Before acquiring a whole bunch of viable sci-fi projects from their purchase of Twentieth Century Fox, Disney has always had something of a lousy string of luck when it came to trying to score a big, original, science fiction home run. In fact, the House of Mouse has always seemed to be unable to catch a break when it comes to serving up a movie based in that particular genre – be it their 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea-in-space epic, The Black Hole; cult flop, Tron; or the gargantuan financial disaster that was John Carter, sci-fi has always seemed to be an achillies heel that the studio can’t seem to shake. However, back in 2015, I was hoping that Tomorrowland was going to be different.
The main reason was that director Brad Bird was on something of a hot streak. After moving on from crafting animated classics such as The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille and shifting to live action with one of the best Mission: Impossible movies ever made, he seemed set to deliver a movie that would blend the heart of one with the thrills of the other. The future, it seemed, had other ideas.
Optimistic teen Casey Newton is smart. Like, really smart – but not in a way that has her acting all aloof and superior. No, rather than being someone with her head buried in books, she’s someone who would rather be looking to the stars and her intuitive ability to just know “how things work” means that she has the tools to help things be better. However, after getting arrested for repeated sabotaging the planned demolition of a NASA launch site in Floria, she finds herself in jail awaiting bail. After collecting her things on the way out, she notices a random pin amongst her stuff that isn’t hers, but when she touches it, she’s somehow transported to another world full of technological advancements and boundless optimism that seems like a futuristic nirvana.
Discovering that no one else has the same experience when they touch it, Casey becomes obsessed and tries to learn more about the pin, however, in doing so she soon stumbles on some sort of conspiracy that sees robots masquerading as humans who are hunting anyone holding that particular type of pin. After nearly getting killed by a couple of these “Audio-Animatronics”, a stunned Casey is saved by Athena, a good robot who is recruiting for “Tomorrowland”, the place the teen sees when she touches the pin that her inhuman benefactor planted for her to find.
From here, she is introduced to Frank Walker; a cynical, middle-aged grouch who was accepted into Tomorrowland when he was a boy, but was subsequently exiled for reasons unknown. Between them, they are tasked with the most awesome task you could ever face an inventor with, no matter how optimistic they are – fix a world that’s growing increasingly nihilistic before disaster strikes. But with robots chasing them at every turn, how are Casey, Frank and Athena supposed to make it back to Tomorrowland to save the future?
So, to be blunt, I actually quite like large chunks of Tomorrowland – but by God is it a complete and total mess. By turns overwhelmingly optimistic and stunningly dark, this movie that’s loosely based on the Disney ride of the same name doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with itself or its large selection of its ideas. As a result, Tomorrowland seems to be rocketing along without having a clue where it’s actually trying to go, or what it wants to say, but if box office were actually measured by good vibes, maybe the movie would have done better. So, yes, it’s a movie that’s trying to be a call to arms that maybe we should be pulling our heads out of our collective, downbeat asses and get to work making things better by injecting hope into our lives; but in its defence, not only is Tomorrowland right, but it also isn’t preachy in that condescending way that a lot of heavy-handed family films with a conscience seem to employ. In fact, for a movie that’s trying to suggest peace and hope, there’s a whole lot of surprisingly violent robot killing and shooting of cool, glowy ray guns that gleefully overdoses on some retrofuturistic cool.
Director Brad Bird seems to be trying to take the same tone he created with his animated stuff and marry it to the kind of big budget, tech-obsessed extravaganza he got to play with while making the ludicrously fun Ghost Protocol and at times it works really well, but during other, the wealth of ideas seem to have trouble gelling and sequences like Athena fighting robots in a memorabilia store, or Frank and Casey Home Alone-ing yet more marauding androids in his booby trapped home seem to be set in a completely different movie to the one that sees a young Frank jetpacking through a retrofuturistic landscape or the revelation that the Eiffel Tower contains a Men In Black-style, dimension-hopping rocket in its base. Simply put, while full of stunning imagery and legitimately fun scenes, Tomorrowland is all over the place and often feels disjointed and chaotic in ways that end up distracting you from the whole.
Still, while the plot bucks like an overladen buckaroo, thankfully the film has both George Clooney and Britt Robertson to steady it through it’s quieter moments which proves to be quite necessary. While Clooney gives good curmudgeony git as a man who got kicked out of a technological paradise and subsequently has discovered that mankind is on an express elevator to it’s own destruction, however it’s Robertson’s legitimately plucky turn that bolts everything together long enough to rattle to the end credits before exploding everywhere. While many such roles, if miscast, usually end up creating the most precocious, irritating characters in all of existence, Robertson’s keen comic timing and natural likability makes her actually a great character to follow through such a colourful conspiracy. In addition to this, there’s a weird selection of extended cameos scattered around such as Kathryn Hahn and a dreadlocked Keegan-Michael Key as shop owning, undercover robots, or Hugh Laurie as Tomorrowland’s embittered ruler that tend to be as distracting as the tonal shifts, but I have to say I was a fan of the bizarrely rough and curiously cruel slaptick the movie employs to negate anything even remotely approaching twee. Be it a teleportation device that comes with a side effect of erasing 90% of your blood sugar, to the sight of Robertson repeatedly bludgeoning the skull of a robot to mulch with a baseball bat like she’s auditioning to murder Joe Pesci in Casino, the robust physical humour also helps steady a tilt ship, but it can only do so much. At the final hurdle, it weirdly torpedoes it’s own message by switching from it’s original suggestion that a downtrodden mankind desperately needs inspiration to save it, to the far less inspiring reveal that a bad space ray is making us shitty, but by then, no amount of robot fights and pratfalls can help.
It’s not that Tomorrowland is a bad film persay, just a very inconsistent one. It has good performances, good jokes, a legit (if muddled) message and some great visual effects, but the damn thing is just so inconsistent with what it wants to be, it ultimately ends up being nothing more than a very expensive curio which means Disney took yet another sci-fi kicking before the Star Wars, Avatar, Alien and Predator franchise suddenly fell in into its lap.
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