The Importance of Tomorrowland – A Review and In Depth Discussion.

*NOTE: Dissecting Disney articles are written in two parts. Part 1 is a traditional review, which is spoiler free. Part 2 however discusses the movie in depth and will contain spoilers.

Part 1: Tomorrowland Review

Tomorrowland the movie represents a lot to Disney. While it’s not the first movie to be based on a theme park attraction, it is the first that was based on an entire area of the parks. Tomorrowland has been part of Disney Parks since their inception in 1955 and almost every Disney Park has it’s own version. Tomorrowland represented to Disney, the company, that they were at the forefront of technologies, and it’s easy to see that Disney, the man, perhaps hoped that his technologies would have implications that reached further than Theme Parks. It’s either clever marketing or beautiful coincidence then that the number one commodity in the Tomorrowland movie universe is inspiration. When a young Frank Walker attempts to win $50 at the World’s Fair he is asked what good a jetpack would do for the world, and his answer was inspiration. This parallel to Walt Disney’s and the Disney company’s contributions to our world should not be missed.

This is in part what makes this movie such a beautiful one to behold; it’s ability to boil down what is needed into it’s core parts. Before you have an idea, even a life-changing, world-saving, humanity redeeming idea, you have to be inspired. You have to hope. These of course are the core qualities of Casey, played by up and coming actress Britt Robertson, daughter of a NASA engineer whose latest job is dismantling the largely symbolic launching pad. Flashbacks show us that even from a young age Casey is a dreamer at heart, one that wants to go to the stars, and that questions all authority; literally as she is soon arrested for her attempts at sabotaging the NASA dismantling project.

After her arrest she finds a button, a technological advanced button that shows her a world that she never knew could exist, exactly the type of place Casey wants to believe in. This sequence is not only one of the most visually stunning, but among the most fun, playful and poignant scenes in recent movie history – it’s a moment we’re happy to share with Casey. Ss she starts to feel what Tomorrowland (the place) could be we the viewer start to feel the excitement of what Tomorrowland (the movie) could be, and while Casey is soon let down, ultimately so are we the viewers.

She is introduced to Frank Walker, now old and grumpy and reluctant to even help, having resigned himself to watching his doomsday clock count down. A few robotic death machines motivate him and soon he and Casey and their “friend” Athena are off towards Tomorrowland, setting up the rest of the film’s action. Predictably it involves saving the world, and Casey and Frank work hand in hand to ensure it’s survival. Surely this is Disney and since a sequel is surely not coming for this film, it has to come to a good conclusion and it does, and we have fun while we’re getting there.

Britt Robertson and George Clooney both play their parts expertly have a great screen chemistry, mentor and mentee, more fun and believeable than Casey and her Father played rather unconvincingly by Tim McGraw. However, there is a sweet sentiment that Casey loves her father, as Frank attempts to pick apart what he assumes is her rebellious teenage story, she plainly states that her “father is the best”. In true Disney fashion the mother is out of the picture, but there are no scenes of her missing her or talking about her, for better or for worse.

Casey represents Disney’s new idea of a young woman; gone are the trappings of “princessesness” and budding romances defining a woman of this age (she’s in high school presumably but it’s never specified), and replacing those are a sense of self-confidence and ability. Casey, even while being saved by Frank a few times, “gets how things work” and uses this ability to help solve a few problems along the way. Much like the recent animated hit Big hero 6 there’s not a minute of romance involving Casey (not developing in the story nor a boyfriend back home) nor does she ever use her femininity to flirt to solve a problem, and that change is more than welcome, it’s perhaps needed. There is a small hint of innocent romance with young Frank Walker in flashback scenes, but it’s handled perfectly and hauntingly sad. It’s not an accident that two of the most capable characters in the movie are female, even if one isn’t exactly human, they both represent qualities Disney is attempting to impart onto it’s female viewership; you can be smart, you can be pretty, you can be independent, you can be self-confident and most importantly you can do ALL these things at the same time.

Once we finally GET to Tomorrowland the negatives there start to slowly weigh down the soaring wonder and depth of the beginning of the film, like going on Space Mountain with the lights on. There is the confusing reasons why Casey and Frank are being pursued and kept out of Tomorrowland; answers are given but never explained. Other questions abound and in any other film they would probably have been accepted or at least ignored, it’s a Summer blockbuster after all, but here, because of the way the movie forces the viewer to take on the questions head on, they feel like at least a small let down. If you take it on it’s face as a futuristic romp you won’t have as much fun, as the movie tends to push the viewer to think deeper and more analytical about what it’s saying, and then backfires on those viewers when they realize it’s messages are muddled by faulty logic and plot holes. Hugh Larie does a good job at the smug badguy, but he has no real motivation, even if I was willing to put spoilers here.. The message of impending disaster is ruined by the same thing that made Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” rather unbelievable – we cannot accept that the end of the world is coming so quickly (even if it were true).

However the freshness of this movie is without question, it’s wonder and spirit capture the ideas of the Disney Parks’s area of Tomorrowland with perfect ease. The beautiful CGI world is believeable, making it a place that we would want to visit, perhaps a subtle commercial for the theme park itself. However, not enough viewers are having the same response and its lack of ticket sales are leading it to be one of the biggest flops in recent history, and that could mean more sequels and remakes for not just Disney Studios, but Hollywood as a whole. When a company takes a large-scale chance on a new property (over $200 million spent to make and market the movie) the entire world takes notice. So when it fails, it has the possibility of setting trends, and in this case, unfortunate ones.

One has to wonder if there isn’t a cult hit hiding here in the near future, a beautiful film that has great actors doing their jobs, directed smoothly and crisply deserves a better reception. The negatives are not enough to spoil the fun of this movie, not in a world that is spending billions to see Superheroes fight aliens year after year, so there is hope here that something positive can still come from this movie.. and much like Frank Walker said, maybe it’s just inspiration.

4 out of 5 Stars.

Part 2. In depth analysis. (REMEMBER the rest of this article is FILLED with spoilers, if you have not seen the film, do not read further.)

 

Tomorrowland is big, beautiful, full of wonder and the afore-mentioned inspiration. It also has a flaw in the programming, as I hinted at above in the review, and that flaw is that it’s pushing too hard. It is BEGGING to be analyzed, which would be great for a movie made up of so much hope and wonder and beautiful ideas of Utopia. It’s designed to keep the viewer thinking beyond the theater. It’s a movie that’s asking for a better viewer, demanding an active viewership; not a movie for a passive watch-how-cool-this-is audience. This could have been a powerful tool, but instead acts like a magnifying glass when small plot holes are revealed.

The biggest glaring thing to me was the countdown, and it was bad in two ways. When we first see the countdown clock Casey is telling the audience (which we later learn are the new robots out seeking new dreamers) that they understand a countdown is bad. At that moment the clock says 63 at the front. By looking at the ticking we can infer that it’s 63 days until… well we don’t know yet, but we know it’s bad. Later this clock is shown at 58 days in Frank Walker’s bunker, and it’s explained that the world as we know is going to end in 58 days – and that ruined it for me. While things might be bad, it’s rather hard to grasp that the world is going to end in less than two months. There just isn’t any evidence of that. While we might not know everything that is going on globally, we see that the movie indicates a combination of war and natural disasters ending the world. While technically a possibility there is just something about this truncated timetable that ruins this part of the movie, takes it out of the realm of possibility and places it somewhere just outside.

Later when we finally see who Frank and Casey are telling the story to, we don’t see the clock, nor anywhere where the clock could even be. It’s inferred that the end of the world has been averted completely and that Tomorrowland is somehow at the heart of that – but it never tells us how. Even if Casey and Frank destroy the giant antennae that is telling us that we’re all doomed (a powerful and tragic metaphor for modern media it itself) and pushed back the end of the world, we were told plainly that it was an inevitability. There was contempt when Frank says that the inhabitants of Tomorrowland don’t care about Earth, but at the end of the movie aren’t they doing the same things? Taking the best brains of Earth and moving them to another dimension to help build Tomorrowland INSTEAD of Earth? It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy then, unless somehow they are transferring the ideas and inventions to Tomorrowland.

These plot holes might have EASILY been fixed in my opinion. A scene making it clear that incredible Tomorrowland inventions have been shared with Earth would have been powerful. It’s discussed that the greatest minds of the world used Tomorrowland as a place to build freely without laws or governments to get in the way, but we aren’t shown this working, not even once. They used real-life names and it would’ve been easy to take one of these inventors real-life inventions as created in Tomorrowland. Later then the doomsday clock could have been used to show that while Casey and Frank have pushed BACK the end of the world, the clock was still ticking. This at the end of the film would have lent more importance to their new mission and even had the ability to set up a sequel. Given that the beginning of the film shows the clock with a different date I have to wonder if this was the original intention, but somewhere in the Disney chain convinced Brad Bird to not show it at the end of the film.

Another small negative is the lack of wish fulfillment for Casey. While we see her longing to be a part of Tomorrwland, even a simple scene of her riding a jet pack or something similarly futuristic would’ve done a lot to complete her journey for the audience. The incredibly cool scene of her first exploring Tomorrowland as she is also still moving in our world is a great concept, a layered dimension where you’re moving in both, and when it turns out to be a cop-out (it’s merely an interactive advertisement) it’s a big disappointment to Casey AND the viewers.

Still, I enjoyed this movie. There were many positives. The non-romance was great for Disney, as they continue their trend to move away from the Disney traditions of yesteryear where a Prince saves a girl and they fall in love. It’s really easy for movie makers to use young romance in a movie as a motivator, but it can go bad quickly and make female characters nothing more than props for the male characters when done incorrectly (like the recent-yet-nearly-forgotten Disney movie Echo) so it was nice to see they didn’t even attempt it here. Casey isn’t doing these things to impress a boy, she does’t have a boyfriend back home that doesn’t understand her crazy antics, nothing of the sort. The mild childhood crush that we see in Frank for Athena is done subtly and beautifully, and sets up the ending quite nicely.

Athena was another positive, and I begged for more out of her character. She was a robot, but much like Wall-E she was clearly something more. She knew that her job was done but didn’t want to shutdown. Her early scenes of her kicking some ass were fun and lent to the wonder that Tomorrowland had to offer. She had at least some consciousness as indicated by the end of the film, making her sacrifice even more powerful. I was glad there wasn’t a new Athena at the end of the film, (the Baymax ending) as it would’ve taken away from her “death”. Frank holds on to her for a perfectly long time, not wanting to give up his friend and childhood, and more importantly what they meant to him personally.

One scene of hers bothered me though, and it was her first one, where she defies Hugh Larie’s character in 1964 by giving Frank a chip it makes me wonder who she worked for, since it seemed that he was answering to her in some way? Who was above Nix, and where did they go? Was there some major coup where he took over as Frank discovered the doomsday machine? Was THAT the decline of Tomorrowland? We never find out, but it’s a nagging thought. The fun of the scenes with anyone fighting a robot are not to be overlooked – the action is smooth, easy to follow and creepily fun. Even as robots I cringed when they got hit and crushed, and audibly gasped when Athena was hit by a truck.

After the movie I found myself worrying about the end of original Disney movies more than the end of the world. After other large-scale failures such as John Carter it worries me that even Disney is going to be less and less willing to take chances. I had big hopes for this movie, as did Disney Executives, and perhaps that’s why we’re both a little let down by what should be a big movie in the Disney Universe.

What are your thoughts on Tomorrowland?