Tomorrowland is big and beautiful, but empty

Walt Disney Pictures

Anyone who has been to the Disney theme parks is more than familiar with the Tomorrowland area, home to Space Mountain and other space-themed and futuristic rides and attractions. Disney has also mined several of the parks’ attractions for movie ideas (and vice versa), most notably for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. This time they’ve taken an entire area of the park and built a movie around it … or at least the name of it.

The movie Tomorrowland focuses on Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a teenager with a younger brother and a dad who is facing the loss of his job once a former rocket launch pad is disassembled. While trying to prevent the job from being completed, Casey is arrested and upon her release finds a mysterious pin among her belongings. Touching it, she is transported to another world (although she can still bump into walls and fall down stairs in this world). Her quest to learn more about the button leads to an attack by Men In Black robots before she is rescued by a little girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy), whom we were introduced to in the film’s 1964 prologue. So how can she still be the same girl now?

Athena, it turns out, is from the future and her mission is to recruit those whom she believes can save the future. She takes Casey to the home of Frank Walker (George Clooney), who also met Athena at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and lived in Tomorrowland for many years. He tells Casey not to believe anything Athena says because the future is already gone and what she had glimpsed earlier was just propaganda to make people want to help. But more MIBs show up and Frank, Casey and Athena have no choice but to join forces and perhaps find a way to make things right.

Disney has been teasing the Tomorrowland movie for quite some time now, sending out mysterious bits and pieces of information or trinkets (including an iPad app), but keeping the plot tightly under wraps. Interest in seeing the movie has been building in those sucked in by all the teases, and they have done a spectacular job putting together a big, colorful, beautiful movie to wow your senses.

But somewhere along the way, someone forgot to tell a coherent story and give us characters/heroes we can root for and care about. Director Brad Bird has had an amazing career making classic animated films from The Iron Giant to The Incredibles, and he did a fantastic job reviving the Mission: Impossible franchise with Ghost Protocol. Producer and writer Damon Lindelof also has a successful run of work behind him (Lost, Star Trek). The two men together, plus Jeff Jensen (who has no previous writing credits to his name), have taken a kitchen sink approach to the film, tossing as many ideas as they can at a wall and picking out the ones that stuck. Without bothering to actually connect the pieces with actual story beats.

The film has so many plot holes that you can drive more than one truck through them. Who are the MIB (and other) robots chasing Casey? Better yet, who sent them? Where is this movie taking place — Texas, Florida, New Jersey (a car ride to Somewhere, New York only seems to take a day)? Why was Frank banished from Tomorrowland? Did he cause its destruction with his probability device (sounds very Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)? How does Casey’s optimism cause the device to seemingly reverse itself briefly? In a review, I would never reveal all of the answers. Unfortunately, the filmmakers don’t seem to feel the need to address any of those questions so answers are not very forthcoming.

Even in the face of the hollowness of the story, I still enjoyed the beauty of the film and the performance of Raffey Cassidy. I liked how she could be a demure and proper little British girl one moment, and a kick-ass killing machine the next. And that’s another of the film’s many problems; a wildly shifting tone. Is it a big, family-friendly Disney movie about the wonders of the future or is it a Disney-fied James Cameron vision of the future with mass planetary destruction and killer robots from the future (and yes, there is a body count of regular humans vaporized in the crossfire, not to mention the peril the three leads are put in). The film tries to straddle both worlds to please parents and kids, but ends up being much too intense for younger children and a bit schizophrenic for everyone else.

I did like the film’s message that we have the power to change the future. tweet

Besides the visuals and Cassidy, I did like the film’s message that we have the power to change the future for the better. I just wish it hadn’t be delivered so heavy-handidly (especially in a long bit of exposition delivered by Hugh Laurie doing his best to explain what the movie is about and coming off like a futuristic Rupert Murdoch). I like that it calls out the media (especially certain 24-hour “news” networks — no names!) that broadcast and endless stream of doom and destruction to the point where viewers feel there is no hope for the future so why do anything about it. The film does strive to give us a message of hope, and that ultimately is what won me over and that is what I will take away from it. I just wish they hadn’t used a baseball bat and a sack of bricks to deliver it.