No kidding. I want to know more about the contrafactuals in the history, not least because it takes place in 1938 and yet they refer to the First World War, implying there was already a second. Likely in far Asia, given how friendly everyone still is with Germany, etc, and the total lack of any Asians at all (though that might be a red herring).
I think we're supposed to find Polly kind of annoying. She's Supremely Competent, often right, and strongwilled in a sometimes-stupid way (the stupid way only very very smart people ever give in to). This makes her annoying. Which doesn't mean that Joe doesn't love her, of course, just means he'll take the chance to tell her her lenscap was on when it WASN'T. She's going to give him suuuuuch a smack when she develops that roll!
I made the mistake of reading the tie-in book--and if you want my copy, for future reference just say so--it can be yours.
I loved both The Phantom and The Shadow--and I'm really hoping that on the Big Screen, with all the cool effects going off at once I'll be able to rise above some of the problems that were in the "book". Like the fact that there are no one-eyed fighter pilots, or the description of Polly as having a "cat-like" mouth (check the nearest cat for why this is not a good image), or that the wingspan of the model of plane Sky Captain flies is too large to fit into a Manhattan alleyway. I can cut good pulp a lot of slack in the improbability zone, but as the great Lester Dent would remind us, there's a limit.
Hope things are going well for you, and that you haven't thrown your back out hoisting and hauling.
Like the fact that there are no one-eyed fighter pilots
Yeah, that bothered me too. And then I got a good close look at Angelina Jolie's face during one of the combat sequences. You can all but see her iris and pupil in the patch... I don't know if she was even wearing a patch or if that was green-screened in. I'm not talking about seeing the eyelids' outline here. I'm talking about briefly seeing what looked like the outline of her actual iris and pupil. I don't know if they said anything about the patch one way or the other in the book, but unless she was wearing an extremely odd prosthesis behind that thing... well. I did the Dance of Fandom Rationalization and came up with 'that's not a patch in the conventional sense, it's some kind of visual filter created with pulp technology so that she has the equivalent of a heads-up display at all times, and she can see through it perfectly well'.
the description of Polly as having a "cat-like" mouth
... buh? Sorry, not able to make that work here. There's, like, weird splitty lip action going on in cats if I recall...
or that the wingspan of the model of plane Sky Captain flies is too large to fit into a Manhattan alleyway.
Well, yeah, it's hard to get past that prospect. But then again, I've dealt with Manhattan alleyways before. The alleyways and spaces between buildings on the screen were a lot wider than anything I've seen in the real world. I'm going to chalk it up to different architectural trends.
What did bother me was the Base. Where the hell was that? It lay within sight of what I can only assume was New York City. It was accessible by car in the space of less than a day, unless Polly had some other way of getting in. It was surrounded by an awful lot of trees and mountainous territory. I could almost place it in parts of New Jersey, except that Polly specifically says 'they're coming over the Palisades', and that's the cliffs and hills along the Hudson River on the New Jersey side. I'd think the giant robots would have been spotted a bit quicker if they'd come over the Palisades and Sky Captain's base was there.
Then again, if the city we saw through the gap wasn't New York but- I dunno- Paterson, Newark, or Gotham- I could maybe deal with it.
Ah, well. Still fairly happy with the movie. I didn't like Polly much after the initial 'oo, she's Plucky'; she made too many irritating mistakes and got relationshippy at the worst times. I could actually deal with Sky Captain being something of a jerk, because he was a 1930's / 1940's fighter pilot, and flyboys have never been what you'd call the nicest of men.
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winterfish
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Date: 2004-09-18 07:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-30 02:17 pm (UTC)I think we're supposed to find Polly kind of annoying. She's Supremely Competent, often right, and strongwilled in a sometimes-stupid way (the stupid way only very very smart people ever give in to). This makes her annoying. Which doesn't mean that Joe doesn't love her, of course, just means he'll take the chance to tell her her lenscap was on when it WASN'T. She's going to give him suuuuuch a smack when she develops that roll!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 08:15 am (UTC)I loved both The Phantom and The Shadow--and I'm really hoping that on the Big Screen, with all the cool effects going off at once I'll be able to rise above some of the problems that were in the "book". Like the fact that there are no one-eyed fighter pilots, or the description of Polly as having a "cat-like" mouth (check the nearest cat for why this is not a good image), or that the wingspan of the model of plane Sky Captain flies is too large to fit into a Manhattan alleyway. I can cut good pulp a lot of slack in the improbability zone, but as the great Lester Dent would remind us, there's a limit.
Hope things are going well for you, and that you haven't thrown your back out hoisting and hauling.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 11:04 am (UTC)Yeah, that bothered me too. And then I got a good close look at Angelina Jolie's face during one of the combat sequences. You can all but see her iris and pupil in the patch... I don't know if she was even wearing a patch or if that was green-screened in. I'm not talking about seeing the eyelids' outline here. I'm talking about briefly seeing what looked like the outline of her actual iris and pupil. I don't know if they said anything about the patch one way or the other in the book, but unless she was wearing an extremely odd prosthesis behind that thing... well. I did the Dance of Fandom Rationalization and came up with 'that's not a patch in the conventional sense, it's some kind of visual filter created with pulp technology so that she has the equivalent of a heads-up display at all times, and she can see through it perfectly well'.
the description of Polly as having a "cat-like" mouth
... buh? Sorry, not able to make that work here. There's, like, weird splitty lip action going on in cats if I recall...
or that the wingspan of the model of plane Sky Captain flies is too large to fit into a Manhattan alleyway.
Well, yeah, it's hard to get past that prospect. But then again, I've dealt with Manhattan alleyways before. The alleyways and spaces between buildings on the screen were a lot wider than anything I've seen in the real world. I'm going to chalk it up to different architectural trends.
What did bother me was the Base. Where the hell was that? It lay within sight of what I can only assume was New York City. It was accessible by car in the space of less than a day, unless Polly had some other way of getting in. It was surrounded by an awful lot of trees and mountainous territory. I could almost place it in parts of New Jersey, except that Polly specifically says 'they're coming over the Palisades', and that's the cliffs and hills along the Hudson River on the New Jersey side. I'd think the giant robots would have been spotted a bit quicker if they'd come over the Palisades and Sky Captain's base was there.
Then again, if the city we saw through the gap wasn't New York but- I dunno- Paterson, Newark, or Gotham- I could maybe deal with it.
Ah, well. Still fairly happy with the movie. I didn't like Polly much after the initial 'oo, she's Plucky'; she made too many irritating mistakes and got relationshippy at the worst times. I could actually deal with Sky Captain being something of a jerk, because he was a 1930's / 1940's fighter pilot, and flyboys have never been what you'd call the nicest of men.
But Lord, Lord, I wanna be Dex when I grow up.