Maybe I'm missing something.

I didn't get what all the critics liked so much about 2002's Far From Heaven, although I understand it has something to do with its having the look and feel of a 1950s melodrama. And I don't get now why many of those same critics are speaking so highly of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which itself has the look and feel of a dime sci-fi novel from the '30s.

Okay, so writer-director Kerry Conran went through great pains to construct a fantasy world of evil millionaire scientists and gigantic city-pulverizing robots that looks just silly enough to be lifted from those same pulp sources. And he shot star Gwyneth Paltrow in an absurdly soft focus just like they used to do with female leads back in the old days, using a digitally rendered, shadowy metropolis as a backdrop. Great ... so what, again, is the point?

Mimicry alone just doesn't seem important enough to make a $70 million movie, or to burn $5 watching it for that matter, especially not when the form you're mimicking is mass-produced kids' stuff with standardized plots and characters.

There's just something ugly about it, like postmodernism, but with even less work involved.

Speaking of not working, it was an awful shame to see pros like Paltrow and Jude Law slum it like this. Angelina Jolie's in the movie too, but not nearly long enough to be boring.

Law, however, as the titular Sky Captain, is startlingly plastic.

Had he risked taking the one-dimensionality of his character to its logically absurd extreme, as George Clooney did so hilariously in O' Brother, Where Art Thou? for instance, he might have breathed even a gasp of subtext into the movie.

I realize I'm opening myself up to the obvious objection that subtext "doesn't matter," because Sky Captain is "just entertainment." In fact, Conran inserts this argument early on, when Paltrow's reporter Polly Perkins tells her editor -- and the audience -- "It's just a movie ... let me buy you some popcorn."

Fair enough, except there really isn't much excitement going on in the movie either. Like George Lucas in the recent Star Wars movies, it feels as if newcomer Conroy's action sequences arise begrudgingly. Whereas good adventure directors come across like little kids playing with Legos or a new train set, Conran seems more like a kid who's forced to brush his teeth at night.

It isn't all unpleasant though; there's some good eye candy. One scene near the beginning particularly sticks out in my mind: set in a movie theater, the scene features a dialogue exchange where the characters are cast against footage from The Wizard of Oz, which plays on the big screen in the background. The resulting scene is an amazing bit of patchwork and my favorite thing about Sky Captain.

Unfortunately, for the most part, Conran sticks to his "classic" visual style, which seems to involve soaking the film stock in Vaseline to make it desirably cloudy and difficult to see and thus ... iconic? Way to go, I guess. Like I said, maybe it's just me. Maybe I just don't see the value in mastering the sensationalist storytelling skills and cardboard characters of a bygone era.

But if there is a point to making a movie look like it might have looked if it had come out 70 years ago -- while keeping it virtually free of irony, likeable characters and a simple sense of humor. I've yet to figure out what that is.