Movie Review: Tomorrowland

With Tomorrowland, Disney has their Kim Kardashian moment.

The iconic production house has largely spent the 21st century throwing a cinematic party to itself, starting with 2003’s based-on-a-ride Pirates of the Caribbean and its subsequent dozen-or-so sequels.

The navel-gazing escalated in 2010 with Alice in Wonderland, continuing through to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Oz, the Great and Powerful, Maleficent and Cinderella. In each, Disney has plundered their past for the sake of current audiences, rebooting classics either by sequelising them, modernising them, or (in the case of Alice) ruining them.

Not even the supposedly “adult” productions are safe. 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks mythologised the creation of Mary Poppins whilst simultaneously offering their patron, Walt Disney, the ultimate tribute: having Tom Hanks play him.

2015’s great white hope, Tomorrowland, drops the pretense of subtlety by just plain being about a stop at Disneyland Park. We are deep in the hall of mirrors now, people.

Efforts in narcissism shouldn’t be immediately written off though. The works of Charlie Kaufman are uniformly brilliant, despite them mostly being about his struggle to make the very thing we’re watching. Community pretty much only works when it’s about itself. Even Kim Kardashian’s book of selfies, Selfish, has been collecting critical raves.

Disney, too, has previously pulled off the impossible by making fun, involving flicks out of what could seem like cash-grabs (the first Pirates of the Caribbean) or hagiographies (Saving Mr. Banks). Their recent retelling of Stephen Sondheim’s deliciously twisted musical Into the Woods was, counter-intuitively, nearly note-perfect.

Tomorrowland, sadly, is not.

It’s a rare misstep for director Brad Bird, who cut his teeth at The Simpsons and graduated to feature filmmaking with animated classics The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille before proving his live-action chops on Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

Yet, not even that CV could have prepared him for the task of wrapping his head around a Damon Lindelof screenplay. Mission: No, For Real, Like Actually Impossible.

I’ve long been a defender of the mystery-loving Lost show-runner and Prometheus screenwriter, but every fan has his limits. Watching a visual stylist and emotive storyteller like Bird get tangled up in Lindelof’s narrative gymnastics is more depressing than watching Lindelof’s show The Leftovers. And that show opens with a child disappearing into thin air.

In the film, Britt Robertson stars as genius teenage inventor Casey. She’s the kind of all-American girl who spends her evenings sabotaging the planned destruction of the NASA launching pad where her engineer dad used to work. (Dad is played by Tim McGraw, because nothing says 'merica like country music and cornfields. Oh, and much of Tomorrowland takes place in a cornfield.)

Her smarts and her moxie get her noticed by the mysterious, ageless Athena (Raffey Cassidy) and handed a pin that, when pressed, delivers a brief glimpse to the hidden world of Tomorrowland; a place where the most brilliant minds of a generation once united to think up a brave new future for Earth.

Casey goes looking for an expat of Tomorrowland who might be willing to take her there, only finding the grizzled Frank Walker (George Clooney). It turns out he was exiled after crafting a device that looked ahead in time and found only nothingness. Seems the world is ending, which makes the profession of future-planning at Tomorrowland, well, not exactly a growth industry.

But maybe, just maybe, an optimistic, precocious squirt like Casey could change the course of human history… simply with her good vibes. (Lindelof dresses up that moral with some baffling pseudo-science. You wouldn’t expect any less.)

Tomorrowland looks expensive, except the action sequences are empty and without consequence. It’s like watching a video game comprised of only cut scenes: it’s not really why you turned on the console.

Clooney is enjoyably gruff here and it’s a miracle of movie-stardom that he can appear not creepy while acting as a spurned-lover alongside Athena, played by 13-year-old Cassidy.

But it is a little creepy.

Robertson is an enthusiastic lead and Hugh Laurie’s late re-emergence as an antagonistic Tomorrowlandian sees him in prime, dryly comic form.

Also, it’s hard to disagree with the picture’s sweet, albeit naïve message; for us to drop our cynicism and consider how we might collectively save our dying planet.

Still, the irony of a 130-minute movie that looks only inward but asks us to look outward.

2.5/5

In cinemas May 28. Rated PG for mild science fiction violence and coarse language.