The slipperiness of creation and the psychosis that finds us repeating ourselves by repeating images of ourselves (Multiplicity is a trickier flick than given credit for) informs Kerry Conran's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which has the audacity to resurrect Laurence Olivier as a literal ghost from Conran's machine. As arch-villain Totenkoff, Olivier makes a cameo appearance in spectral illumination: a projection of a spectre jerry-rigged from new technology mining old film clips and stills. An act of exhumation sanctioned by Olivier's estate and dreamed up by Jude Law (playing the titular hero, otherwise called "Joe," who has a mouth that is exactly the right shape to say things like "Where's Dex?"), it renders Olivier more machine than man and gives the film its balance by providing, mostly offstage, a villain with charisma and a dream for a better tomorrow free of the animalism of man. It's disconcerting to consider that the aims of the villain jibe with the aims of the film itself (recall Andrew Niccol's underestimated S1m0ne): a construction filmed completely on blue stages, fabricated whole inside a computer with only the actors (and not even all the actors, at that) the flesh and blood. Things like this have been done before using 2-D techniques--Cool World, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Lady and the Duke, and Anchors Aweigh swim to mind--but Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow represents that great leap forward for machine technology where an advancement in science has finally made it possible to make the spectacle film that would have been made in the 1940s were it possible.

In a similar way, it's the great leap forward of Star Wars a generation ago (and sure enough, the storyline is at times alarmingly like that of the original Star Wars trilogy), where technology advances to the point at which nostalgia and the decay that accompanies it can finally be represented with a presumption of authenticity. Sky Captain is a scrapbook of references to old styles and newer films, everything from the pulp art of Rafael DeSoto and Frank Paul to the modern versions of them in the art of Jon Muth and George Pratt; from old Buck Rogers serials to The Land that Time Forgot and Journey to the Center of the Earth to the clinical lunar phantasms of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even the kitsch camp of Mike Hodges' curious Flash Gordon is evoked. Telling, too, that with a cast that includes Gwyneth Paltrow as a Howard Hawksian news maven, Giovanni Ribisi as a boy-mechanical-genius, and Angelina Jolie as a one-eyed British sky-pirate (a turn that would fit comfortably with any outtake from Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso), the only thing that sparks conversation is the technology used in the film's creation--and the sources that it's cannibalized to serve as the framework for all the admittedly impressive gewgaw.-Walter Chaw