text: The exploding zeppelins crashing down upon 'Sky Captain' Jude Law's base present an adequate metaphor to describe how truly terrible this movie is. First off, let me state right off the bat that I sincerely doubt that Paramount will ever recover any money from this film. A cult hit it might become, but only because it is so remarkable for what it failed to achieve. I can see the studio pitch now. "Let's combine 1920's German Expressionism and a 1940's globetrotting adventure with a modern action flick and use computer animation to dominate every scene! Wow, won't that be a success! " Skycaptain bludgeons the viewer with its sheer excess. There are too many fake explosions, too many unconvincing dogfight scenes, and too few real moments where the characters are anything but painfully two-dimensional. After all, why shock and awe with one floating airship when you can have three, or five, or one hundred?! Moreover, what could have been a groundbreaking film, seamlessly combining computer generated imagery and human actors in a stylized and intriguing setting, will instead become a flop in no small part because it fails to meet the most important requirement of any flick using CGI. Quite simply, the graphics are amazingly poor. From the movement of the cars to the physics of the aircraft in the dogfights, everything seems to be just a little off. I'm not being nit-picky here in any way. An infant could notice that a car doesn't glide along the road like a maglev train (unless its a Mercedes S500). And for those of you raising your voices in protest, crying out 'This is a stylized film, it's not supposed to be like reality', let me just say this. Lord of the Rings has set the standard for integrating real-life actors with CGI, Starship Troopers has set the standard for ironic science fiction films, the Rocketeer did a solid job reintroducing the decade of the 1920's back into the Hollywood film portfolio, and Tim Burton's Batman created a unique picture of New York City/Gotham that has yet to be repeated. Sky Captain falls so short of all these films, it is hard for me to mention them in the same sentence. Plus, the acting is so poor, it makes me positively ill. So there you have it. I spent $9 to see this film and you get my review. I hope it might dissuade you all from making the same mistake that I did.