Hey remember that time Disney spent a load of money on a science fiction epic that was visually spectacular but also kinda inert, weirdly off-brand for them, with a load of tonal and pacing issues that ended up costing them a load of money?

Anyway, Tomorrowland is the second (and to date last) live action feature directed by animation legend Brad Bird and it keeps alive the proud Disney tradition of sci-fi movies that I respect and want to like but are just fundamentally too dang flawed on the writing level to get anything other than a qualified endorsement.

Alright, so the movie begins with Frank Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) narrating to an unseen audience about the future. Frank is all doom and gloom whereas Casey wants him to be more optimistic and upbeat. She asks Frank to talk about how the future was viewed when he was a child and he admits that, when he was growing up, the future was something bright and hopeful. This is the movie’s thesis statement; in the past we had bright optimistic science fiction but now the only stories we seem able to tell about the future are dark and dystopian.

It’s a nice, truthy little parable but unfortunately it’s hokum. People who grew up in the mid twentieth century remember the science fiction being brighter and more optimistic because the sci-fi they were consuming was aimed at…y’know, children. The adults of the time were watching this:

Hell, even Star Trek was a lot less utopian in the sixties than people think. Sixties Trek was less about a glorious harmonious future than racing to get medicine to some colony before they all die of space diptheria.

Anyway, we flash back to 1964 where Frank is nine years old and has run away from home to visit the New York World’s Fair and sell his prototype jet pack. He presents it to a man named Nix (Hugh Laurie) who is impressed but turns him down when Frank admits that there is a slight technical hiccup with the jet pack; it don’t bloody work. However, Nix’s daughter Athena (Raffey Cassidy) likes the cut of Frank’s jib and gives him a special pin with a “T” and tells him that all he needs to do to leave his old life behind is to go on the “It’s A Small World” ride.

Having survived this terrifying gauntlet, Frank is transported to a fantastic world full of robots, flying cars and where everyone travels in tubes!

So here’s the first big problem with this script. We spend fifteen whole minutes with Frank, following him on his journey to Tomorrowland and then the movie just drops him like Leonardo DiCaprio dropping a girlfriend who hits the big three oh. A quarter of a goddamn hour with this kid and then suddenly we have to get to know our actual protagonist, Casey, and the movie never recovers from this sudden, juddering loss of momentum. I will give credit where it’s due. The little we are allowed to see of Tomorrowland looks incredible. The CGI robot in particular is just flawless.

Okay, so with a grinding of gears the movie switches focus to Casey Newton, a teenage girl who lives near Cape Canaveral in Florida. Disillusioned with what she sees as a hopeless future, Casey does what many teenagers like her do and becomes a terrorist. I’m not even joking.

Casey’s Dad is an engineer at NASA, but NASA is shutting down apparently and her Dad is going to be out of a job soon. So Casey spends her nights breaking into Cape Canavaral and sabotaging the demolition machines. Her Dad suspects what she’s up to and tells her that nothing is going to stop the launchpad being taken down. She then tells him that there are two wolves battling inside everyone, one which is despair and the other hope, and that the one that wins is the one that you feed. This of course is a parable told by the ancient American tribe known as Facebook Users. Casey tries to sabotage the demolition again, but this time she gets arrested and her Dad has to bail her out. But, getting her bag back from the cops she finds a T pin and gets transported to Tomorrowland.

She can’t interact with anything, but she can walk around and see all the hope and solar-punk optimism and our girl is down. Transported back home when the battery runs out, Casey goes online and finds a geek shop in Houston that’s offering money for the T pins run by married couple Hugo (Keegan-Michael Key) and Ursula (Catherine Hahn). Casey asks Hugo where the pin came from and he asks her:

“Have you ever wondered what would happen, if all the geniuses, the artists, the scientists, the smartest, most creative people in the world decided to actually change it? Where, where could they even do such a thing? They’d need a place free from politics and bureaucracy, distractions, greed – a secret place where they could build whatever they were crazy enough to imagine…“

You know…I actually have wondered that?

Okay, let’s go there. Tomorrowland is probably Exhibit A in the “Brad Bird is an Objectivist” argument. Personally, I don’t think he is. Or if he is, he’s an Objectivist who’s rejected so much of what makes objectivism morally abhorrent that it barely still counts. His movies are full of exceptionable people (and rats) rising above mediocrity, sure. But they’re also about altruism and kindness and using your gifts to help others which is not exactly the Rand Brand. He’s definitely not helping himself here with Hugo’s little John Galt speech but, as we’ll see, Tomorrowland turns out to be a rusting dystopian wreck largely responsible for nearly ending the world so probably not the adaptation of Atlas Shrugged some were hoping for.

Anyway, the two shop-keepers start getting real pushy, demanding to know who gave Casey the pin and where “the girl” is. Casey tries to leave but they pull out some Men in Black level weaponry. Suddenly, Casey is rescued by Athena, who still looks all of fourteen who blows up the shop and bundles her into a stolen car and drives off. Athena explains that the shop-keepers were advanced animatronics and that she is as well. Freaked out by this, Casey slams on the breaks and makes a run for it. Athena chases after her and…gets hit by a truck.

So let’s talk about that tone issue. Tomorrowland is supposed to be a paean to bright, optimistic science fiction but it often goes uncomfortably dark. There’s quite a lot of onscreen death and injury and then you have a scene like this where a fourteen year old girl gets bodied by a four-by-four. I mean sure, logically you know that she’s a robot and she’s fine but it’s still brutal. The driver, understandably traumatised, gets out to see if Athena is still alive and Casey uses this opportunity to steal his car.

Athena springs back to life, chases after Casey and leaps into the car through the back window and continues to explain the plot to Casey and us. Athena was built to recruit scientists and inventors to come away to Tomorrowland to work on their inventions and be entitled to the sweat of their brow and so on. And…the form that was chosen for her for that task was that of a 14 year old girl.

You know what? Given everything I’ve heard about the tech industry this is horrifyingly plausible.

Athena tells Casey that she needs her help to fix Tomorrowland but that they’ll also need the help of someone else to get there: Frank Walker, the kid from the start of the movie who is now all grown up and played by George Clooney.

We get a weird scene where Casey falls asleep in the car and wakes up by the side of the road outside Frank’s house with Athena driving off into the distance. Like…why did Athena do that? How did she carry Casey out of the car without waking her? It feels like they needed to stitch two different drafts of the movie together and couldn’t figure out a way to do it elegantly. Anyway, she goes to the house and asks Frank for help and he’s all…

See, Frank was banished from Tomorrowland years ago and now sits in his basement watching a timer counting down to the end of the world and obsessing about the one that got away.

That one being Athena.

Yeaaah.

This is where the movie gets real uncomfortable. The creators decided that it would be a perfectly okay plot point to have Frank (now played by fifty something George Clooney) still be heartbroken about a relationship that ended when he was still eligible for the Mickey Mouse Club. So you have all these scenes of Frank and Athena where they’re rehashing their relationship like Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca but it’s grown ass George Clooney and 14 year old Raffey Cassidy and it feels…

Who thought this was a good idea?

Anyway, setting all that aside. Frank shows Casey his big clock of Doom, showing that the world is going to end with 100% certainty. But she says “nuh uh” and that causes the counter to go down to 99% which is enough to convince Frank that she might be The Special. More robots attack Frank’s house but he and Casey fight them off, rejoin Athena and the three set off to find Tomorrowland.

Getting to Tomorrowland involves teleporting to the top of the Eiffel Tower and using a rocket hidden at the top to blast into another dimension. Frank reveals that Tomorrowland was actually built by Gustave Eiffel, Jules Verne, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison who founded Tomorrowland together.

They finally arrive at Tomorrowland and the place now looks like you could get tetanus just by looking at it. They’re captured by Nix, who is now the governor of Tomorrowland and out villain. But honestly, the dude built a perfectly convincing robotic facsimile of a 14 year old girl, you should not be surprised that he’s sketchy.

Nix asks Frank why he came back given that he was exiled and Frank tells him that he believes that Casey can fix the world. Nix takes them to the core of Tomorrowland, a machine called The Monitor that runs on tachyons. Frank built the machine and used it to see the future.

Horrified by what she is shown, Casey is told by Nix that the end of the world is coming in 53 days and that it is inevitable. Casey angrily refuses to accept that and this causes a brief flicker of a better world to appear. Frank knows that Nix saw it but the governor knocks all three of them unconscious and has them locked up in a cell.

Casey is furious at Athena, telling her that she should never have given her the pin because the vision of Tomorrowland she showed her is a lie. Suddenly, she gets an idea. She asks Frank how he was able to build his own apocalypse predictor back on Earth and he admits that he just pirated Tomorrowland’s signal. The pair realise that The Monitor is not simply predicting the future, but blanketing Earth with doom and gloom thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

They confront Nix, who says that they intentionally broadcast the signal to Earth hoping to spur them into action, like a short sharp paddle to the buttocks. Instead, it turns out humans are really into that and just started wallowing in nihilism and dystopian fiction. So Nix was all “ew, weird” and decided that humanity was not worth saving (we all have days like that), and elected to just let the apocalypse happen and see whether the next species that arises does any better.

Our heroes try to destroy the Monitor and Nix takes a shot at Frank. Athena jumps in front of the shot and gets hit. Frank tries to repair her but it’s too late and Athena tells him that she’s activated her self-destruct and he has to use her body to take out the Monitor. And Frank bids her a tearful farewell as he cradles the body of the only girl he’s ever loved, and I do mean the word “girl” quite literally.

The scene is intercut with flashbacks to them together when they were both children. My skin was literally crawling off my skeleton.

The Monitor is destroyed and we cycle back tot he opening scene and learn who Casey and Frank are addressing; a new generation of androids whose job it is to recruit the greatest minds in the world to come to Tomorrowland. And yes, they are all perfectly lifelike android children, how did you know?

***

Weird ass film. Weird ass goddamn film.

Not terrible. And I’ll be the first to applaud a big-budget film that actually has the balls to be an original concept and not just a rehashed older IP. But there are problems. Even overlooking…all that…this is a bloated mess of a screenplay that really needed to be trimmed, re-ordered and strapped to a bed until it agreed to settle on a consistent tone.

SCORE: 49%

NEXT UPDATE: 20 February 2025

NEXT TIME: Theatre kids, to me!