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''Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow'' is a 2004 movie [[George Lucas Throwback|homage]] to the [[Two-Fisted Tales]] of the 1930's. The film follows the adventures of [[Ace Pilot]] 'Joe' Sullivan, known as [[The Red Baron|Sky Captain]] (Jude Law) and newspaper reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow).
They begin investigating the affairs of the [[Mad Scientist|mysterious German scientist]], Dr Totenkopf, after his machines attack [[New York City]]. Further implicating Totenkopf is a string of kidnapped scientists all leading back to his involvment.
The plot shamelessly uses the [[Awesome but Impractical|outrageous gadgets]] and cliches of the [[Pulp Magazine]] and [[Comic Book]] genres, plus numerous [[Shout-Out|shout outs]] to other media of the period. Filmed with live actors against computer-generated surroundings, the movie did not make enough money to offset its production costs, so a sequel is unlikely.
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* [[Action Dress Rip]]: Polly tears her skirt to run better during the NYC robot attack. But leaves on the heels....
* [[Action Girl]]: Commander Francesca "Franky" Cook of the Royal Navy, who sports an [[Eyepatch of Power]]. There's also [[The Nameless|The Mysterious Woman]], a [[He Who Must Not Be Heard|silent]] but deadly woman who controls Totenkopf's machines {{spoiler|and turns out to be a [[Robot Girl]].}}
* [[Aerial Canyon Chase]]: The title character flies his fighter plane along the streets of New York just above ground level while trying to escape Dr. Totenkopf's robot ornithopters.
* [[Alternate History]]: Set in a 1939 (with ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'' showing in theaters) where [[World War Two]] either happened earlier than our world's, is still brewing, or not at all, though apparently the Japanese invasion of Manchuria still happened.
** There is also a ''Hindenburg III'' in the opening scene (which implies either that the first ''Hindenburg'' did not explode, or else its explosion was not an impediment to further airship construction).
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{{quote|'''Joe:''' Could we just for once die without all this bickering?}}
* [[Bilingual Dialogue]]: Polly can understand both written and spoken German.
* [[Bring It]]: Dr. Totenkopf's female [[The Dragon]] makes a gesture to Sky Captain before fighting him outside the rocket ship.
* [[Brits With Battleships]]: ''Flying'' battleships.
* [[Camera Obscurer]]: Polly Perkins spends much of the movie with only one frame left on her only roll of film, and wants to save it for a truly awesome photo. In the film's denouement, {{spoiler|she decides to take a photo of Joe Sullivan, only for Joe to look at her and say "Lenscap".}}
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* [[Cut and Paste Environments]]: Toward the beginning of the movie, just after the robots attack Manhattan, Sky Captain lands at his base and drives his plane into a huge hangar. At the top of the doors of the hangar are these huge windows of 8x10 panes. In every window, some of the panes are broken. In every window, it's ''EXACTLY THE SAME PANES'' that are broken.
* [[Cutting the Gordian Knot]]: Polly and the door to Dr. Jenning's lab.
* [[Deliberately Monochrome]]: Filmed in color and desaturated, then re-saturated again to make it more like a painting than a photo-realistic movie.
* [[
* [[Disintegrator Ray]]: [[Gadgeteer Genius]] Dex is shown testing a [[Buck Rogers]] raygun that can burn a hole through solid metal with luminous <s>Lifesavers</s> rings of energy.
* [[Disproportionate Retribution]]: Apparently the proper response for ''suspecting'' your boyfriend is cheating on you is to sabotage his plane so that he might die (but actually just gets stuck in a brutal prison for months). [[Double Standard|But then she's a woman, he hurt her feelings, he clearly had it coming.]]
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* [[Fake Shemp]]: [[Laurence Olivier]], via the magic of stock footage and CGI, [[Virtual Ghost|comes back to life]] as Dr. Totenkopf.
* [[The Fantastic Trope of Wonderous Titles]]
▲* [[George Lucas Throwback]]: to 30's sci-fi and 40's-50's war fiction.
* [[Giant Flyer]]: The protagonists encounter giant prehistoric birds on Totenkopf's island.
* [[A God Am I]]: Totenkopf, in the video that plays while his rocket is rising through the atmosphere. It plays a twisted version of the first few verses of Genesis, replacing him as God and him seeing that "Man was evil."
* [[Gratuitous German]]: The German in this movie is often mangled.
** A particularly noticeable example is a button labeled with "Dringlichkeitsfreigabe", which then gets translated as "Emergency Release", while it actually means "Urgency Release". It should be "Notfallfreigabe/-abkopplung/-entriegelung/-freisetzung".
** The German newspaper headline about the robot invasion translates to ''"Very Big Metallc [sic!] Machines Steal Steal Reserves"''.
* [[The Grotesque]]: The sole survivor of Dr. Totenkopf's uranium mining and experiments.
* [[Gunship Rescue]]. {{spoiler|An entire fleet of heliocarriers turns up to rescue the protagonists at the end, though they don't really need saving by that stage.}} And Dex has a [[Big Damn Heroes]] moment {{spoiler|when he arrives in a hoversled just in time to save Joe and Polly from the swarm of flying killer robots}}.
* [[Herr Doctor]]: All the scientists are German and Austrian.
* [[Hologram Projection Imperfection]]: As the protagonists approach Dr. Totenkopf's office a Tesla-type generator creates a [[Huge Holographic Head]] of Totenkopf that explains his motives and warns them to get out or die. Both the image and voice are distorted when powering up, highlighting the more primitive 1930's zeerust technology of the film. {{spoiler|The imperfections also hint this is a case of [[The Tape Knew You Would Say That]].}}
* [[Homage|Homages]]: The attack by giant bipedal robots is copied from the 1941 Superman cartoon "The Mechanical Monsters". Their laser sound-effects are the same as the Martian [[Disintegrator Ray]] in the 1953 ''[[The War of the Worlds (novel)|The War of the Worlds]]'' film; similarly Polly's phoned-in report on the attack uses lines lifted from the famous [[Orson Welles]] radio broadcast. On seeing one of the robots, Dex mutters "[[Shazam]]!" The silhouette of [[Godzilla]] can be seen in a newspaper from Japan. During an underwater sequence we see both the wreck of the [[Titanic]] and the ship from ''[[King Kong]]'', complete with ape-holding cage. King Kong himself can be seen at the top of the Empire State Building during one shot with the robots in the streets. The flying robots on Totenkopf's island have the same chest controls as Commando Cody's [[Jet Pack]]. Etc.
* [[Hostage for Macguffin]]: When Dr. Totenkopf's thugs capture Polly Perkins in the uranium mine.
* [[Hot Scoop]]: Polly.
* [[Info Dump]]: Dex and the [[
* [[It Is Beyond Saving]]: Totenkopf's [[Well-Intentioned Extremist|motive]] in creating his World of Tomorrow (and destroying the old one in the process).
* [[It's the Only Way]]: Spoofed.
{{quote|'''Sky Captain:''' "Is it safe?"
'''Dex:''' "Well, there's only one way to find out."
''(Sky Captain and Polly step across the [[Door of Doom|booby-trapped threshold]], holding hands, in lock-step and are relieved to be unharmed)''
'''Dex:''' "...I meant throw something."}}
* [[Justified Title]]: The [[Character Name and the Noun Phrase]] title is obviously a reference to the retro-futuristic nature of the movie, but "Sky Captain" is the nickname of the main character, and the villain calls his scheme {{spoiler|to seed life on another planet}} the "World of Tomorrow".
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* [[Reconstruction]]
* [[Redshirt Army]]: The [[Private Military Contractors|Flying Legion]] gets wiped out by an air raid, but Joe is only concerned about his missing buddy Dex. Additionally, Franky's troops.
* [[
* [[Running Gag]]: Polly and Joe's discussions about whether she cut his fuel line. As it turns out, {{spoiler|she did cut it.}}
* [[Shangri La]]: Shangri-La itself, whose people were forced to work in Totenkopf's uranium mine.
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** Godzilla appears on one of the newspaper headlines in a "blink and you'll miss it" cameo.
** "[[War of the Worlds|They've reached Sixth Avenue. They've reached Fifth Avenue. They're a hundred yards away. Oh, my God.]]"
* [[Sidekick]]: Dex, to Joe (Sky Captain). But there's a lot more to Dex then this, he may ''look'' like a skinny little nerd but he's [[Took a Level
* [[Sitting Duck]]: The Flying Legion is caught on the ground by an air raid launched by what can only be described as pulp sci-fi [[UCA Vs]].
* [[Stripped to the Bone]]: One of the escaping {{spoiler|scientists}} on Totenkopf's island gets skeletonised by a bolt of electricity from a [[Nikola Tesla|Tesla coil]].
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* [[Too Awesome to Use]]: See [[One Bullet Left]].
* [[Traitor Shot]]: Two of the guides look at each other while standing under Joe's plane as sinister music plays.
* [[What Happened to the Mouse?]]: A [[Mutants|survivor of Totenkopf's experiments]] asks for one last favor. {{spoiler|To be killed. We never find out if Joe obliges, although his rather sad look after they've left Shangri-La implies that he did it.}}
* [[Why Won't You Die?]]: Invoked word-for-word {{spoiler|when [[The Dragon]], beaten, revealed as a [[Robot Girl]], and left for dead at the villain's island, sneaks into the rocketship to attack Joe one last time.}}
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[[Category:Films of the 2000s]]
[[Category:Hugo Award]]
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