The Incredibles & Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Remember when the future was really high-tech and filled with all kinds of adventure? Alas, the future these days is more like an amplified present, like in the shopping malls, suburban houses and personalized adverts of Minority Report. These days the past is where the action is--and all the cool machines, too. The animated Incredibles re-animate their dullsville c. 1960s suburban existence by reasserting their white middle-class specialness (as a family, of course) to defeat the evil machines of a problem-child genius, who wants to use technology to make everyone equally special (oh, the nerve!). Going further back in time, the seemingly omnipresent Jude Law has himself partly animated as Sky Captain, a 1930s hero complete with airships, a blonde lady journalist as love interest, and a boyish techno-wiz sidekick. Together they battle the energy-hungry robots of a proto-Nazi mad scientist, whose machines may eventually destroy the world. Both of these movies were enjoyable to watch--I especially liked Sky Captain's comic-book 1930s world, though the overlaid computer animation sometimes just seemed like a whole lot of Vaseline smeared on the lens. My enjoyment was tempered, however, by the intrusion of present-day politics into my viewing of these yester-year fantasy worlds. Partly this was the result of seeing both films shortly before the Nov. 2 presidential election, when politics of the most frustrating kind was as omnipresent as Jude Law. But both films featured battles against a fearsome and mysterious enemy, who seemingly could strike with impunity almost any where, at any time. Protection against this terrorist-like malevolence was provided, in the 1960s, by a white middle-class family that just doesn't seem to fit in amidst their bureaucratic, lawyer-and-government-dominated world that tries to make everyone the same. In the 1930s, our hero patches together a coalition of the willing (US and Britain) to invade and disarm the weapon of mass destruction (set to destroy the world for no apparent reason) secreted away on a hidden island by a scientist from old Europe. Hmmm... Okay, maybe I'm reading too much into these movies. But given the current world situation, is it any wonder that the past seems a lot more exciting than the future?