FUTURE LOOKS BLEAK FOR TOMORROWLAND.
TOMORROWLAND ★ out of 5 Starring: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie Directed by: Brad Bird Running time: 130 minutes
Most people 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 lies in ruins.
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.
Tomorrowland opens and soon reveals its ulterior design: A trap door plunges those selected into a secret underground chamber, where, as a young stowaway named Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) discovers, the future awaits. Yes, it seems 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.
Meanwhile, in presentday 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. She proves formidable enough to win herself 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 idyll, very real to her but invisible to everyone else. 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.
But it takes an awfully long time for Tomorrowland to arrange its players and for the story proper to 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 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? 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. Rarely has a film relied so much on tedious dialogue for clarification.
That story is vaguely cautionary: A wealthy, idealistic industrialist gathered the most talented and creative people in the world and shuttled them to an alternate dimension, where together they constructed a futuristic steampunk Arcadia unmolested by the whims of politicians. But instead of inviting the populace to share in the newly minted paradise, its architect, David Nix (Hugh Laurie), shut the gates.
Tomorrowland aspires to galvanize its audience — to inspire them to effect positive change. But it’s like telling somebody with depression that they could get over it if they’d only cheer up a little.