Back to the Future

The Sky Captain world, both retro and futuristic fuses elements from classic cinema as diverse as German Expressionism and bickering exes.

Metropolis
The movie’s industrial deco design owes much to the mechanized future society in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). “It draws heavily on the German expressionism of the twenties, certainly the work of Fritz Lang and [F.W.] Murnau,” says director Kerry Conran, “going up to some of the work that [Orson] Welles did—even Citizen Kane, which drew from the same sources.”

Flyboy Heroes
Sky Captain has antecedents in David Niven (A Matter of Life and Death), Cary Grant (Only Angels Have Wings), and Harrison Ford (the Indiana Jones trilogy). “He’s not some superman,” says Law. “He runs out of bullets, he has stomach ulcers. [Yet] he takes on towering robots and flies an airplane like no one you’ve ever seen.” His squadron is loosely patterned after the Flying Tigers, American aviators who flew as mercenaries against the Japanese in World War II; their exploits were fictionalized in the 1942 John Wayne movie.

Combative Romantic Comedies
The verbal repartee and flirtatious-contentious relationship between Law’s Sky Captain and Paltrow’s Polly Perkins recall, says Conran, “the sensibilities of a Howard Hawks romantic comedy” (like the Cary Grant–Rosalind Russell classic His Girl Friday), as well as the work of Preston Sturges and films such as The Philadelphia Story.

Serial Adventures
With their weekly episodes and cliff-hanger endings, the Larry “Buster” Crabbe–starring Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials proved inspirational not just narratively but psychologically. “The idea of making 120 minutes by myself seemed really, really daunting and debilitating, but the notion of making seven short films seemed reasonable to me,” Conran says. “So the serial form helped me work my way through it.”

Superman Cartoons
The Max Fleischer–produced Superman cartoons of the early 1940s were a major influence both visually and technically, Conran says. “They were unique in that they were cartoons done in the film noir style, and I don’t think there’s been anything like it before or since.”