Don't be intimidated by the hype. Don't assume Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a visual masterpiece. True, the picture hangs on its vaunted visual style and is a noteworthy technical achievement, having been composed entirely on computers without using sets or remote locations -- the actors were filmed against blue screen and inserted later. But that doesn't mean you'll automatically be drawn in. Wherever you come down on its looks, there's plenty to absorb and you do get your money's worth.

To my eye, the blimp docking at the Empire State building in the opening scene exemplifies the lumbering images dominating the first reel. They're dark, smudged, and blurry at the edges, leaving you hoping the sun will come out tomorrow. It doesn't, although things do brighten. This is intentional of course. Setting his opus in the late 1930s, director Kerry Conran is going for futuristic film noir. Trench coats, fedoras, and shadows abound. Noir is a style and genre, however, not an evaluative category. Just because a movie pays homage to it, doesn't make it a good movie. Noir suits the outlines of the plot but not its center.

Perhaps what made me so uncomfortable watching the dim fascist aesthetic in the movie's first third is how it taps into contemporary fears about terrorism and natural disaster. Objectively, Sky Captain is still under-lit -- digital chiaroscuro nearly gone haywire.

In any case, once the confines of a besieged Art Deco Manhattan are left behind, there are some spectacular images to behold, and action sequences that aren't as ominously claustrophobic. The retro story has a contagious, pulp grandiosity tempered by self-effacing humor.

The fate of the world will rest in the hands of bickering former sweethearts -- a persnickety blond journalist named Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the intrepid flying ace Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan (Jude Law), a big-hearted mercenary with lots of gadgets, guts and friends. German scientists are disappearing and gigantic metal robots and futurisitc machines are attacking Gotham, among other places.

Against the advice of her editor (an obscured Michael Gambon) Polly is on the case, although she needs Joe to swoop down in his heavily modified fighter plane to rescue her. After an assault on his base, Polly and Joe venture to the Himalayas, trailing metallic pterodactyls that have kidnapped Joe's techy lieutenant (Giovanni Ribisi). They're ultimate quarry is a mad scientist named Dr. Totenkopf, who bears an odd resemblance to Laurence Olivier.

The energy between Paltrow and Law flickers on and off, yet there's enough tongue-in-cheek banter to deflect your attention. Sky Captain's greatest strength is the sense of adventure it evokes. It's hard not to find something cool -- an airplane that turns into a submarine, a flying airstrip commanded by a dominatrix with an eye patch (Angelina Jolie), or the Jurassic animals inhabiting Totenkopf's island lair, to list three.

Title notwithstanding, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is more backward- than forward-looking -- a patchwork of sensibilities and narrative sources. He's part Indiana Jones, part Flash Gordon; she's part Lois Lane, part Fay Wray, and part mysterious femme fatale waiting in Philip Marlowe's office. The villain is an imaginary construct with pinches of Dr. Mengele, Dr. Moreau, and the Wizard of Oz.  And whether you like them or not, you have to credit the computer-generated visuals for enabling all these to coexist if not always cohere. 

(Released by Paramount Pictures and rated "PG" for sequences of stylized violence and brief mild language.)