Disneyland at the moviehouse
If we are to look at the future as the movies project it, it isn’t very cheerful or encouraging. For in screen make-believe, there are only two prospects: Dystopia and doomsday, either which way scary possibilities.
The first shows post-apocalyptic anarchy, a society run by tyrants and an oppressive government, the earth running out of resources, a vast wasteland, or that same earth disintegrating.
The other scenario shows the dominance and influence of science; this is where you see artificial intelligences, bionic human beings, buildings, laboratories and monuments floating in the sky, fantastical modes of transportation, conquests of gravity and outer space.
Disney’s Tomorrowland is a crossover from the studio’s theme park hit, where visitors and tourists are taken to another time. It breaks the chilling sci-fi scenario and takes us to the kind of fun and excitement the theme park brings, something like Yul Brynner’s Westworld, bigger but not necessarily more astounding. It simply approximates the cinematic experience of a Disneyland tomorrowland.
Plus, there are characters who take us on a journey meant to unlock a cosmic secret.
When the movie opens, Frank (George Clooney) is starting what appears to be like a broadcast interview that is continually interrupted, establishing his impatience. He is a disillusioned man, once a boy genius now beaten. The character is paired with a teen named Casey (Britt Robertson) with a contrasting, rosy outlook, hungry with scientific curiosity. They embark on a quest to reach a mysterious time and place (tomorrowland itself). Suffice it to say that that quest takes viewers on a magical mystery tour, a cinematic rollercoaster ride full of wonder and suspense.
As the best that Hollywood can offer, Tomorrowland tries to push its premise that imagination is more important than knowledge, a statement for debate among artists and artist types, and scholars and researchers.
For more than a decade now, the American movie industry has churned out highly-imaginative futuristic disaster movies, most of them variations from the theme of tomorrowland. This Tomorrowland continues the tradition of spectacle and state-of-the-art special effects.
It is a fast-paced tour, as though intended for audiences with a short attention span. If it were a slower movie, it would be a paean to a world of natural vistas and oldworld charm, a paradisiacal beach, a clean, quiet country setting, with nice old cottages — all of these an endangered reality. In quick shots and sequences, Tomorrowland shows catastrophic images such as the Eiffel Tower being halved, or Manhattan’s Central Park going under water.
The moviegoers are bombarded with sights so plentiful and fleet that in all likelihood, they will leave the theater forgetting many of them.
Even the Oscar-winning Clooney sometimes gets buried in the avalanche of eye-poppers, maybe deliberately for it is a Clooney tradition to give the floor to a co-star as he did to Sandra Bullock in the other year’s sci-fi adventure Gravity.
Robertson as Casey fares better than the lead star, partly because the young actor has an expressive face and can project emotions with intensity.
Amid the battery of carnival sights and thrills, it is that face that stays in the mind — more lasting and vivid than the bleak future depicted here. For all the visual delights a sleek thriller may bring, in the end, it is not the high concept and technical mumbo jumbo but the characters (moving within an interesting plot) that make a movie more memorable and truly satisfying.