It’s no secret that our world can be an overwhelmingly
cynical place. As a society we’ve become so entrenched in negativity and
pessimism that it’s easy to become disillusioned with where we’re headed. This
mindset has extended even to the way we imagine our future: Once, we dreamt of
a great big, beautiful tomorrow, but somewhere along the line our visions of
the future turned into an endless sea of dystopias and post-apocalyptic
wastelands.
With their
earnest, retro-futurist adventure tale, “Tomorrowland,” director Brad
Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof aim to cure our collective sense of
disenchantment. Arguing that the population uses this sense of hopelessness as
an excuse to not attempt to change things, they want to inspire us through
ray-guns, rocket ships, and plenty of gee-whiz optimism. It’s hard to fault a
film with such noble goals — of course we could use more imagination and
creativity in our world — but the problem comes when the conceit ceases to be a movie and settles for being a TED talk about the
healing power of positivity.
In a
flashback sequence, we’re introduced to Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson), a young
boy attending the 1964 World’s Fair with plans to enter his homemade, only
semi-functioning jetpack into competition at the inventor’s pavilion. When
asked by the judge (Hugh Laurie, cluing us in that he’ll become important
later) what purpose a jetpack that doesn’t actually fly could possibly serve,
Frank explains (as characters in this film are wont to do) how its mere
potential is enough to show people that anything is possible and can inspire
them to do great things. It’s a nice notion — and a pretty great defense of the
value of art — so it’s a shame that once the film presents that idea, it never
does anything to advance it. Frank’s invention fails to impress the judge, but
a mysterious young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy, by far the best part of
the movie) takes an interest, slipping him a pin that offers entry into a
futuristic utopia created by our world’s best and brightest.
From there,
we jump forward to present day where we meet our teenage heroine, Casey Newton
(Britt Robertson), a brainy optimist who believes that the future can be
brighter than society tells her. She finds herself in the possession of a very
familiar pin, and the discovery sets her off to track down Frank, now a recluse
(and played by a cranky George Clooney) holed up in his inventively booby-trapped
home. After some convincing, Casey enlists his help get her to Tomorrowland and
uncover its many mysteries.
There’s some
nicely staged action as our heroes attempt to outrun a pack of humanoid robots
meant to keep them from reaching their destination as well as an exciting trip
to the Eiffel Tower (which conceals its own hidden wonders). Unfortunately, the
action does nothing to advance the plot and frequently feels like Bird and
Lindelof spinning their wheels. The few glimpses we get of the gleaming Tomorrowland
are appropriately spectacular, but not much else in the movie shows as much
imagination (intentionally or not) as those all-too-brief sequences, and that
sense of wonder is sorely missing from the rest of the film.
All of the
film’s great concepts come wrapped in a package of sloppy storytelling, and
it’s hard not to wonder how much blame lies with Lindelof, whose projects
(including “Lost” and “Prometheus”) can uniformly be characterized by their
oversized ambitions and narrative incoherence. A third act, in which it turns
out that the source of all the world’s pessimism is a physical object that can
be destroyed by blowing it up real good, strikes me as particularly
Lindelof-esque. I hate to pile on the guy, since yes, his collaborators have the
option to veto any ideas they think are terrible. But when you’re the common
denominator in so many projects that have such similar issues, it gets harder
and harder to ignore the thought that perhaps that’s where the blame lies.
Props to
Bird for making his lead a young woman and science enthusiast (and how great is
it that the three films currently topping the box office all have female
leads?), but I hold the director to a higher standard. For a movie about
creativity and imagination, I want a little more ingenuity from its
storytelling. Each of Bird’s animated films, from “The Iron Giant” to “The Incredibles,”
had their own messages, but found more imaginative, entertaining ways to
express them than through simple sermonizing. Thankfully, Michael Giacchino’s
magnificent score is on-hand, often single-handedly providing the sense of
wonder the film itself can’t muster.
It’s a bit
disheartening to find myself criticizing a film with such admirable goals and
clear passion behind it, but without the execution to back them up, ideas will
only get you so far. Still, I suppose that if the film actually does succeed in
inspiring young people toward action and invention, than my quibbles are
negated — even if it never feels like this jetpack ever truly gets off the
ground.
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2015.
