Tomorrowland comes off like an expanded Super Bowl TV advertisement: cocksure of itself and sure to dazzle but ultimately a hollow, superficial gewgaw. Director Brad Bird (the excellent Ratatouille and The Incredibles) even has a wonderful young actress (Raffey Cassidy) and two venerable pros (George Clooney and Hugh Laurie) going for him, but the film’s fatal flaw is it fails to provide an inspiring vision of the future. It resurrects Dale Carnegie’s The Power of Positive Thinking, and (shudder) not a little Ayn Rand in declaring a shrill diatribe against all the disabling negativity of our current society. Look how humanity holds back this utopian future by believing it has to be this grim! How self-defeating!
What future? Here the wonders of this ideal society only appear in a few squishy scenes of ubiquitous whirring vehicles in the air and well-groomed people walking around what seems like a pretty shopping mall. All the cranky, shrill sermonizing in the film’s closing sections seems like a poor substitute for a coherent story and deeper insight into its characters. Unlike the riveting Remy in Ratatouille, his equivalent here is Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) but she ultimately fails to inspire. We’re told over and over how special she is but Bird barely shows us why she is singled out.
I’ll refrain from revealing much in the way of spoilers, but what we have here is a kid, Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson), takes a bus to the 1964 World’s Fair, proudly lugging along his bulky invention: a jet pack that almost works. Here he encounters a gruff and dismissive David Nix (Laurie) and also an encouraging, sharp-as-a-tack young whippersnapper, Athena (Cassidy), who provides him with a key that unlocks the treasures of either an intoxicating (to Frank anyway) vision of the future or a parallel universe.
Then Tomorrowland jumps to Casey, a precocious and daring teen who, despondent her NASA engineer Dad (Tim McGraw) will soon be out of work once the Cape Canaveral launch site is disbanded, takes matters into her own hands. She also feels scientific frontiers should be continuously explored. Athena’s key reappears and we’re on our way to the four main characters staging not-so-jolly reunion after reunion, complete with robot bad-guys and random acts of violence.
Is any of it fun? Yeah, some of it, for sure. However, you’ll want to forget as soon as possible the creepiness of Clooney’s scenes with Cassidy. Walt Disney himself just might be rolling over in his grave over those.