© Disney
2.5/4 Stars
Rated PG
Starring: George Clooney and Britt Robertson
Directed by Brad Bird
The future wasn’t supposed to look so dark, with decaying roads and bridges, a pop culture led by grim superheroes and their snarling superfoes and a political culture in gridlock. The 1964 New York World’s Fair, the setting for an early scene in Tomorrowland, promised gleaming architecture and bullet trains; space travel would be common and jetpacks as ordinary as bicycles; and advances in technology would solve every problem rather than make new ones.
The promised future never came, and that makes reclusive inventor-genius Frank (George Clooney) mad as hell. He was at the fair as a kid and knows more than he’s letting on. An interesting theme on the cost of cultural pessimism runs through the creaky plot of Tomorrowland, along with vibrant nostalgia for the era of atoms for peace, the New Frontier and the space race. Director Brad Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof are a promising pair for this project. Bird directed The Iron Giant, a remarkable low-tech animated film from the late 20th century, and Lindelof was responsible for “Lost.” But in Tomorrowland, both are trapped inside the mechanics of a 21st-century Hollywood blockbuster for kids, complete with pyrotechnics and computer-generated displays of kinetic catastrophes. The coolest special effects come in subtle tones, like when a snarling guard dog is identified as a hologram because he leaves no paw prints in the mud.
Tomorrowland is also a Disney movie, linked thematically to Disney theme parks and philosophically to old Uncle Walt himself. In his future, there would have been no Dark Knight franchise or haggling over renewable energy. Pop culture would be relentlessly optimistic and great satellites would encircle the Earth, beaming down rays of the sun to light our homes and power those bullet trains.
The movie’s plot is a time-bending, place-hopping tangle set against a backdrop of a dispirited America. Suffice it to say that years ago, the world’s great dreamers brought a parallel dimension into being, but the current dreamer-in-chief, a supercilious cynic called Nix (Hugh Laurie), is having nightmares. Frank was there, but has retreated into sullen seclusion. The girl-power element comes through the plucky protagonist, Casey (played with believable energy by Britt Robertson). She’s the daughter of a NASA engineer about to lose his job because NASA has been defunded. Bringing them together to save the world is a delightfully determined girl called Athena (Raffey Cassidy) who turns out to be… Well, let’s not spoil the fun.
Subtlety isn’t the selling point. Tomorrowland has messages lined up in big block letters obvious enough for kindergartners to grasp. The most interesting idea is that our society has been manipulated into turning post-apocalyptic visions (take that, Mad Max: Fury Road) into unhealthy consumerism—carcinogenic junk food for the mind. Tomorrowland maintains that imagination is better than knowledge, humans are more than an algorithm of 0s and 1s and apathetic acceptance of the world we’ve been handed will lead to ruin. Tomorrowland is a confounding mess, but an oddly inspiring one.
