Sci-fi epic loses the plot
Entertaining but ‘Tomorrowland’ ties the brain in knots
(6) TOMORROWLAND: A World Beyond. Directed by: Brad Bird. Starring: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie. Reviewed by: Tim Robey
TOMORROWLAND: A World Beyond looks like a hoot, and often is. But what’s it all about? The poster and trailers promise superstar George Clooney, a dreamy, Disneyland sci-fi utopia, jetpack rides, and a lot of chases.
This all gets served up – but to assume the premise could fit in a nutshell is to reckon without the exorbitant tastes of its screenwriter, Lost creator Damon Lindelof.
Lindelof’s never content to keep things simple, when he can choose the alternative path of baffling you completely.
It’s a clue that the film must start with Clooney explaining what’s going on, as his grumpy inventor, Frank Walker, addresses the camera.
We’re counting down to doomsday on a digital display, and Walker is saying: “Listen up, because before too long, this is all going to get awfully confusing.” Soon the movie is whizzing off into the past and future with the wideeyed elan of a theme-park ride.
We flash back to the 1964 World’s Fair, where young Frank, played with a floppy fringe and ingenuous smile by Thomas Robinson, shows up to demonstrate the jetpack he’s made from spare bits of junk.
It doesn’t quite work – it sends him skittering across the ground, rather than airborne.
But a young girl called Athena (Raffey Cassidy) thinks he’s onto something, affixes a mysterious pin to his shirt, and this becomes his all-access pass to an actual world of tomorrow. It is an Ayn Randian paradise of glass spires, gravity-defying walkways, and mammoth, friendly robots who will fix your jetpack without you even asking.
Brad Bird ( The Incredibles, Mission Impossible 4) is a dab hand at this kind of technology-loving space age nostalgia. He’s the right director for Tomor rowland, and does just about all he can; you just wish it had the right script (Bird is co-credited).
But the film zips along, postponing its plot problems with a bevy of clever setpieces, and for a good while it keeps you fully entertained.
We’re properly introduced to a third major character: this is Casey, the young science whiz Britt Robertson plays in the present day, who finds one of those mysterious pins in her possession.
Even touching it transports her to Tomor rowland, regardless of where she’s standing or what obstacles are in her way.
The pin has a limited lifespan – one of Lindelof’s tackier script gimmicks – and in trying to find another one, she runs into jeopardy.
Along the way, there’s great fun to be had at a retro toy store called Blast from the Past, whose staff, played with gusto by Kathryn Hahn and a dreadlocked Keegan-Michael Key, are not what they seem.
Android cops, their leader packing a perfect set of pearly whites, turn up and give chase.
Clooney’s Frank, holed up at a farmhouse grumbling about the apocalypse, has booby-trapped it against these intruders: there’s a super, sequence lasting 10 minutes in which Casey finds him, and the pair duck and dive while making robot mincemeat. This part is up there with the giddy highlights of Terminator 2.
But it’s almost the last hurrah before the film has to get all plotty, and the plottier Tomor rowland gets, the more it ties your brain in knots.
Robertson and Cassidy, virtual newcomers, are the best value in the cast, but there’s a super performance by Pierce Gagnon as Casey’s confused younger brother.
Clooney, who’s off-screen for most of the first hour, is rather awkwardly cast as a grouchy, fulminating loner with an axe to grind.
As the villain, a utopian eminence grise called David Nix, Hugh Laurie brings welcome touches of pure Laurie-ness, and has a crowd-pleasing last line I won’t spoil.
But Lindelof lumps him with huge pages of script late in the day, when the film’s finally decided it’s time to knuckle down and explain itself.
One wonders why the fun had to stop, and why Lindelof is so set on making his plots this complicated. – The Telegraph