My rating: Woweee-wow.

It's official: the digital gauntlet has been thrown. For those who haven't heard, this sparkling gem of a movie is the first major motion picture to employ something never before done: total digital landscapes. No sets. The actors were all shot against green screens (and reportedly, all the extras were even shot individually to more totally control the editing process) and then dropped into a digital environment. Enough about the digital, though... it's the environment that you need to hear about.

I suppose the first movie of this type had to be good, to really push the envelope. It was, indeed. Matter of fact, I could even go out on a limb to say this was my favorite movie all summer. (It was, after all, released a full week before the first day of fall.) It was spectacular. It was nostalgic, but totally cutting-edge. And best of all, parents... it was rated PG. Did we really believe that something clean could still be so incredibly good? If not, we should have. This was such fun. And to keep you from ruining it for yourself, I encourage you to go into it WANTING to have fun. Heather and I were watching the credits at the end, and this dude walked by us, talking about how American pilots weren't allowed to fly in that part of the world at that time... for Pete's sake, people... maybe if giant robots had attacked the world's major cities, they would. Ya know? Don't go messing this up for yourself.

First-time director Kerry Conran gets to take a lot of credit here, since he not only directed this masterpiece, but wrote the story as well. Conran has taken everything that was wonderful and good about the classics and intricately woven it into a storyline that is totally modern. The end result was, as I predicted in my summer movie review, a wonderful mix of the past meets the future... and no, that does not equal the present. You almost expect Laurence Olivier to appear... and then he does. There are old-style robots walking the streets, zap guns, and this kind of soft, Casablanca-style fog following the action around. It's completely brave. In a day where sci-fi seeems to be chasing down some kind of endless race to come up with new, techno-style motifs, Kerry Conran decides to pay homage to the age of the silver screen. I think the quality is worthy of the products of that age.

The story is intriguing as well. Scientists are mysteriously disappearing. The world is being attacked by robots who appear to terrorize cities, then disappear into, seemingly, nowhere. Sky Captain is the last hope. He shoots down a lot of stuff from his plane, and, along the way, he encounters an eyepatched Angelina Jolie on board a giant airship-aircraft-carrier- type-thing. They embark on an undersea mission (complete in old style scuba suits with the big bubble helmets, of course) and save the day. They find the Garden of Eden. They find (with a cool plot twist added) the bad guy. He fights Bai Ling. And of course, Gwyneth Paltrow adds that girlie flair of emotion to the whole thing. Sorry not to include her earlier, but she didn't do a lot of flying and zapping. :)

It's refreshing to have a film experience like this. Hopefully, this will set new standards in addition to the digital challenge. Hopefully, the level of imagination that Kerry Conran achieved will rub off on other filmmakers. Either way, this film was, in my opinion, a cornerstone in the film industry. It'll find its way to my DVD collection for sure.