Mad Max: Fury Road will remain firmly atop its pedestal as my favorite film of summer so far. Tomorrowland, despite all the hope and fairy dust, did not unseat it. And for anyone complaining that Fury Road had a “thin” plot… well, Tomorrowland’s plot is essentially: Hope is great! We should all have it! This is not to say it’s a bad film, but it is a simple one, and I am not its target audience. This is the kind of optimistic, gee whiz kids movie that the ’80s were particularly good at, and if you have a human under 14 in your home, you might want to drop it off at the theater and pick it up after.
The Basics
Casey Newton is an optimistic Florida high school student, the daughter of a NASA engineer dad and, this being a Disney film, a presumably deceased mom. NASA is shutting down the launchpad, because no one believes in the future anymore, and since Casey believes in the future she uses drones to sneak in and pull a bunch of wires to slow the demolition process. As character introductions go, it’s pretty great, and firmly establishes us in an Interstellar-style pro-space movie. When she finds a techno-magical pin that shows her visions of the ecstatic, jetpunk future she’s always wanted, she starts off on a quest to figure out (a)if that future is possible or just a hallucination, and (b) if there’s a way she can make it happen in our reality. Along the way she meets Athena, a girl who claims to be from the future, and Frank Walker, a man who is George Clooney. Shenanigans ensue, but be aware that this is much more of a message movie than a plot movie.
Clooney
…gets to do a world-weary spin on his usual twinkly charm. And it’s great! He’s gruff and damaged and he invents a ton of stuff to protect his deceptively ramshackle house! Is there still a kernel of belief in under that cynical exterior? Will Casey reignite that kernel into fully-popped belief-in-the-future popcorn? The other actors more than match Clooney, with Britt Robertson imbuing Casey with far more depth than the underwritten script should allow. Plus Raffey Cassidy is fun as Athena, and Hugh Laurie is at maximum polite-yet-snotty Hugh Laurie-ness.
This is Basically an Ibsen Play Wearing a Jetpack
Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof have noticed that our current reality is slowly turning into the dystopia we’ve all been warned about, and they DO NOT APPROVE. This movie is not so much a hero’s quest, or even a bildungsroman, as much as it’s a call to action for the audience. Bird and Lindelof are offering summer moviegoers a corrective to all the death and despair we’ve seen on TV and in theaters over the last few years, and offer us the crazy idea that using optimism and creativity might actually help things get better. I canvassed for the Obama campaign, but I have never heard the words “hope” and “change” more often in a two-hour period. However, I don’t think they built enough of a structure beneath all of their dazzling visuals. There’s also much too much reliance on one of Brad Bird’s particular tropes.
The Special is Special
Casey is simply good at things. We have a situation in this movie where multiple intelligent people tell Casey (and us) that she’s Special. But other than her extreme pluckiness we never see her do anything special. She runs off on her quest like she’s been waiting for the call to adventure her whole life, and she just crushes all in her path with unbeatable optimism. While we want to root for her, she’s kind of a cipher—we don’t meet any of her friends, there’s no mention of her lost mom, she seemingly has an absurdly perfect relationship with her perfect little moppet brother, and a relationship with her dad that makes Coop and Murph’s look aloof. It’s like Brad Bird made a clone of a Spielberg movie and left all the spikiness out. And when we finally get to the big culminating moments in the film, Casey seems to figure things out purely from intuition. We don’t see her build drones, fix robots, study science after school, or take any particular tests, tinkering… she just knows how things work. Iron Man has more credibility as a mechanic than this kid. The students in Big Hero 6 were shown actively learning. In Bird’s own Ratatouille, Remy was naturally good at cooking, and had a refined palate, but he still needed to practice and learn how to work with the rest of the cooks in the kitchen before he could become truly successful. Casey just moves wires around and suddenly she’s showing up her NASA engineer dad. In other words…
You Need More Science in Your Pro-Science Movie
On the surface, this movie is all about using learning and science to build a better tomorrow today. However, we never see anyone except Casey’s dad actually doing science. There is no backing for any of the inventions in the film, things just, I don’t know, work. Because optimism. Or, in a few cases, because robots. But even there, we don’t see anyone build the robots! By the time we get around to a rousing discussion of tachyons, it’s already become clear that this is a science fantasy, and that we shouldn’t ask for more than pixie dust. Couldn’t Casey have been in teen science competitions? Or at least be seen reading a science book? Or making her own drones? The film takes the step to make our protagonist an intelligent girl, but then doesn’t show us her intelligence. This is despite ample opportunity because of…
Free-Range Parenting
Tomorrowland I can buy. Robots? Sure. Optimism being an actual force for change? …I guess I’ll allow it. High school student Casey Newton going on all these adventures without Child Protective Services taking her and her brother away? That’s where you lose me, movie. There is no way Casey would have been able to go on even the first leg of her quest in the U.S. in 2015. Now having gotten common sense and snark out of the way, I loved that she just went for the adventure. For it’s first half, at least, Tomorrowland gives us an intelligent, resourceful young woman who doesn’t accept the world she’s being given, and goes out to actively change it. There’s no bullying or sexual threats or condescension—she’s treated with respect by all the major characters, and this film is completely free of skeeviness. (There is a hint of romance, but it doesn’t involve Casey.) If the small human who lives with you is a girl, you can put this up next to her Miyazaki movies, and trust that she’ll be inspired. But…
Female Protagonist Yay?
Even though Casey’s the protagonist, Frank Walker does most of the heavy lifting—sometimes literally. While this saves us the annoying trope of “young character who’s suddenly good at fighting for no reason” it also robs Casey of some great potential hero moments. Without getting too spoilery, there’s a point in the film where it looks like things are going in a direction that would have been very interesting, and new, but then the film resets itself to put Frank back on center stage. I am way more interested in the film where Casey stays the main agent throughout. Having said all of that, though, I still really liked the film. I just wish there was more futuristic food capsules to chew over.
Rockets!
There are several of them, each more impressively steampunk than the last.
In Case You Forgot, This is A Disney Film.
Tomorrowland’s skyline looks like Disneyland, and a whole other Disney ride has a cameo in the film! However, there is also a scene that feels to me much more like Brad Bird’s editorializing that undercuts all the marketing and retro-future-nostalgia of the film. When Casey tries researching the pin by visiting a boutique called Blast From the Past—basically a cabinet of wonders filled with mint condition action figures, posters, and movie memorabilia—it quickly becomes clear that this is a misstep on her quest. Allowing herself to be wooed by nostalgia is a distraction, and all of that attachment to the past needs to be gotten rid of so she can move forward into the future.
Marketing Is Dangerous!
Possibly the most subversive thing you can ever say in a Disney film is that advertising lies to people, but this film, despite literally being based on a theme park ride, manages to have surprisingly complex relationship with marketing. Can the architects of Tomorrowland be trusted? Or are they just shilling for a future that can never be? Are they just feeding us false hope, and encouraging us to dream genuinely impossible dreams?
And Did I Mention Hope?
This leads me to my last point. This film is not for me. It’s for the ten-year-old children who might be able to salvage whatever’s left of civilization in another decade. I will admit that despite the flaws in the film, I was (slightly! just a little!) teary at the end. The last few moments are an adrenaline shot of hope to the heart, and it might be worth watching the whole film just for that.
Leah Schnelbach thinks that tickets for this movie should have come with a jetpack. Come yell at her about retrofuturism on Twitter!
I think you were just a bit too kind in your assessment of this movie. I was SO looking forward to it that I made sure to see it opening weekend. Suffice it to say that I’m glad hubby and I went to see it at a drive-in, so there was the opportunity to see “The Avengers” for the second time, so the evening wasn’t a total loss.
I didn’t appreciate the cheesy preachiness of the movie, and I was insulted when Hugh Laurie’s character stated his unhappiness with the state of the world blasting humans for being obese and happy with their lot. Judge not lest ye be judged pal!
I’m a Disney fanatic, thus my screen name, but this is not a Disney film I’ll stand behind. Already sent a text to my daughter telling her not to bother seeing the movie. There are better films to spend money to see.
Leah, I think you have done a very good job of putting your finger on this movie’s weaknesses, because it definitely does have some weaknesses. Not the least of which was the expository lump at its very center, where Nix and Frank have an argument about self fulfilling prophecies. I don’t need the point of a movie driven home with a sledge hammer and a sixteen penny nail.
On the other hand, the strengths of this movie far outweighed its weaknesses. Visually, it was stunning, with so much to look at, from Tomorrowland both past and present, Frank’s gadget-filled house, and Le Tour Eiffel as a gaslamp era rocket gantry. The robots were wonderful, from the human-looking ones right up to the giant assembly robots. The deranged grin of the ‘secret service’ robot was an especially good running gag. There were a lot of good ideas introduced, and if even only a few kids who watch it are inspired to go out and pursue science classes and build some robots of their own, the movie will have done some good for the world. It was a movie just bursting with heart and passion, and you could see that the film-makers believed in what they were doing.
I have to admit that this movie was, more than any movie I have seen in decades, pitched almost directly at me. I was a ten year old boy when I went to the New York World’s Fair, and introduced to the idea of a “great big beautiful tomorrow.” Like many folks, I was amazed at the audio-animatronics of the robot Lincoln, the giant dinosaurs, the cities of the future, and the little people of “It’s a Small World.” My dad was an aerospace engineer, and I grew up with slide rules, Popular Science magazine, and Analog Science Fiction. While I don’t buy into conspiracy theories, I love to speculate on them, and enjoy a tale that ‘uncovers’ unseen forces that have been influencing society. So I went in already sold on what was being presented.
One of the best things about the movie was that, other than its name, and a few hints in the background, it did not try to latch onto any particular aspect of the theme park. Instead, it tried to tap into the spirit of optimism that Walt Disney brought to so many of his projects. And the thought of him being part of a conspiracy of do-gooders just felt so right, it helped the whole movie work.
My final thought on the movie actually comes from my wife. At the end, when they show the best and brightest being gathered up to go to Tomorrowland, she asked why they were taking those people away from the world and hoarding them, instead of leaving them to help make the world a better place. I know the move wanted to make a point about valuing and nurturing ‘specialness,’ but if people with special gifts do not use those gifts to help better mankind, then those gifts are wasted. If George Clooney, in his final address to the robots going out to seek special people, had just mentioned that their goal was to make the whole world a better place, the ending would have been much more satisfying. Instead, we were left with a whiff of selfishness, and the thought that some people were just too good for the rest of us. Which I don’t think was a point the film-makers wanted to make.
If you want to avoid spoilers, avoid this post
I watched this last night and I am not impressed. The film appears to have been hacked about at some stage either in the scripting or the editing. The way the film starts which the switching POV feels like something added in the second cut.
The character of Frank means that while we are enjoying a new spin on the Terminator with Casey and Athena, it has to stop so that we can introduce the adult Frank. Then Frank appears to take up all the climax including the scene with Athena. But Frank could have been written out of this easily. He could have died off-screen, Casey could have looked for him and found the information herself. Or he could have become the Nix/villain figure.
The glimpses of Tomorrowland that Casey see when she is touching the badge are great, no question, but there don’t really explain why the place is so quiet when she gets there. It also makes the climax even more half-hearted with the old blow up the device routine. I find it hard to believe that some revision wasn’t involved here, as I couldn’t help wondering if the budget was running out at this stage.
Why are there a group of evil robots chasing them anyway? If they were to keep Frank quiet, why not just shoot him anyway? I’m convinced that this film had an AI in Tomorrowland originally, which would have made more sense, but they threw this out because of ‘Age of Ultron’. As it is, they appear have evil robots to cause the characters to keep running about because we are going to have action scenes regardless. Even if the storyline has now collapsed in it’s focus. (And we are not supposed to care about the casual bystanders that the robots kill either.)
The use of tachyons causing visions of the future is a nice shout-out to ‘Prince of Darkness’ but probably unintentional.
Also it’s know good saying that people want the world to end, if you can’t explore the full implications of that. Do the critic the belief in the Rapture or similar things? No. Do they address social or economic factors and controlling interests? No. The Cold War? No. (They can’t even reference the Doomsday Clock when it seems obvious.)
Another reason that the film appears to have been messed about with is the ending. The obvious figure to have been to give everybody the vision of Tomorrowland to inspire them from the path of doom and gloom. But this is ignored in favour of giving more people badges, What about have the technology made available or releasing it onto the internet? When the villain of ‘Watchman’ or Doctor Doom could up with more believable world-saving plans, something has gone very wrong.
The way the movie creators tried to cater to the widest audience possible and stuff it with as much popular tropes as possible is so laughable. I liked the idea and some aspects of its realization, but the sheer amount of sloppiness here was really disappointing.
Steampunk is all the rage these days? Okay, let’s have some of that steampunk here, in the movie about the future. Plausibility? What plausibility? Nobody will care about it as soon as they spot a bronze gear.
No sci-fi movie is good without a cool fighting scene full of shiny gadgets? Of course we need it too! And don’t worry about the thin reasoning, nobody will notice, spellbound by our blue shiny thingys and clever one-liners.
More people are pushing for racial diversity? Sure, let’s shove that diversity right in their faces, but not in the movie proper, no-no, we can’t have that (who wants to watch a bunch of non-white people after all?). Let’s save it all for the very last scene.
Lindelof strikes again huh? Will nobody bring his mediocre-writing-reign-of-terror to an end?
I just saw it and I have to sayIt was better than I feared and Not as good as I hoped. Still i feel like it was a good film. I guess the problem is that you can see moments were it easily could have slipped into a great one.
Ultimately i think they kind of flubbed the ending a little. A better ending than lets blow this thing up,even the cliche of changing the message would have fit the movie better.
Sorry to see yet another less than stellar role for Hugh. I think that is where it ultimately went askew. A better bad guy would have helped and because we know he can act, probably going with the vision of the director then.
Overall it is probably a little nitpicking. It was still a solid movie, and one i am far from upset at seeing. It is just those little things that turn it from an A movie into a B and knowing that the idea was there.
Leah, I couldn’t disagree with you more (and apparently the majority of folks leaving comments) about this movie. I am 30 years past the 10 year old you suggest this movie is for. I thought it was original and awesome. I came out of the theater happy and so were my wife and teenagers.
The disappointing thing to me is that you were given the task to review it when you specifically state that the movie wasn’t for you. I read your Mad Max review and what movies you grew up on. Stick to that and stop trying to dissuade others from seeing a great flick that makes people feel happy and that they might just be able to make a difference in their own corner of the world.
I think the exposition with Casey at school perfectly sums up why she is special. With all of the bad things going on in the world, she wants to do something to make it better.
I see that this review ignores the Randian elephant in the room. That is the source of much of the movie’s tone and message. With a healthy dollop of Techno Libertarianism.
This movie was much more realistic when it was called Bioshock.
“This is basically an Ibsen play wearing a jetpack” is a fantastic sentence. Kudos.
To my surprise, I actually enjoyed most of this movie, even with the logic flaws. It had such a nice 80s feel and had some of those nerdy topics (like Tesla, Edison, Verne and Eiffel working together, complete with mentioning the problems between Tesla and Edison) and I was well entertained.
However, the ending completely spoiled it for me. That tirade about humanity was just horrible, simplistic sermonizing, and the sappy “I may be an android, yet now I have feelings” scene and even sappier farewell scene were almost unbearably kitschy. To top it off, we get all those new badge-distributors looking like the jumped out of a Benetton ad to go out and fetch all the “good” people to help saving earth… That was enough to make me sick to the stomach. Yuck!
So, 90 min of great (yet mindless) entertainment and then 30 min of suffering…. I’m having “A.I.” flashbacks ;)