[7.4/10] You’d have to sleep through the movie to miss the intended message of Tomorrowland. Optimistic visions of the future are good. Dystopian and/or apocalyptic visions of the future are bad. Each is self-reinforcing, so feed the good wolf. Glory to the dreamers, those who refuse to give up, even when everyone else is content with complacency and destruction. The film is never shy about these points, broadcasting them as loudly and clearly as some futuristic giant antennae.
But even if that sentiment is more than a tad trite, clarity of theme isn’t the worst thing for a movie to have, especially when it’s much more lacking when it comes to clarity of plot. It’s a good thing to build anticipation and mystery in a film, but Tomorrowland spends the opening two-thirds of the movie offering, at best, cryptic hints as to what the titular utopia of progress is, why our protagonist is needed there, and most importantly, what exactly the globe-imperiling threat is and, with that, what the actual stakes here are.
Once the film gets to its third act, brings our heroes to the vaunted land of tomorrow, and puts its cards on the table, business picks up. The characters’ motivations become clearer; the story has more focus, and the emotional and thematic moments land with more force. Until then, the movie tries to coast on anticipation and chemistry, which muddles the characters in places and loses some of its force in this cinematic game of hide the ball.
And yet, hoping to get by on chemistry alone isn’t the worst bet here. It says something when George Clooney gives arguably the weakest performance of your main ensemble (and for the record, he’s not bad). Britt Robertson does strong work as our main protagonist, Casey Newton, the brilliant and inventive dreamer who’s more focused on trying to fix the world than lamenting its demise. She not only holds her own with Clooney, but sells the combination of wide-eyed wonder and hard-nose determination necessary to make an almost impossible character work.
But both are upstaged by a tween. Raffey Cassidy delivers a performance well beyond her years as Athena, the android child who acts as a recruiter for the collection of imaginative and advanced minds in Tomorrowland. Cassidy sells the aura of robotic detachment, while also conveying subtle layers of exasperation, determination, wistfulness, regret, wry sarcasm, and even love. The film asks a lot of her, especially as a child actor, but she more than meets the challenge.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the most enjoyable stretches of Tomorrowland come when the film puts the three of them together. There’s a fun dose of banter, different personalities clashing, and differing perspectives and levels of experience bouncing off one another that helps give life to both the show’s maximalist set pieces and its frantic interludes between them. In brief stretches, the film is kind of a buddy/road trip film, and that’s its most enjoyable mode.
Then, of course, there’s the inimitable Hugh Laurie, who plays the film’s villain. He not only brings the dry wit that fans of House M.D. are already familiar with, but he gets the speech. If you’ve seen other films from Brad Bird (who directed the film and co-wrote it with Damon Lindelof of HBO’s Watchmen mini-series), you know what I’m talking about. There comes a moment, before the climax really kicks into gear, where the bad guy announces the philosophical point of view that’s driving their action. In a Brad Bird film, they’re wrong and the ultimate conclusion is implicitly rejected by the movie, but there’s the germ of a legitimate critique, one meant to be biting to the audience at home.
Here, it’s the notion that humanity has ignored planetary warnings of its own impending destruction and instead turned the apocalypse into just another means of consumption, because it asks the littlest of it. In a world where climate change is still a threat we’re not doing nearly enough to combat and visions of global destruction and pre-apocalyptic apathy are manufactured and broadcast by the hundreds, the critique carries some sting. Laurie, as always, sells it like a champ, and the writing of his big monologue gives it thematic heft.
That’s good, because much of the film feels surprisingly weightless. Maybe it’s just that Tomorrowland doesn’t do more than hint at its stakes until late in its runtime, but it doesn’t help that the major set pieces feel more perfunctory than wondrous. Coming from the world of animation, Brad Bird and his team know how to construct a good sequence. And yet, whether it’s fighting killer robots or blasting to another dimension, aside from a few neat flourishes, it’s an unexpectedly ho-hum experience.
Perhaps this is where a big screen viewing would pick up some of the slack, but it ties into one of the movie’s bigger problems. An overreliance on CGI gives everything more of a sterile, rather than inviting quality. There’s something chloraseptic and anodyne about several of the design choices, which makes it harder to immerse yourself in the world of the film. The one attention-grabbing element is that it’s a surprisingly violent film for a story so steeped in positivity and optimism. It’s all bloodless, but people are painfully crushed, humanoid robots are stabbed and decapitated, and child-like androids are hit by trucks.
That’s the other uncomfortable oddity in this film. Again, Raffidy does a great job at selling Athena the recruiter-bot’s world-weariness that belies her youthful appearance. The problem is that much of Clooney’s character’s arc hinges on him having lost hope for the world at least partly because he lost hope from an interpersonal standpoint, having faced rejection from his father and, as a boy himself, harbored affections for Athena that he eventually learned she could not return. Part of his laudable growth and arc here is learning that she did love him in her way, and even grow because of him, which likewise helps restore his belief that the improbable can be made possible and the world can be saved.
The big issue there is that it requires fifty-four-year-old George Clooney to cradle Athena and look deeply and lovingly into the eyes of a young woman who, however old her character may be, isn’t far removed from elementary school in real life. The movie thankfully plays it chaste and, once again, Raffidy sells the “I’m sorry I hurt you” vibe between them incredibly well, but it adds an icky dimension to the film’s emotional high point that is hard to ignore.
Still, Tomorrowland’s heart is in the right place, and once it stops just peddling its themes and instead starts grappling with them in the latter part of the movie, it lands with real force. The mechanics of why the world is doomed and how our heroes can save it are a little wonky and don’t necessarily work beyond a metaphorical level, but it’s good enough for an imaginative fantasy film. More to the point, while as a blockbuster, the film includes the obligatory final reel fireworks and blowing up of the big giant thing, it emphasizes in its closing moments that truly saving the planet will require more than one climactic act, but rather the ideas and, more importantly, the hard work of scores of creative and inventive people across the globe.
That message is not subtle, and at times Bird and company struggle to communicate in a way that doesn’t feel oversimplified or blunt, but it’s a strong animating idea. There’s something appealing about the notion of returning to the hopeful vision of the future of the space age, that we can solve the multitude of problems plaguing us today, rather than simply slump under the weight of them. I’ll admit to bristling a bit at the directness with which Tomorrowland conveys that message. But if it serves as the positive inspiration the movie itself posits as sorely needed, particularly for the generation of young people its aimed at who’ll be inheriting those problems, then so much the better. A brighter tomorrow is worth being more direct than artful.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-08-09T05:36:55Z
[7.4/10] You’d have to sleep through the movie to miss the intended message of Tomorrowland. Optimistic visions of the future are good. Dystopian and/or apocalyptic visions of the future are bad. Each is self-reinforcing, so feed the good wolf. Glory to the dreamers, those who refuse to give up, even when everyone else is content with complacency and destruction. The film is never shy about these points, broadcasting them as loudly and clearly as some futuristic giant antennae.
But even if that sentiment is more than a tad trite, clarity of theme isn’t the worst thing for a movie to have, especially when it’s much more lacking when it comes to clarity of plot. It’s a good thing to build anticipation and mystery in a film, but Tomorrowland spends the opening two-thirds of the movie offering, at best, cryptic hints as to what the titular utopia of progress is, why our protagonist is needed there, and most importantly, what exactly the globe-imperiling threat is and, with that, what the actual stakes here are.
Once the film gets to its third act, brings our heroes to the vaunted land of tomorrow, and puts its cards on the table, business picks up. The characters’ motivations become clearer; the story has more focus, and the emotional and thematic moments land with more force. Until then, the movie tries to coast on anticipation and chemistry, which muddles the characters in places and loses some of its force in this cinematic game of hide the ball.
And yet, hoping to get by on chemistry alone isn’t the worst bet here. It says something when George Clooney gives arguably the weakest performance of your main ensemble (and for the record, he’s not bad). Britt Robertson does strong work as our main protagonist, Casey Newton, the brilliant and inventive dreamer who’s more focused on trying to fix the world than lamenting its demise. She not only holds her own with Clooney, but sells the combination of wide-eyed wonder and hard-nose determination necessary to make an almost impossible character work.
But both are upstaged by a tween. Raffey Cassidy delivers a performance well beyond her years as Athena, the android child who acts as a recruiter for the collection of imaginative and advanced minds in Tomorrowland. Cassidy sells the aura of robotic detachment, while also conveying subtle layers of exasperation, determination, wistfulness, regret, wry sarcasm, and even love. The film asks a lot of her, especially as a child actor, but she more than meets the challenge.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the most enjoyable stretches of Tomorrowland come when the film puts the three of them together. There’s a fun dose of banter, different personalities clashing, and differing perspectives and levels of experience bouncing off one another that helps give life to both the show’s maximalist set pieces and its frantic interludes between them. In brief stretches, the film is kind of a buddy/road trip film, and that’s its most enjoyable mode.
Then, of course, there’s the inimitable Hugh Laurie, who plays the film’s villain. He not only brings the dry wit that fans of House M.D. are already familiar with, but he gets the speech. If you’ve seen other films from Brad Bird (who directed the film and co-wrote it with Damon Lindelof of HBO’s Watchmen mini-series), you know what I’m talking about. There comes a moment, before the climax really kicks into gear, where the bad guy announces the philosophical point of view that’s driving their action. In a Brad Bird film, they’re wrong and the ultimate conclusion is implicitly rejected by the movie, but there’s the germ of a legitimate critique, one meant to be biting to the audience at home.
Here, it’s the notion that humanity has ignored planetary warnings of its own impending destruction and instead turned the apocalypse into just another means of consumption, because it asks the littlest of it. In a world where climate change is still a threat we’re not doing nearly enough to combat and visions of global destruction and pre-apocalyptic apathy are manufactured and broadcast by the hundreds, the critique carries some sting. Laurie, as always, sells it like a champ, and the writing of his big monologue gives it thematic heft.
That’s good, because much of the film feels surprisingly weightless. Maybe it’s just that Tomorrowland doesn’t do more than hint at its stakes until late in its runtime, but it doesn’t help that the major set pieces feel more perfunctory than wondrous. Coming from the world of animation, Brad Bird and his team know how to construct a good sequence. And yet, whether it’s fighting killer robots or blasting to another dimension, aside from a few neat flourishes, it’s an unexpectedly ho-hum experience.
Perhaps this is where a big screen viewing would pick up some of the slack, but it ties into one of the movie’s bigger problems. An overreliance on CGI gives everything more of a sterile, rather than inviting quality. There’s something chloraseptic and anodyne about several of the design choices, which makes it harder to immerse yourself in the world of the film. The one attention-grabbing element is that it’s a surprisingly violent film for a story so steeped in positivity and optimism. It’s all bloodless, but people are painfully crushed, humanoid robots are stabbed and decapitated, and child-like androids are hit by trucks.
That’s the other uncomfortable oddity in this film. Again, Raffidy does a great job at selling Athena the recruiter-bot’s world-weariness that belies her youthful appearance. The problem is that much of Clooney’s character’s arc hinges on him having lost hope for the world at least partly because he lost hope from an interpersonal standpoint, having faced rejection from his father and, as a boy himself, harbored affections for Athena that he eventually learned she could not return. Part of his laudable growth and arc here is learning that she did love him in her way, and even grow because of him, which likewise helps restore his belief that the improbable can be made possible and the world can be saved.
The big issue there is that it requires fifty-four-year-old George Clooney to cradle Athena and look deeply and lovingly into the eyes of a young woman who, however old her character may be, isn’t far removed from elementary school in real life. The movie thankfully plays it chaste and, once again, Raffidy sells the “I’m sorry I hurt you” vibe between them incredibly well, but it adds an icky dimension to the film’s emotional high point that is hard to ignore.
Still, Tomorrowland’s heart is in the right place, and once it stops just peddling its themes and instead starts grappling with them in the latter part of the movie, it lands with real force. The mechanics of why the world is doomed and how our heroes can save it are a little wonky and don’t necessarily work beyond a metaphorical level, but it’s good enough for an imaginative fantasy film. More to the point, while as a blockbuster, the film includes the obligatory final reel fireworks and blowing up of the big giant thing, it emphasizes in its closing moments that truly saving the planet will require more than one climactic act, but rather the ideas and, more importantly, the hard work of scores of creative and inventive people across the globe.
That message is not subtle, and at times Bird and company struggle to communicate in a way that doesn’t feel oversimplified or blunt, but it’s a strong animating idea. There’s something appealing about the notion of returning to the hopeful vision of the future of the space age, that we can solve the multitude of problems plaguing us today, rather than simply slump under the weight of them. I’ll admit to bristling a bit at the directness with which Tomorrowland conveys that message. But if it serves as the positive inspiration the movie itself posits as sorely needed, particularly for the generation of young people its aimed at who’ll be inheriting those problems, then so much the better. A brighter tomorrow is worth being more direct than artful.