Angelina Jolie as Commander Franky Cook in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) Netflix, Amazon Instant

The Basics: In an alternate past, the heroic pilot Sky Captain and intrepid journalist Polly Perkins take to the air to combat a giant robot attack.

If You Like: The Rocketeer, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Things to Come

A period piece that was also very much ahead of its time, the steampunk adventure Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is the kind of imaginative gamble that you wish studios would take more often.

Writer/director Kerry Conran sat hunched over his personal computer — a long-discontinued Macintosh IIci 

For four years, sculpting a killer black-and-white trailer for his passion project, which sought to bring the magic of ’30s-era pulp fiction and cliffhanger serial adventures seven decades forward into the digital age. With the aid of producer-director Jon Avnet, he eventually raised the money (to the tune of $70 million) and started the arduous process of splashing his home movie across the big screen.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law

Among the first films to be made without any physical sets, Sky Captain was shot on a so-called “digital backlot,” where actors performed against greenscreens, with the environments added in later by teams of computer animators. While the highly-stylized visuals might seem artificial at first, the movie becomes more immersive as it goes along, following our hero Sky Captain (square-jawed Jude Law) and his sidekick/love interest Polly (Gwyneth Paltrow, doing a trial run as Tony Stark’s right-hand woman, Pepper Potts) as they fly around the world pursuing the mystery behind these giant robots, traveling from New York City to such exotic backdrops as Nepal and, later, Shangri-La. Along the way, they encounter larger-than-life personalities like Angelina Jolie’s eye-patch sporting British officer, Commander Franky Cook and Dr. Totenkopf, played from beyond the grave by a young Laurence Olivier.

Like another serial-inspired storyteller, George Lucas, Conran has a tin ear for dialogue, but his head is obviously packed with mythic images — and when he’s able to realize them onscreen, Sky Captain soars. Unfortunately, audiences at the time weren’t ready to go along for the ride and the movie flew out of theaters after only grossing a modest $60 million. Conran hasn’t made another feature since, although he did recently co-direct the short film, Gumdrop. Considering the way technology, not to mention content delivery systems, has changed over the past decade, now seems like an ideal time to bring Sky Captain — which does have a strong cult following — back as a web series or a made-for-streaming movie. The ball’s in your court, Netflix.