Beastly Reviews: Tomorrowland
A funky future flick that failed.
Tomorrowland had the elements a decent movie — nostalgia, good actors, timeliness. So how did Disney bungle it so badly? The film magnificently failed. It felt like a Disney Channel movie, cobbled together from weak plots and bad special effects.
Tomorrowland, a retro-futuristic section of Disney park, has been around for decades — in the Magic Kingdom, in Disneyland, and in Discoveryland in Paris — and was first conceived by Walt Disney himself. So they had sixty years to get this movie right.
The film is so awkwardly thrown together that it's a bit insulting. Disney knew we adult-kids would see it, regardless of bad reviews, because we grew up going to Tomorrowland. It follows Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), an aspiring rule-breaker who gets recruited by a creepy British robot girl named Athena to save the world.
Athena is from Tomorrowland — another world with highly advanced technology — and she presents a vague, head-scratching plot of impending peril while they get chased by evil nameless bad guys, who are also robots.
We learn that Tomorrowland, despite its name, isn't actually "the world of tomorrow," or, you know, the future. Instead, it's another dimension, a separate reality from ours, with no real connection to the one we live in. It is, I repeat, completely unrelated to happenings on Earth. Technically speaking, no one time-travels in this movie. They're not hopping from the present to the future, but rather from one world to another. That fact left me badly confused.
Casey learns that her world (ours) faces imminent doom. Why? And if these worlds are disconnected, and Tomorrowland has no bearing on our world and its doom, why does it matter? Why did Athena come from there to save ours? These questions are never answered. The "end as we know it" (for our world, not Tomorrowland) will happen in less than two months and there's nothing anyone can do about it — except a teenage white girl named Casey.
The end of the world is always so immediate in these kinds of movies. No one imagines us just petering out, a whimper rather than a bang. Tomorrowland becomes another hackneyed movie with an American teenager racing against the clock with new friends to save everyone.
Tomorrowland (the park, not the movie) is a cutely antiquated vision of the future. Walking through it is an odd experience in seeing what people in the past thought the future would look like, perhaps not envisioning Facebook ruining society and unstoppable global warming. It's retro-futuristic indeed — a pitch of hope, not despair.
Sorry, Jules Verne, we don't live on Mars. But we have mostly eradicated hunger and wiped out whole sections of the animal kingdom in the process. Tomorrowland does not want to touch the hot potato of technology and future, so it does neither — in fact, we never actually go to this magical other world of flying saucers and futuristic cities. Casey just uses its existence (and its robots) to save...ours?
The film feels kiddie and unoriginal in the worst way. It promised to reinvigorate an old section of Disney park, perhaps because there's a current debate to tear it down and replace it with something new.
Call in the wrecking crew.
Love, Beastly
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