Tomorrowland is Disney’s animatronic answer to our cataclysmic times: technology’s detrimental role to human interaction is a strong theme, as is society’s predisposition to violence (in video games, television programming, and films). Promoted as a film adaptation of Walt Disney’s theme park attraction, Tomorrowland seeks to be many movies to many people: a child-pleasing fantastical adventure, a barrage of special effects and thunderous sound, a philosophical commentary on the state of human civilization, a treatise on the relationship between humans and the machines they build. In just over two hours, few of these goals are accomplished, but it’s a fun ride nonetheless.
The movie focuses on how human actions may be contributing to the end of the world: famine, global warming, political dysfunction and upheaval, and “war on every continent” are named, most more than once. One character has a complex monitoring system rigged in his earthly, present-tense outpost, where what appeared to be actual footage of street protests and military actions streamed across an array of televisions; a master ‘clock’ summed all of it to mean the human race had a 100% probability of ending in less than three months. Much like The Matrix, George Clooney’s character and only a handful of others are aware of the impending doom, while the rest of the world proceeded with their business. The climax of the film brings additional revelation: not only has the end of the world been propagated by humanity, but that humans have been somewhat under the control of a technology that changed individuals’ perceptions of the future, if not the future itself. After two hours of time travel and dramatic sequences featuring a team of lead characters, it was a let-down to find out that, in the end, there’s a reason the human race should not be held accountable for its actions.
Raffey Cassidy, a twelve-year old actress from England, could have stolen the film with her stellar abilities, were her role-- as an ageless android named Athena-- had been written more carefully: she could have been a twelve-year old female Dr. Spock, instead of merely an expressionless and apparently-impulsive ‘bot. At times, her eerie gaze dominated the scene, especially when opposite the scruffy and emotive George Clooney (as wunderkind Frank Walker, who was exiled from Tomorrowland). The script hinged on Clooney’s character being seen as a young child (played excellently by Thomas Robinson), and then as a grown man, semi-retired and quietly monitoring the end of the world from his overgrown farmhouse. The relationship between Athena and Walker was truly odd, and not just because Cassidy could have been cast as one of the girls that appears in Kubrick’s The Shining, but because a man-- George Clooney-- fell in love with a robot, and one cannot help but wonder if he could ever recover from the heartbreak.
Britt Robertson plays Casey Newton, a sparky and inquisitive female protagonist. Casey’s father is a tragic character, an widowed engineer for NASA, unfulfilled and about to be laid off. Sneaking out of her house on a regular basis, Casey uses a drone to surveil and sabotage a rocket launch platform that’s being dismantled near her home, thinking she could save her father’s job. Were Casey not a cute and tenacious young white girl in a Disney movie, her actions would clearly be terrorism. When she’s caught, her father posts her bail. On the car ride home, he tells Casey, “do you know how many strings I had to pull to keep Homeland Security out of this?”
Hugh Laurie plays the narrative’s central villain, Nix. Like the character of Athena, Tomorrowland lacks scenes of direct and effective character development: introduced early in the film, all the viewer knows of Nix is captured in his evil sneer. Later, in his confrontations with the adult Frank Walker, he is revealed more fully as a typecast Disney villain, through an especially good soliloquy at the end of the film-- but the added depth comes too late. Laurie does a good job with what his character is given in the script, but unlike other one-dimensional Disney villains (Cruella DeVille in 101 Dalmatians comes to mind), plot exposition regarding the villain's motivation is unrendered for the bulk of the movie.
The attention to detail and allusion to previous Disney films was at times surprisingly welcome: the 1964 World’s Fair, including the It’s A Small World boat ride, is colorfully represented; the windows in a specific time-traveling capsule look like they were taken from the set of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; a panoramic shot of Tomorrowland includes the sleek 1970s-style conical building that, on my visit to DisneyWorld in the early 1990s, contained the dated ride Space Mountain; the illuminated vacuum tube countdown clock featured early in the film is itself a staggeringly authentic prop, considering glass vacuum tubes that could act as early digital displays haven’t been manufactured since the 1960s. Teleportation across dimensions was accomplished at times by a portal that looked almost exactly like the ancients’ device used the Stargate films and television series, except this ring was an oval shape. The film does well in paying subtle homage to Disney’s science-fiction filmography, though film purists may be annoyed.
At one point, Casey and her brother search for information about her unique pin on eBay, which leads her to a toys-and-movies collectibles store in a small town in Texas. In one of the film’s strangest sequences, Casey finds a woman gazing vacantly at a television, and the image of an atomic bomb, disinterested in her presence until she learns about the pin. The store is overcrowded with sci-fi statuaries, board games-- many ComicCon booths worth of merchandise. The encounter with the lead character turns violent, and with the help of her dreadlocked husband, the store is completely destroyed in a massive explosion.
Tomorrowland is an interesting exploration of travel across time and dimensions, and the special effects are at times stunning, remarkable, disorientating, even psychedelic. Visually, much of the film has the vibe of the boat scene in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: frantic and unexpected action and violently quick travel, without a clear destination in mind (in IMAX, the screen resolution, detail, and vibrant color was perhaps the highest fidelity I’ve experienced). It’s easy to enjoy what the film looks and sounds like, without trying to understand the plot’s complicated rising action. Had the film’s script allowed for more effective character development, Tomorrowland might have been great, and not just good. As a commentary on the widespread upheaval in society, the film intends to absolve its audiences of culpability, hoping we’d leave the theater feeling relieved and empowered, rather than confused by the film’s love (?) interest, and burned by the discovery of an artificial source of humanity’s ill will and deeds.
