The pastel world of Kerry Conran's "Spy Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is like nothing you've ever seen in a movie, and for a while, at least, you're afraid to blink for fear of missing something.

It's like nothing you've seen before because nothing quite like it has been attempted before. Though the actors and their movements are real, nearly everything else in the film - from the faux Manhattan set to the array of fighter planes and robots - was produced in computers.

The actors gave their entire performances without the benefit of sets, using their imaginations to see the environment and action created for them in Conran's script.

It's a beautiful movie to look at - a breathing comic book that serves as a loving tribute to the pop culture of the matinee serial era in a story that artfully blends the look of film noir with state-of-the-art science fiction.

Missing beneath its fabulous surface, however, is anything like a beating heart.

The movie it most wants to resemble is "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and Conran did well in casting Jude Law, in a role that is part Indiana Jones and part Ace Drummond, and Gwyneth Paltrow, in a role that is part Marion Ravenwood and part Lois Lane.

But the characters seem to be doing exactly what the actors had to do: pretend there's something between them when there isn't.

The year is 1939 and Law is flyboy Joe Sullivan, called to the rescue when giant robots invade Gotham. The robots have something to do with the disappearance of the world's leading scientists, a mystery that has attracted the attention of ace reporter Polly Perkins (Paltrow).

Joe and Polly, bitter former lovers, join forces - and rekindle old flames - to save the world by solving what once might have been called "The Case of the Missing Scientists and the Flying Robots."

The actual events that occur along the way are a blur of kinetic energy. Everything is so unreal that it's impossible to get an emotional fix on the dangers facing our heroes, and the story and characters are so derivative they have no life of their own.

By the time Angelina Jolie shows up, for an extended cameo as a rogue pilot with a patch over one eye and a gleam in the other for Joe, style has obliterated substance. There's no there there.

My favorite image in the film is of a dirigible docking at the top of the Empire State Building. My least favorite is a hologram of the head of a young Laurence Olivier, drawn from the cinema graveyard for one last performance he never knew he'd give.