Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow

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You missed the point entirely...things like "World War I" should have been edited out of the script to say instead something like, "The Great War" which is, by the way, what everyone - American's especially - were calling it in 1938. It's not a matter of a flick to be taken seriously. You just don't do something like that.

Decent movies have someone who reads over the scripts for things like that to keep them from cropping up in the movie.

And please, if you're going to set the movie in 1938, let's use a 1938 aircraft?

I don't dispute that 1918 was over 20 years ago from 1938....but uh, why then do they continually suggest in the movie that it's post-World War II.

In fact the Hindenburg III refrence in the beginning is entirely possible if you're assuming an alternate history, the Original was destroyed in May of 1937, in your "alternate history" theory let's assume it wasn't destroyed. Could two more have been built in the next year and a half (The time between May 1937 and your professed date for the movie: December 1938)? Of course. Especially if they were already under development.

The P-40, however, didn't even enter testing stages until 1940, with only the prototype being in use in 1939...so then how is there a full wing of them, with "special modifications" in the hands of a mercenary group in 1938?

That's the one part of the movie I felt they skipped on. The United States is allowing Sky Captain to maintain a mercenary force within driving distance of New York City using a prototype fighter that they have a full wing of?

They go through some great lengths to make the movie believable, and then stuff like that crops up. I mean, look at the Rocketeer, that movie (the closest comparison I have) is at least believable.
 
Jason_Ryock said:
They go through some great lengths to make the movie believable, and then stuff like that crops up. I mean, look at the Rocketeer, that movie (the closest comparison I have) is at least believable.
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Giant robots and robot assassins and giant silver dildo rockets that carry animals and burn up planets and P-40s that can fly around the world on a single tank of fuel are believable?

Sure, you keep your date arguments. This wasn't meant to be believable. This was supposed to be something like you might find in a cheesy action hero comic.
 
Forgive me having standards even for my cheesy action hero comics....the story can not jive with the real world all it wants to. I don't object to that.

But hell, I like stories that at least refrain from contradicting themselves.

As for the Rocket ship, that was a very nice touch. You call it a Dildo, I call it a throwback to the 50's when concept images of Rocket Ships looked like that, sleek and silver with a pointed nose.

My argument isn't that the movie doesn't make sense in the world today...my argument is that it doesn't make sense in the fake world they try to create to set the movie in.
 
Jason_Ryock said:
My argument isn't that the movie doesn't make sense in the world today...my argument is that it doesn't make sense in the fake world they try to create to set the movie in.
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Is that so? Well, I haven't seen this movie, so I don't know what's in it and what's not. However, your argument is incredibly senseless. Unless somebody at some point said, "Gee, Bob, what with WWII due to start next year, it's really pretty great that we can fly these planes that haven't been invented yet", how can you claim that WWII did not happen before 1938 in this movie, or that the P-40 wasn't invented before 1938?

In short, did the movie contradict itself, or did it contradict your knowledge of history, which you irrationally chose to apply to an alternate history science-fiction movie?
 
There's also the little detail that's mentioned in passing that the main character flew in the AVG (the "Flying Tigers"), which didn't, in this reality, exist as a combat unit until late 1941, which supports the notion that the world timeline of Sky Captain diverges significantly from the one that we (the folks on the other side of the monitor) know.

(The mention was during one of the discussions about who sabotaged SC's plane, in a past event in China.)
 
I don't understand this argument.

Fake world events contradict real world events, so the fake world contradicts itself? That doesn't make too much sense.

All your points say pretty clearly that this could not have happened in the world as we know, which there is really no disagreement on. The dates are totally wrong for when the events happened in the real world, also at least some of them seem to have turned out differently.

What I am saying is that you cannot apply the real world timeline to a work of fiction that does not subscribe to the real world timeline. A humanity that has the technology to create flying robots en masse (albeit one crazy scientist fellow) probably has the technology to pump out aircraft a few years earlier. We imagine that the aircraft development model moved forward in the same direction it did in the real timeline, however it moved along more quickly, so that the P-40 hit production two or three years earlier.

That is how I am seeing it anyway. "How would history have progressed if these things were different?"
 
It's not a matter of comparing it to the real-world timeline, it's a matter of the movie to alluding to a number of things that remain unexplained.

In places, it seems in fact to reference the actual history of the world (For example, the Flying Tigers refrence) and then contradicts that with a reference to the Hidenburg III.

The movie itself can't decide if it's going to base itself off of a real timeline or a false one and so it goes back and forth, and in the end, it contradicts themselves. How difficult would it have been to write out a short undetailed timeline and stick to it for the whole course of the movie?

Consistancy is what I want in a movie, consistancy with itself, which is lacking here. Sometimes it's consistant to the rest of the world, sometimes it's consistant to it's own timeline but it can't have things both ways...
 
Yeah, the movie about giant robots attacking New York really had trouble getting the idea that it wasn't a historical drama across.
 
Is it really that big of a leap of faith to imagine that not only did our real world things exist early in the movie timeline and that they developed things we never did? If the flying tigers came into being earlier, couldn't the Hindenberg have done the same thing?

Is it really that hard to believe that Armani still would've been a fashion designer no matter which timeline you're following?
 
Jason_Ryock said:
In places, it seems in fact to reference the actual history of the world (For example, the Flying Tigers refrence) and then contradicts that with a reference to the Hidenburg III.

The movie itself can't decide if it's going to base itself off of a real timeline or a false one and so it goes back and forth, and in the end, it contradicts themselves. How difficult would it have been to write out a short undetailed timeline and stick to it for the whole course of the movie?
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Man, what the hell are you talking about? How on earth does a Flying Tigers reference contradict a Hindenburg III reference? What, if you have the Flying Tigers, you are legally bound to not build any more Hindenburgs?

Again - stop complaining about how this movie contradicts your crazy pre-conceived notions of what happens in its fictional alternative history. Go back to the cinema, watch the damn movie again, and you will see that it does not contradict itself. And I can say this without even seeing the movie or knowing anything about it, because I know that, in order to contradict itself the way you imply, the movie would need to include lines like - "Oh, wow, it's the Hindenburg III, which never existed," or "Hey, what's this Hindenburg III doing here? We've mentioned the Flying Tigers, so a Hindenburg III can't possibly exist!"
 
This argument got started on the wrong foot.

I shall again explain the position I take. Sky Captain follows an alternate timeline that diverges probably sometime in the early 1900s. In this alternate timeline, technological development escalates all over the world, to the point where Japan is able to launch aircraft that can bomb Pearl Harbor several years prior to 1942. Let's just pretend that WW2 has been shifted back 10 years (just an arbitrary figure). USA jumps in in 1932, the Flying Tigers defend their Chinese comrades about this time as well. WW2 ends with the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1935. 3 years later, Sky Captain. If we shift everything backwards 8 - 10 years and change up some events (maybe the designers of the Hindenburg suddenly figured "Hey! We should put helium in this thing instead so it won't blow up and a guy with a camera won't scream 'oh, the humanity!'") then this could work out.

This is under the theory that even if mankind were to advance technologically at a much quicker rate, it would follow the same course, just obviously faster.
 
Nomad Terror said:
(maybe the designers of the Hindenburg suddenly figured "Hey! We should put helium in this thing instead so it won't blow up and a guy with a camera won't scream 'oh, the humanity!'")
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Um, there was no TV in 1937, it was a radio announcer (Herb Morrison, of Chicago station WLS) that made that broadcast. :)

As for the cause, it wasn't the hydrogen that was the issue, but that the envelope was effectively weatherproofed ("doped" being the specific term, and no it has nothing to do with drugs :p ) with solid rocket fuel, which was probably ignited by a static discharge. The only other zepellin built after the Hindenburg, the Graf Zepellin II, was doped with a different mixture that had fire retarding agents in it, and used bronze powder instead of aluminum powder.
 
Death said:
Um, there was no TV in 1937, it was a radio announcer (Herb Morrison, of Chicago station WLS) that made that broadcast. :)

As for the cause, it wasn't the hydrogen that was the issue, but that the envelope was effectively weatherproofed ("doped" being the specific term, and no it has nothing to do with drugs :p ) with solid rocket fuel, which was probably ignited by a static discharge. The only other zepellin built after the Hindenburg, the Graf Zepellin II, was doped with a different mixture that had fire retarding agents in it, and used bronze powder instead of aluminum powder.
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Now that's stuff I didn't know. I mean, I knew about the TV part.
 
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