Tomorrowland
Disney Tomorrowland: A World Beyond

Disney’s Tomorrowland is a sci-fi mystery adventure with some terrific ideas, evocative designs, and compelling themes.  But boy, is it a slog to sit through. Directed by Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) and written by Bird and Damon Lindelof (Prometheus, World War Z, TV’s Lost), the film attempts to recapture an optimistic vision of the future, in contrast to the dystopian and post-apocalyptic tales that currently dominate mainstream movies, television, and young-adult fiction.   Tomorrowland is, of course, one of the “lands” in Disney’s Magic Kingdom theme park, and this picture follows the company’s tendency to turn all of its properties into big-budget live action features.  Theme park rides like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion, classic animated films like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and the studio’s backstage history in movies like Saving Mr. Banks have gotten this treatment with varying degrees of success.  But while Tomorrowland uses some of the distinctive iconography of the area of Disneyland that houses “Space Mountain” and the “Astro Orbiter,” it’s more concerned with the culture and literary fiction that inspired Walt Disney’s ideas for the future. At least that’s its jumping off point.

The film stars George Clooney as Frank Walker, the kind of man Walt Disney called an “imagineer,” and Britt Robertson as Casey Newton, a young science enthusiast who dreams of being a NASA pilot. After an insufferably tedious introduction in which Walker and Newton argue about how best to set-up their story [the answer to this question is NOT to address the camera and ramble on for several minutes of insipid, uninformative dialogue] we’re treated to two introductions that somehow manage to feel both rushed and much too long.  First, we see young Frank as he arrives at the 1964 New York World's Fair—the technology and culture EXPO dedicated to "Man's Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe" in which Walt Disney unveiled his iconic attractions, “It’s a Small World,” “The Carousel of Progress,” and “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.”

Beginning at the legendary World’s Fair right off the bat, without the tiresome framing device, would be a wonderfully engaging opening if Tomorrowland were aimed at nostalgic old geezers or middle-aged guys like me who would have loved to come of age in this era.  Bird wants to capture these viewers too, but he’s much more focused on the impressionable kids who will hopefully grow up to save the planet after seeing his movie.  So we get the comforting (numbing) narration from Clooney, and the young version of Frank isn’t a mechanically inclined teenager that tinkers with cars in his parent’s garage, but rather an adorable tween who builds an almost functional jetpack out of old vacuum cleaner parts in his parents' garage.  Little Frank brings his invention to the fair in the hope of winning a contest overseen by a man named Nix (Hugh Laurie). Nix is dismissive of the tyke, but a little girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy), who appears to be Nix’s daughter, sees that Frank is special and gives him a magical pin that transports him to the futuristic city of Tomorrowland.

This movie’s “real world,” in which a twelve-year-old has access to jet fuel, devises a way to convert a vacuum cleaner engine into a rocket, and sustains no injuries when he tests his explosive invention alone in a field, is already so ungrounded in cartoon reality that when we’re transported along with Frank to Tomorrowland, the only way to heighten the fantasy is with an assault on the senses. But the barrage of eye-popping imagery and enticing futuristic concepts that Bird and the FX folks at Industrial Light and Magic hurl at us, ends up feeling pretty unimpressive. There just isn’t anything left that a movie can simply show viewers that will amaze us. Filmmakers need to give audiences more than visual razzle-dazzle to get us invested in the worlds they create.

The picture then jumps forward in time, but backwards in terms of narrative, as we learn about Casey, a young adult growing up in contemporary Texas. Casey gets a similar but more mysterious introduction/invitation to Tomorrowland.  Athena, still a little girl, visits her too, and after they meet up with the now fifty-something Frank, Casey learns that she’s the last hope for the future of the human race.

It is a fun change of pace to have two young girls and a cranky-pants George Clooney as the heroes of a blockbuster movie.  Clooney’s curmudgeonly Frank recalls Eddie Albert in Escape to Witch Mountain (1975) or Fred MacMurray in The Shaggy Dog (1959). Athena and Casey are reminiscent of the two principal types of classic “Disney kids”—with British eleven-year-old Raffey Cassidy in the Hayley Mills-Karen Dotrice-Janet Munro mold, and American twenty-four year old Britt Robertson from the Lindsay Lohan-Britney Spears-Hilary Duff school. Unfortunately, Cassidy is the only actor in the entire picture that doesn’t wear out her welcome. Clooney phones in most of his performance, and Hugh Laurie does nothing to make the ostensible villain interesting.  Even the cameo by Kathryn Hahn and Keegan-Michael Key gets real tedious real quick.

Casey and Frank’s banter is the standard bickering we expect in a movie like this, but it’s not really warranted here because Casey is not a typical disgruntled teen who unknowingly longs for a surrogate father. Indeed she reveres her NASA engineer dad (Tim McGraw) and loves her little brother (Pierce Gagnon), who inexplicably looks like the young Frank. [And in the grand Disney tradition there are curiously no mothers in this film]. Casey is a mature young adult with no character flaws—it’s the world she lives in that’s broken. Frank does have emotional scars but, after his initial reluctance to join forces with Casey, he has no reason not to get along with her. Nevertheless, they squabble like unwilling partners throughout the interminable second act.  Their strained attempt at humor serves no function other then to make the end-of-the-world narrative stakes seem less important.

The picture does, amazingly, improve in its final act, when the heroes reach the no-longer-shiny-and-wonderful Tomorrowland. This late upswing is mostly thanks to Cassidy, who handles with ease the extremely difficult task of eliciting our empathy for a piece of artificial intelligence. I’d give Tomorrowland a higher rating if it put across its themes the way it earns the sentimentality of its emotional climax.  The film has a compelling message about the need for optimistic fiction to inspire young people to dream big and solve the world’s problems. Unfortunately this sermon is laid out with an unforgivably heavy hand. Each character engages in overt “monologuing” (to borrow a derogatory term coined in Bird’s own The Incredibles) and all the simplistic dialogue is insultingly shallow. I get that Tomorrowland is aimed at kids, but kids can still be intelligent and discriminating. The picture is too intense, violent, and disturbing for anyone young enough to be seriously moved by its facile moralizing.

Tomorrowland’s overt critique of contemporary YA fiction is interesting but it doesn’t acknowledge that the inspirational novels, movies, and designs it celebrates have their own set of ideological issues. The jury’s still out, but I won’t be surprised if the kids growing up on The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Giver end up doing a better job with the world’s problems than the boomers who came of age with the false promises of Disney and his ilk.  Not that I’m a Disney-hater—quite the contrary. But the film should not conveniently ignore the fact that Walt’s own dream of an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (which was creepily Orwellian and Stepfordian to begin with) ended up as little more than a monument to consumerism and corporate greed—with rides and attractions that sing the praises of companies like Exxon and Nestlé.