Movie of the Week: Tomorrowland - A World Beyond

Spolers ahead.

Tomorrowland is a curate's egg of a movie, i.e. good in parts, but if you think about it too much the theme, which seems to be 'hope overcomes all the bad stuff' is actually not played out to its logical conclusioin. Should I be looking for logical conclusions in all of this? Well, i'd like to.

Start off with the old Cherokee tale of two wolves fighting it out inside your head. One is dark, the other is light. Which one wins? The answer is: the one you feed.

OK, so it's a Disney movie aimed at kids, which means that on the surface it's fairly simplistic. There's a place in another dimension called Tomorrowland - created by Tesla and the best minds of his age -  where some of the brightest and best have been recruited to create a perfect world.

There's a framing device which is the older Frank (George Clooney) and teenage Casey (Britt Robertson) speaking straight to camera addressing us (or so it seems) and telling a story which begins with Frank as a child - a whizz kid, ever hopeful child inventor, being recruited to Tomorrowland at the 1966 World's Fair in New York by a pretty child called Athena. Skip forward to the present day and Casey is indulging in a bit of honest terrorism, trying to prevent NASA from demolishing its own launch pad (and presumably ending any pretensions to accessing space). Her dad is one of the NASA engineers employed on the demolition project. Inevitably she gets caught, spends a night in jail and is bailed out in the morning. Amongst her belongings is a strange button which, when touched, gives her a wonderful vision of the utopian Tomorrowland. Full of hope she goes in search, but it turns out that it's not going to be so simple. The utopia has failed and together with Athena (who has not aged), Casey (chased by robots) goes in search of Frank, now old and embittered. Athena thinks that Casey can prevent the end of our world and change the world of Tomorrowland if only they can get back into it.

OK, with me so far? It's impossible to explain this without spoilers, so I'm going to stop right there. Actually watching this with a hefty chunk of WSOD is the only way that it can work because when you think about the themes too deeply the ending is somewhat unsatisfying. Yes they do what they set out to do and that's OK for Tomorrowland, but kiunda sucks for Earth-as-we-know-it because, although the world does not end as predicted, nothing changes except that the brightest and best are sucked away into the utopia where they can fulfil their potential.

The good includes Clooney's performance and that of all the major characters - all the rest of them youngsters except for Hugh Laurie as Nix. The imagery of Tomorrowland itself is fantastic (literally) and i could have done with a bit more of that. The bad--well--it's a really slow start. Despite being called Tomorrowland much of the plot takes place on Earth-as-we-know-it and there are times when you wish it would chage gear and take us somewhere else. There's some snappy dialogue between old Frank and Casey, but the script is otherwise pretty forgettable.

Passing note for SF fans, one of the villains of the piece is a comic book store owner in the present day called Hugo whose surname, mentioned only once, is Gernsback. Homage? In-joke?

This didn't do well at the box office and I can't say I'm surprised. It's a mish-mash and for all its promise, it doesn't really deliver.