Planes are able to swim, Britain is still a military juggernaut, and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has given way to giant robots marching down the streets of New York.

This is the future writer-director Kerry Conran envisions in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Despite a convoluted plot, this film marks a spectacular debut for the 29-year-old Conran and is worth the $7.50 of anyone impatient for the fourth Indiana Jones movie.

Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan (Jude Law) is a world-famous aviator on call whenever trouble’s afoot. He is joined by reporter and old flame Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) who joins him to discover why famous scientists are disappearing and how they are connected with mechanical monsters ravaging cities around the world.

Sky Captain is Conran’s tribute to 1930’s comic books and is reminiscent of films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark. A California Institute of the Arts graduate, he poured his love of 1930s culture into a computer program allowing him to render any scene and drop living actors into it.

The result is a world that looks incredibly realistic. Conran takes us through the concrete canyons of Manhattan, the peaks of the Himalayas, even Shangri-La, each filled with its own visual splendor and painstaking accuracy despite existing only on a computer.

Eye candy set aside, the plot can be hard to follow. Sky Captain’s nostalgic charm is quickly lost as Conran’s obsession with the 1930s gives way to his fondness for more recent scifi movies and, as a result, the story becomes incoherent.

Regardless, Law is incredibly engaging as Sullivan. He has several hilarious spats with Polly who, along with finding her story, wants to know who he’s been messing around with. Paltrow is fantastic as this spunky reporter who risks her life to photograph the monsters attacking New York, but she turns into a ditz upon meeting him.

Sky Captain is a stunning visual spectacle and could mean the end of actual film studios. Pretty pictures aside, its well-chosen cast and fast-moving story make for an enjoyable movie-going experience.