Film Review: Tomorrowland (2015)

People always have a tendency to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles, but that is generally not the case with the future. One period in which the future was seen as far rosier than in eras before and after were the 1960s, when the years of post-war economic growth and previously unimaginable leaps in general prosperity and living standards created a perception that things simply had to keep getting better. One of the best-known figures who embraced such an outlook was Walt Disney, who a decade earlier had channelled his fascination with technology into Tomorrowland, one of Disneyland’s most popular attractions, and in 1964 channelled his talent for depicting a brave new world of tomorrow into exhibits at the New York World’s Fair. Walt Disney died, the future in the following decades did not look rosy, but Tomorrowland endured and was successful enough that in the early 2010s Damon Lindelof persuaded Disney executives to make a feature film based on the attraction. A similar concept in the previous decade had led to the extremely successful Pirates of the Caribbean film series. History, in the case of Tomorrowland, did not repeat itself, and 2015 film Tomorrowland: A World Beyond fared poorly with both audiences and critics.

The film’s plot begins with a prologue set in 1964, when a young inventor boy named Frank (Thomas Robinson) visits the World’s Fair and during that occasion experiences a brief but unforgettable trip to Tomorrowland, which turns out not to be part of the exhibition but an alternate dimension in which all futuristic concepts have become reality. Fifty years later, an idealistic teenager, Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), ends up in prison after sabotaging NASA to prevent it from dismantling rocket launch pads for space exploration. A mysterious artefact briefly transports her to Tomorrowland, after which a quest begins in which she is aided by a mysterious girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) and during which she meets the now-adult, cynical and demoralised Frank (George Clooney), who is convinced that our world is on the brink of ruin. Tomorrowland, an alternate dimension created so that gifted inventors could develop technology in peace, has come under the rule of Governor Nix (Hugh Laurie), who turns out to be responsible for the cataclysm that Casey decides to prevent at all costs.

Disney invested nearly 200 million US$ into the project, which cynics would call nothing more than an advertisement for its own theme parks, but also some undoubted talents, among whom director Brad Bird stands out, known as the creator of some of the most successful and acclaimed animated films of recent times. Bird, however, did not fare best when it came to live-action film, though the greatest responsibility for that lies with Lindelof’s complex and often contradictory script. Its biggest problem is that the concept of a secret society of idealistic geniuses trying to save the world from a parallel dimension is compromised by the fact that Tomorrowland has been taken over by a villain whose ultimate motives and reasons for turning to the “dark side” are not well explained. Even if one disregards the theodicean shortcomings of Lindelof’s world, it’s hard to shake the impression that the villain was inserted simply so that some sort of action plot—or rather, an excuse to pit the protagonists against dangerous androids armed with laser weapons—could be grafted onto the utopian idealistic vision of a bright future. A detail that will irritate many viewers far more are the not exactly “purest” feelings that Frank’s character harbours for a robot that looks like a little girl, something neither Lindelof nor Bird knew how to portray in the most adequate or appropriate way. All of this, of course, culminates in a disappointing and anticlimactic finale, after which comes a scene in which Tomorrowland continues to gather young talents from around the world, depicted in a manner that Soviet propagandists of the era of socialist realism would not have been ashamed of.

That does not mean the film is without good elements, and that pertains above all to the very good acting, which applies both to Clooney burdened with one of the most thankless roles of his career, as well as to young Raffey Cassidy as the girl-robot and the charming Britt Robertson, for whom the failure of Tomorrowland largely steered her career toward the far more rewarding small screen, better suited to actresses of her calibre.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)

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