Tomorrowland

I wholeheartedly agree with the ideas expressed within Tomorrowland.  With so many movies and books (many of them targeted at teens) set in gloomy, dystopian future societies like The Hunger Games or Divergent, here is a movie that gives us an optimistic outlook at what the future could possibly be.  Hollywood has been so keen on hard-selling a bleak future to today's youth that it makes this movie's quaint and upbeat view of what it can be almost novel.

So, the ideas behind the movie are sound.  It's the narrative that kept me at a distance.  Outside of the brief glimpses of a bright future of invention made up of jetpacks and other wonders, Tomorrowland is an oddly shapeless film.  The movie promises technological wonders, and instead gives us a muddled plot revolved around two people with very different views on the future.  One of them, Casey (Britt Robertson from The Longest Ride), is a relentlessly upbeat teenage girl.  At school, she listens all day to her teachers talking about war, the polar ice caps melting, and how the future is all but doomed.  When she asks the simple question, "What can we do to fix it?", her teachers are stumped.  All the talk of hopelessness she hears does not deter her enthusiasm, however.  The other person at the center of the story is Frank Walker (George Clooney), who once shared Casey's enthusiasm for tomorrow, until something happened in his life, and he's now a reclusive shut in who does nothing but wait for the world to end.  And yes, he knows exactly when that's going to happen.  He even has a clock in his house that ticks down to our final moments.

How does Frank know this, and how did he lose his faith in tomorrow?  The film actually opens in a flashback in 1964, when a young and idealistic Frank (Thomas Robinson) attended the World's Fair with an invention of his own - a jetpack that would allow him to fly - Not for any specific purpose, mind you.  Just for the fun and wonder it would bring him to be able to fly.  His invention catches the eye of a mysterious young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy), who believed in his invention as well as his ability to dream, and helped lead him to another world known as Tomorrowland, a place where the brightest minds in the world would be free to invent and make their wildest fantasies come true.  But, somehow, the dream behind Tomorrowland became corrupted, and Frank was exiled from the utopia.  Now Frank is bitter and jaded by his own past failures, and it's up to Casey to reawaken the spirit that once was inside of him, and revive the dream of Tomorrowland, which can possibly save the very world itself from a worldwide natural disaster that is set to wipe out humanity.

It is Athena, the mysterious child from Frank's past (who is still a child in the present day, for reasons I will not reveal), who brings the two together.  She has been searching for someone who had the imagination and the spirit to revive the dream of Tomorrowland, and thinks Casey may be that someone.  She gives Casey a mysterious pin that, when she touches it, allows her to see a glimpse of the scientific wonder and hope that Tomorrowland could be if the dream it once was was restored.  Casey becomes driven by this vision of a hopeful tomorrow, and is told to track Frank down if she wants to see it come true.  However, mysterious men in black (who are actually mannequin-like robots) start chasing after and harassing Casey as she tries to uncover the truth.  Who are these evil robots?  They work for a character who played a minor role in Frank's flashback, and suddenly is now an evil tyrant who has turned Tomorrowland into a decrepit and dying society.  Why is the villain doing this?  I don't know if even the movie itself fully knows for sure, and that is part of the problem.

Tomorrowland is a movie that loves to go into great detail about its own plot, yet at the same time, leaves a lot of loose story threads hanging that never come together.  The movie hits you over the head with dry, lengthy speeches about the virtues of invention and imagination.  Hey, these are great ideas to build a movie around, but director and co-writer Brad Bird (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) just has the characters talk about these ideas, instead of actually implementing them into the screenplay.  The ad campaign for the film suggests a wonderful adventure in a far off futuristic society in another world or dimension.  However, these moments only take up less than 10 minutes of the film's two hour plus running time.  The majority of the movie is trying to get to this world, and when the characters finally get there, all we get is a long-winded villain, and a ludicrous climax involving oversized Rock 'em-Sock 'em Robots.

So yes, I agreed with the ideas and views expressed in this film.  I also enjoyed the performances - Clooney makes for a likable curmudgeon, and Robertson is a wonderful wide-eyed optimist.  I even liked the special effects and set designs.  I just could not get into the story the movie was telling, because it feels like the movie is biding time with numerous scenes where the characters just talk endlessly, while nothing of importance happens.  For all of its ideas and visual wonder, the whole thing ends up feeling kind of endless, because the movie takes forever to get to where it's going.  There's never enough momentum for us to feel engaged.  Oh, there are great individual moments, such as when the heroes launch an antique rocket ship out of the base of the Eiffel Tower, but it never becomes a completely satisfying movie because of the long stretches of dead space between the stuff that does work.

I suppose I could also praise Tomorrowland for being an ambitious movie in a summer filled with sequels, remakes and superheroes.  The three people credited to the film's story (Brad Bird, Damon Lindelof and Entertainment Weekly film critic, Jeff Jensen) obviously had a lot of ideas and a grand vision for this movie.  What they don't have is a way to put these ideas in a story that grabs us.  When it was over, I still wasn't certain how certain elements fit into the movie.  I felt like I had watched something with a lot of potential that just didn't know how to pull itself together.  I'm sure I will remember many of the sights of the futuristic society dreamed up by the filmmakers, such as swimming pools that supposedly float in mid air and on top of another pool of water, so that the swimmer can dive from one pool to the one below it.  But if someone were to quiz me on the plot a week after seeing this movie, I would probably fail it.

I kind of feel bad not recommending this movie, as it's one I really want to.  But I cannot, in any good conscience, do so.  It's simply too messy and too flawed at a narrative level.  I'm not sorry I saw Tomorrowland, but I won't be going out of my way to watch it again anytime soon, unless there's a way I can skip around to my favorite moments.

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