Tomorrowland: A World Beyond
With The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, director Brad Bird demonstrated a keen interest in retrofuturism, a creative trend in which futuristic technology is blended with dashes of old-fashioned ‘retro’ styles. As such, Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (his second live-action feature after Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) is right in his wheelhouse, in that it continues that aesthetic interest alongside actively exploring the concept of changing notions of the future.
Tomorrowland is a utopian metropolis located in a parallel dimension of sorts, where Earth’s so-called best and brightest have gone to actually change human existence for the better. As a boy in 1964, Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) gets a glimpse of this land of airborne automobiles, zipping jetpacks and gravity-defying structures via an invitation by mysterious young girl Athena (Raffey Cassidy). When asked who she is, she introduces herself as “the future”. And then, as a narrating adult Frank (George Clooney) posits, “everything went to hell.” Something happened in Tomorrowland to turn it from utopia to a more cinematically common dystopia.
The story then switches to the POV of a considerably more upbeat protagonist, Casey (Britt Robertson), a teenage science whizz whose path is soon to cross with the older Frank, who’s been exiled from Tomorrowland. In the aftermath of a botched plan to sabotage the dismantling of the NASA shuttle launch platform where her dad works, Casey encounters both the ageless Athena and a pin that briefly transports her to Tomorrowland upon a single touch. Casey has always dreamed of reaching the stars, and it suddenly seems like she’s destined for great things.
Speaking of great things, there’s a few of them peppered throughout Tomorrowland. Robertson’s an endearing screen presence (and her stubborn brainiac character a refreshing female role model), and there’s some impressive spectacle via the whole Americana sci-fi conceit – Bird probably loves fellow retrofuture Disney production The Rocketeer.
The problem is that once Tomorrowland finally goes “a world beyond,” shifting the narrative from Earth to the former utopia, Bird’s film turns from fairly engaging, Joe Dante-esque adventure movie into a clunky mess. It morphs into a samey film of lengthy villain monologues, deus ex machinas, less interesting visuals, and yet another race to blow up a big monument to save everyone.
In general, too often characters are caught up in exchanges in otherwise casual scenarios (like a dad and daughter chatting over breakfast) that are less actual conversations and more earnest hammerings of the film's big themes, where each line is followed by a pregnant pause to let the significance sink in. For a project that seems born of wanting to inspire, it’s a shame the articulation of its arguments is so flat. You need to keep up the fun while laying on the overly convoluted glum; fewer lectures, more adventures.