Above: Casey (Brit Robertson) glimpses Tomorrowland for the first time. Photo ©Walt Disney Pictures
There is a moment, early in
Brad Bird’s bouncy sci-fi adventure “Tomorrowland,” when the intrepid teenager
Casey Newton (Brit Robertson) journeys to a Cape Canaveral launch pad, armed
with a motorcycle and a prototypically rebellious leather jacket. She’s there to sabotage a crane (because oh
no! The launch pad’s going to be
demolished!) and to make good on her lust for adventure. So why does movie around her never drip with
the passion of a bright kid burning with ambition?
Visual sterility is one explanation. Casey lives with her dad and her brother in a
sleek modernist house that looks as if it were snipped from a cheap knockoff of
Dwell magazine. That semblance of security vanishes, however,
when Casey beholds a towering futuristic city—Tomorrowland, a realm where
sterling scientists and artists work to “make the world a better place” (as
opposed to making it worse, I suppose?).
They’re lorded over by the icy David Nix (Hugh Laurie), who believes
that life on Earth will soon end in nuclear fire. Let the world burn, Nix says. Needless to say, the always idealistic Casey
violently disagrees.
Are
you bored yet? Of course you are;
“Tomorrowland” has enough pseudo-philosophical blather and wacky twists and
turns to (almost) upstage “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” But more perplexingly, it features
surprisingly little of its titular metropolis.
Early on, Casey finds herself amidst Tomorrowland’s gloriously smooth
towers, which are orbited by white-walled, glass-floored trains. But these wondrous visions are mere blinks and
soon, Casey is left back on Earth, scrambling in the dirt as she searches for a
way back to the movie’s high-tech promised land.
I admire Mr. Bird’s restraint. By keeping our time in Tomorrowland to a
minimum, he builds the place into a mysterious, mythological domain, amping up
the giddy sensation of guessing what wonders it might contain. But he takes too long to get there. Thus, what should have been a grandiose
summer epic feels oddly muted. Where are
the lush digital vistas? Where are the
awe-inviting feats of daring do? Later,
later—first, Casey has to go on a road trip to find George Clooney.
Mr. Clooney (who plays Casey’s grumpy guide, Frank
Walker) doesn’t have any more success animating “Tomorrowland” than Ms.
Robertson does (her chirpy “let’s save the world!” shtick screams Green Peace activism,
not summer movie heroism). Yet the movie
does posses moments of transcendence, like the climactic scene where Nix rails
against humanity, berating people for craving and fetishizing destruction via
movies and video games. “They didn’t
fear their demise!” he rants. “They
repackaged it!”
That moment is stiff and bland, as cinematic speechifying
so often is. Yet it crystallizes the movie’s
touching belief in the power of optimism to affect genuine change. True, “Tomorrowland” is too generic and
visually dull to ring with real hope. But
there is something to both Nix’s aggrieved preaching and the early montage
where Casey’s high school teachers rail about dystopia and mutually assured
destruction. In the midst of that
crowing, Casey seems to be the only one willing to ask a question of true
import:
“What can we do to fix it?”
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