Retropolis

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is a paradox: a film that uses the digital technology of the future to build a hand-tinted, hyperstylized fever dream of the

past. Filmmaker Kerry Conran has made a soaring action adventure that's both a glorious labor of love and, in the end, irrelevant. No one has really been asking for a fusion of "Independence Day," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and an old Buck Rogers serial, but here it is anyway, and the only thing keeping it from greatness is a good story. Jude Law plays Joe Sutphin, a.k.a. Sky Captain, a heroic late-'30s flyboy with an airbase and a private force of can-do pilots

nestled in the mountains just north of Manhattan (the ones east of the Poconos, presumably), from whence he emerges in times of crisis. The appearance of a squadron of giant airborne robots over New York qualifies, and before we're 10 minutes into the movie, Joe has flown double Immelmans down Broadway in his Tomahawk and sent the iron giants packing. Down on the ground, his once and future girlfriend, Chronicle reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), sighs and fumes. I should probably point out that none of this is real. Well, Law and Paltrow and possibly some of the props are real -- meaning they exist as tightly bonded molecular structures in physical space. Everything else in "Sky Captain" has been digitally

painted on the canvas of a computer: the sets, the gleaming planes and rocketships, the Art Deco cityscapes, everything. The film's opening scene, of a dirigible docking at the tip of the Empire State Building, sets the tone: heavy chiaroscuro, gracefully impossible camera angles, and a breathless re-engineering of 1930s iconography that borders on fetish. If art-house filmmaker Guy Maddin ("The Saddest Music in the World") ever went Hollywood, this might be what he'd come up with. Peek under the luxe exteriors, though, and we're in surprisingly derivative "Star Wars"/"Indiana Jones" territory. There's an evil madman, of course, a mysterious individual named Totenkopf (about whom more later) whose robots are plundering the generators and oil refineries of the world for reasons revealed late in the game. Joe's right-hand guy, a brainiac named Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), has been kidnapped by the villain, so it's Joe to the rescue, with Polly along for the scoop, Leica at the ready.

Their stops along the way feature a hit parade of cliffhanger cliches -- trapped in a room full of dynamite, that sort of thing -- which Conran serves straight with a chaser of camp. You're supposed to rediscover your inner 9-year-old watching "Sky Captain," but so many movies have gone this route since George Lucas blazed the path 27 years ago that these days our inner 9-year-olds are catered to around the clock. The finale includes both a race across a thin bridge over a yawning chasm and the hero frantically snipping wires to avert a nuclear countdown; archetypal moments, sure, but sometimes that's just a synonym for "trite."

So you're left with the look of the film, which is mesmerizing. Apparently lit for black and white then digitally colorized, "Sky Captain" glows with the curved chrome optimism of pre-war design and attitudes. The film's sci-fi elements come out of the 1939 World's Fair -- the robots that attack Dex have the squiggly tentacles of the aliens in "The War of the Worlds" -- and elsewhere Conran recombines the DNA of so many old movies that Turner Classic aficionados may go into seizures. There's a side trip to the Shangri-La of "Lost Horizon," for instance (with backgrounds out of a Maxfield Parrish painting), and, delightfully, a visit to Kong Island, complete with dinosaurs. They call it something else, but trust me, it's Kong Island.

In all, "Sky Captain" feels like an artifact unearthed from the bottom of a steamer trunk in your grandmother's attic, and that poses questions. Such as: Will kids and teenagers sit still for a stylistic petri-dish experiment, no matter that the visuals at times have the hermetic smoothness of a video game? And: Is it possible for an actor to give a performance in a blue-screen void?

Law manages the trick: He's a believable and engaging two-dimensional hero. Ribisi's a pip too, but Paltrow's fairly awful -- while she looks the part, her nasal line readings sound like Kate Hepburn with the air let out of her tires. And Conran wastes Chinese actress Bai Ling in the role of the goggled, latex-clad leader of the robot army -- think the False Maria from "Metropolis" with an S&M makeover. The character's intriguing and, um, really hot, so why not give her more to do?

Cast in smaller roles are Angelina Jolie and the very late Sir Laurence Olivier. The former is a joy as Capt. Frankie Cook, eye-patched British commanding officer of a floating air force base that takes the travelers in. Barking out lines like "Alert the amphibious squadron!," Jolie finds the pulse of the movie and rides it for the few scenes she's in. Memo to the actress: Less earnest crud like "Beyond Borders," please, and more character turns like this.

And Olivier? Yes, yes, the great actor has been gone these 15 years, but his image has been exhumed and cast as Dr. Totenkopf (that's "deadhead" in German) in jerky video footage and one "Wizard of Oz" floating-head homage. Sir Larry even gets a credit at the end and for all I know a salary that went to widow Joan Plowright's bingo fund, but his "participation" marks the point where Kerry Conran's love of the 1930s turns a little sweaty in the palms. The digital manipulations of "Sky Captain" point the way to the cinema of the future, but the perils of plundering the past are never more queasily clear than when Olivier's onscreen, uttering words he never said. What's next -- Cary Grant brought back from the beyond to play Mandy Moore's dad? Bette Davis in "Now and Again, Voyager"? O brave new world, that has such people in it.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.