Tomorrowland

I am compelled to review this movie precisely because it has been a box-office disappointment and has been criticized for not being the best work director Brad Bird is capable of.  Other reviewers have said the set-up for the trip to the other dimension was wasted time and the plot is too slow…. they didn’t make enough use of the marvelous “other world” that they labored so intensively to create.  I think the main reason people are disappointed in this movie, which I saw for the first time by my lonesome self at the metroplex in Lewisville, Texas, is that people have either forgotten how to watch intelligent movies, or they have simply never learned.

Movie character poster

The thing I loved most about this beautiful, inspirational movie, is its basic intelligence and the wonderful way Disney/Pixar’s Brad Bird weaves complex themes of past, present, and future together into a carefully patterned web of everything that’s right about good science fiction.  Good science fiction tells you, through basic scientific understanding, what the possibilities are.   It scares you with horrible possible futures that make all too much sense with things like climate change, nuclear warfare, and a society that embraces stupidity and entrenched habits that can lead us like lambs to the slaughter.  It also shows you how technology and the willingness to risk it all on good ideas can possibly solve problems, even those problems that technology itself creates.  This movie introduces us to complexly-layered characters.  The male lead character is played by George Clooney, yet his bright-eyed, inventive, little-boy self is also a critical part of the whole mix.  The female lead, Britt Robertson, is a dreamer who carries the theme with her based on the old Native American proverb that asks, “which wolf will win a battle between a dark wolf full of negativity and a white wolf full of positivity and light?”  The answer, of course, is the wolf you feed.  The character is relentlessly positive in the face of a horrific future that the film brings out which humanity probably deserves.  And the catalyst character, the little-girl robot played by Raffey Cassidy, is a brilliant performance by an amazing young actress that brings to the front and center one of the most powerful of all science-fiction questions, “what does it actually mean to be human?”

I believe this movie brings out the best of Brad Bird’s skills as a story-teller.  Like some of his most brilliant work in the past, like the cartoon movie Iron Giant or the Pixar movie The Incredibles, this movie pushes the magic nostalgia buttons from a fondly-remembered simpler time.  I remember going to Walt Disney World in Orlando back in the 1970’s and being so enthralled by the two most must-see parts of the park, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland.  Tomorrowland was the culmination of my childhood astronaut dreams born of watching the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969 on our old black-and-white Motorola TV and all those other Gemini, and even Mercury missions that I followed with all-consuming interest.  It’s that feeling of a better world waiting up ahead, in the future, just around the corner.  The anticipation that something wonderful is going to happen… and then when it doesn’t happen, or, at least, doesn’t happen in the bright shiny way I was expecting… I can start over with the conviction that I can make it happen… that dreams really do come true.

Brad Bird’s body of directorial work is, in my humble opinion, the equal of some of the greatest cinematic artists of all time.