future shock
Brad Bird’s Disneyfied adventure is heavy on exposition and objectivism
Most people, I expect, stop believing they can imagine their way to happiness sometime around their eighth birthday. Apparently that’s been our trouble all along. In the future of Tomorrowland the world is in a sorry state: forests are scorched, cities are drowning, civilization lay in ruin. Why? Because we all got a kick out of Mad Max, naturally, and felt compelled to bring the apocalypse on. But there remains hope for us yet. All we need to avert global catastrophe, Tomorrowland cheerfully explains, is a can-do attitude and a bit of imagination. And of course certain freedoms for the imaginative among us from the red tape of bureaucracy. I can think of another epic about visionary individuals dreaming up a utopia while accosted by the pesky government. It’s called Atlas Shrugged. I bet Ayn Rand would like Tomorrowland just fine.
Six years before Don Draper channelled the spirit of Esalen into “Buy the World a Coke,” Pepsi-Cola paired with Walt Disney to devise an even more infectious jingle, “It’s a Small World,” which they foisted on an unsuspecting public at the World’s Fair in 1964. Tomorrowland opens in this musical boat ride’s midst and soon reveals its ulterior design: a sort of trapdoor fashioned into its shallow channel plunges those selected into a secret underground chamber, where, as a young stowaway named Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) swiftly discovers, the future awaits. Yes, it seems that Disney’s well-known animatronic attraction was merely a cover for some kind of interdimensional portal — a great glass elevator meant to whisk a chosen few to their new objectivist paradise. The very moment our plucky hero Frank arrives he runs afoul of some robots and, because the future ought to be exciting, stumbles into a ludicrous jetpack chase. That’s a Disney-funded utopia for you.
Meanwhile, in present-day Middle America, an even pluckier young hero is being vetted for Tomorrowland recruitment. That would be Casey (Britt Robertson), who speaks mainly in epigrams and dresses like a mid-’80s Spielberg character. In an astonishingly original development, Casey is both a brilliant and troubled teen, wowing parents and teachers alike with her intellectual prowess at the same time that she runs into trouble with the law. We’re introduced to her as she’s mounting an inexplicable campaign to sabotage the disassembly of a NASA launch platform, by which she hopes to achieve ... something meaningful, I gather, though it wasn’t quite clear what. In any case, her efforts, though eventually thwarted by the local sheriff ’s department, prove formidable enough to win her the favour of Athena (Raffey Cassidy), Tomorrowland’s robotic headhunter. And so begins another precocious moppet’s voyage to the beyond.
Released from jail after the failure of her latest round of public vandalism, Casey finds among her belongings a small brooch with an unusual power: touching it seems to teleport her into some shimmering Oz-like idyl, very real to her but invisible to everyone else. And so she does as any sensible person would do and Googles what she’s found to learn more. Research brings Casey to a science-fiction novelty store in another town, where nefarious androids (what else?) shoot lasers until Athena shows up and rather extravagantly fights them off. Not that we have any idea who these robots are or have any reason to care about the machinations of a mysterious pin. At this point in the film enough questions have been posed, possibilities have been glimpsed, and futures have been teased that intrigue, once in ample supply, has begun to curdle into impatience. We need a bit of momentum.
It takes an awfully long time for Tomorrowland to arrange its players into the necessary positions and for the story proper to at last get underway — and in fact the movie’s more than halfway over by the time it finally does. Fleeing from the aftermath of their now-eviscerated animatronic foes, Casey exhorts her taciturn saviour to explain a few things. Athena obliges, but what she divulges is even more confusing: the future is in peril, she says, but why? By what threat? How does she know about it? What can be done to stop it? And so on — for another 45 minutes. It’s about this time that George Clooney appears, playing Frank Walker as a grown man. His purpose is mainly to explain things — many, many things. Scarcely has a film relied so much on tedious expository dialogue for clarification. It’s a story and its own annotation in one.
That story, as far as I can tell, is vaguely cautionary: a wealthy, idealistic industrialist gathered the most talented and creative people in the world and shuttled them, somehow, to an alternate dimension, where together they constructed a futuristic steampunk Arcadia unmolested by the whims of politicians. But then instead of inviting the populace to share in the newly minted paradise, its architect, David Nix (Hugh Laurie), shut the gates and … actually I’m not quite sure. For all the time it spends explaining things at length, gallingly, Tomor
rowland remains pretty opaque. The fundamentals aren’t clear. I spent virtually the length of the film’s running time straining to keep up with the labyrinthine details of the future world and its leader’s complicated plan — then walked out with only the vaguest idea of what had happened.
Though perhaps the fault was with me. More straightforward than the mechanics of Tomorrowland’s technology or the logistics of its interdimensional travel is the ideology it gleefully embodies. Tomorrowland aspires, I suppose, to galvanize its audience — to inspire them to effect positive change. And it proposes that the most important change to be effected is attitudinal. This, it probably goes without saying, is a stunningly naive philosophy. Strife and turmoil, the heroes feel, can be resolved if people put their minds to it — if imaginations can be harnessed, if resolve can be cultivated. It’s like telling somebody with depression that they could get over it if they’d only cheer up a little. Well, perhaps Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof will manage to drive a few people to the rally or to the soup kitchen. Or perhaps to the bookstore, where a whole back catalog of Rand books happily awaits.
Intrigue curdles into impatience. We need a bit of momentum
Tomorrowland opens wide May 22.