Filled with style with a capital S, Sky Captain is a joyous combo of rollicking adventure, film noir and all the gee-whizzery of high-tech innovation.
- Urban Cinefile Critics, Urban Cinefile, October 18, 2008
This debut feature by Kerry Conran is a triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste.
- J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader, June 08, 2007
For its writer-director, Sky Captain was a labour of love. For almost everyone else -- including the wooden cast -- it's just a labour.
- William Thomas, Empire Magazine, April 01, 2006
The clincher is how the actors are reduced to puppets and ciphers; Paltrow straight-jacketed in her Hildy Johnson-style two-piece and the evidently bored Law reduced throughout half the movie to giving the gimlet eye through flying goggles.
- Wally Hammond, Time Out, February 09, 2006
It should feel like Star Wars, yet it fails to feel like a movie at all. Conran has done his work almost too well. It's as if you're sitting in front of an outsize comic book with a speed reader as page-turner.
- Sandra Hall, Sydney Morning Herald, January 17, 2006
- Luke Buckmaster, In Film Australia, February 26, 2005
- , Sunday Times (Australia), February 07, 2005
Alas, the finest technology money can buy can't disguise basic flaws in plotting and structure, and flatly written, blandly heroic protagonists.
- Neil Smith, BBC, October 06, 2004
Such an interestingly silly movie that I found myself idly wondering what particular audience was being targeted with its peculiar conceits and infinitude of special effects.
- Andrew Sarris, New York Observer, October 01, 2004
His nostalgia enabled by technology, Conran takes the ghosts in his machine seriously, and the results appear at once meltingly lovely and intriguingly inhuman.
- Ed Park, Village Voice, September 21, 2004
Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of style-over- substance movies, but this one is so gorgeous that it's possible to become literally lost in the richness of the images.
- James Berardinelli, ReelViews, September 19, 2004
Ultimately seems more like a fancy mechanical toy than a work of art we can warm up to.
- Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com, September 18, 2004
A clever parlor trick but a dull movie.
- Claudia Puig, USA Today, September 17, 2004
Style over substance -- but what style!
- Joe Baltake, Sacramento Bee, September 17, 2004
With its silky textures and fluffed up fake-studio imagery, Sky Captain is like a big warm pillow that threatens to smother you in downy gorgeousness.
- Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star, September 17, 2004
Sky Captain never exceeds the level of a clever exercise.
- Carla Hall, San Francisco Chronicle, September 17, 2004
Marvelous fun to watch.
- Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times, September 17, 2004
- , Sight and Sound, June 18, 2012
- , Reverse Shot, May 06, 2006
The picture seems reverse-engineered, as if, having conceived his spectacular milieu, Conran created monsters to populate it, then heroes for them to fight, then reasons for the heroes to be there, with emotional plausibility some way behind that.
- Ben Walters, Sight and Sound, November 02, 2004
