-bones archetypes (The Hero, The Girl, The Sidekick), gamely acted by a cast that still seems more bemused than engaged. Sky Captain is devoid of the emotional sparks generated when actors interact with real props, real sets and other actors. If George Lucas proved the right mix of oppressive technology and emotional detachment can make even great actors seem lame, Conran proves it again here. I suspect he was so immersed in logistics and so insecure about directing professionals that he was unable to offer anything but anemic, Lucas-style notes—i.e., "Do it again, but faster," or "Next time, remember to look at the X on the ceiling where the giant robot's supposed to be."

I did appreciate the film's grace notes—a zeppelin docking with the Empire State Building, the War of the Worlds death-ray noise made by the robots' laser eyes. But that's the movie's problem: It's all grace notes and no melody. Taro Rin's dazzling 2001 anime Metropolis was a more focused, unsettling vision of an Art Deco retro-future; ditto Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which reveled in film references from Battleship Potemkin to Orson Welles' The Trial, yet refused to let film literacy eclipse suspense, satire and dread.

Conran's most telling error comes early, when he stages a rendezvous between Polly and a scientist at Radio City Music Hall, with a print of The Wizard of Oz unreeling behind them. I found myself tuning out Conran's characters and fixating on Oz, which ranks among the studio system's greatest achievements precisely because it refused to let technique eclipse emotion. Oz is nearly 70 years old, but thanks to its focus on one girl's longings, it seems ageless. Sky Captain is new but feels dead—a dream embalmed in pixels.

If you want drastically different, far more aggressive examples of obsessive filmmaking, check out Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye. This odd, off-putting feature, which opens Sept. 22 at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, is not for kids, bluenoses or anyone faint of heart. Directed by Philadelphia-based indie filmmaker Andrew Repasky McElhinney, Story of the Eye is a loose adaption of the first novel by French writer Georges Bataille, a spiritual disciple of the Marquis de Sade whose name will be familiar to anyone who's dabbled in post-structuralist theory or erotic literature. (If you dig both, tickets are half-price. Just kidding.)

Shot on video and poised somewhere between David Lynch surrealism and hardcore porn, McElhinney's feature is structured as a sexually omnivorous series of tableaus, laid out (cough, cough) buffet-style. The movie kicks off with a narrated prologue about Bataille's life and work, spoken over graphic home-movie imagery of a childbirth that includes an episiotomy by scalpel. (The framing suggests the opening of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's surrealist short Un Chien Andalou, but with a birth canal instead of a sheep's eye.)

From there, McElhinney serves up a creepy masturbation fantasy involving a dead-eyed male spectator, a videogame joystick and two bare-torsoed women in Ginger Rogers-style tapdancing attire, but with gigantic top hats and eyeballs painted over their nipples. (Music: "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.") From there, Story of the Eye segues into more fantasies—straight, S&M, gay, lesbian, black on white, you name it. The copulations seem at once literal and abstract, and in the end it all comes together (cough, cough) in sort of a Rubik's Cube of conceptual porn. Again, the movie's not for everybody, or for most people; if you see it expecting a charming little tale of courtship and end up nauseous, please don't write. I mention Story of the Eye in the same column with Conran's blockbuster only because McElhinney's movie knows what it wants to be (obscure, demented and experimental, rather than accessible, charming and story-driven) and pursues its goals with the obsessive focus and inscrutable energy that defines independence.

AMONG CRITICS, it has become fashionable to bash John Sayles because he makes overtly polemical features that are more interested in dialogue, narrative structure and performance than editing, camera movement and composition. This criticism presumes that anyone more comfortable with literature than pictures cannot be a good director; moreover, it validates the false but popular assumption that commercial cinema is a purely visual medium (it isn't; theater and the novel are stronger influences).

Unfortunately, anyone looking to mount a defense of Sayles will have to wait for a better film than Silver City, an exposition-choked Rocky Mountain Chinatown that aims for epic relevance, but settles for bland propaganda. It's the latest example of West Wing-style deck-stacking, an attempt to elevate liberal ideals by tarring conservatives as creeps, fakes and dummies. The movie stars Chris Cooper as Dickie Pilager, a George W. Bush-like dummy-natural politician, Richard Dreyfuss as his Karl Rove-like handler and Danny Huston as a down-and-out journalist-turned-private eye hired to scare off foes and potential detractors.

In contrast to Sayles' superior Matewan, Eight Men Out and his masterwork, Lone Star, this movie has trouble staying focused. Sayles seems to have envisioned his script as a dialogue-laden checklist of issues that really bug him, from pollution to lobbying to journalistic conflict-of-interest to the exploitation of illegal immigrants. Two or three such issues might have been okay, but after the 12th or 13th position paper disguised as a monologue, Sayles smothers every manner of goodwill, even from the like-minded. The symbolically charged names confirm Sayles' condescending attitude. Even Tom Wolfe or Gore Vidal might draw the line at naming a ruthless politician "Pilager."o