I hear there was a three person crew whose only job was to light Jude's cheekbones.

Ooh, it's so pretty. And not just because of Jude Law.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a throwback combined with a leap forward, a daring blend of retro-style storytelling and high-tech filmmaking. The retro part is easy to spot. Writer/director Kerry Conran has developed a story of the type you may have seen in serial form at a Saturday matinee if you happen to be in your 70s. The year is 1939. Scientists are disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Giant robots (yes, giant robots) wreak havoc on New York City. Plucky reporter Polly Perkins investigates while her ex-boyfriend, hero-for-hire Joe Sullivan (aka Sky Captain), is called in to save the day. Every ten minutes or so there's an attack or a rescue or a chase or something else that would make a dandy cliffhanger if this were a serial instead of a stand-alone movie. Frankly, the plot doesn't make much sense, a point which bothers me not at all. The Flash Gordon-esque, heroic cheesiness of it all is part of the fun and you should either get on-board with it or just skip this movie. (I mean it. Don't sit there ruining it for the rest of us with your sighing and eye-rolling and complaining about incredible coincidences and so on.)

I'm surprised giant robots haven't caught on for real-world military applications because I have to say their havoc was quite impressive.

But it's the high-tech filmmaking part that's really interesting. Conran shot pretty much every frame of every scene with his actors against a green screen, then matted in the backgrounds. All of them. Even things like offices and phone booths. (Well, I hear the cockpit of Sky Captain's plane was real. And they're lying on a bed at one point and that looked real. But that's it, honest.)

So what, you say? Well I'll tell you what: it makes the whole movie look just . . . neat. Conran's settings have a stylized-retro-1930s-art deco look that I adore, with the muted color palette of a hand-tinted photo. Costumes, make-up and lighting combine to seamlessly integrate the actors with their computer-generated backgrounds.

Conran gets the details right, even in a certain lack of detail. Some of the settings are barely sketched in, much as they would have been in an actual low-budget 1930s serial. Others are rendered with the richness of element and atmosphere you might expect from an Indiana Jones movie. The score plays on nostalgia as well, lilting and trilling jauntily through scenes where most modern movies wouldn't use music at all.

Oh, that eye is fine. You're just trying to look tough, you big poseur.

The two leads are appealing and well-cast. Jude Law cruises through his undemanding hero role as Sky Captain. Gwyneth Paltrow is sardonic and spunky as Polly. Angelina Jolie, in an extended cameo as the hard-as-nails commander of some sort of Royal Air Force base, looks as bored with the world as she always does, and so I found her as irritating as I always do. It’s nice to know there are some constants in this crazy world.

On the down side, Conran is better with pictures than he is with words. Yes, I found the very lameness of the plot kind of amusing. Yes, I spent most of the movie mentally rewriting the dialogue, and enjoyed that too. I had a good time, really, but a better script certainly wouldn't have hurt the movie. Sky Captain is a lot of fun, but I'll be in no hurry to see Conran's next movie without the promise of stronger writing.

But for now, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is an enjoyable and ingenious piece of filmmaking and I say, check it out. Sometimes pretty is enough.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3 out of 4 bananas