Title: Tommorowland
Release Date: May 22, 2015
Director: Brad Bird
Production Company:Walt Disney Pictures
Summary/Review:
Brad Bird, writer and director of animated films like the Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, brings his utopian vision to live action films. The basic gist is that a group of creative geniuses make an alternative reality called Tomorrowland which is an amalgam of the optimistic views of a space age future that were common in culture circa the 1950s-1980s (it’s never explained how this alternative universe works). The major characters are George Clooney as an older man who has been exiled from Tomorrowland, Britt Robertson as a teenage scientific enthusiast who is the latest recruit for Tommorrowland, Raffey Cassidy as the Audio-Animatronic who recruits new members, and Hugh Laurie as the villain who desires to make Tommorowland exclusive, and ultimately destroy the real world.
The movie is full of fantastic visuals and great ideas. But ultimately, it feels hollow at the heart of it. There’s a preachy vein that we should feel bad about giving up on our optimistic vision of tomorrow, but never gives a reason why, especially since the effort to get to Tommorrowland is full of violence and a Libertarian idea of some people being naturally better than others. There’s a lot that’s good about this movie, from the acting to the visuals, that it’s doubly disappointing that it misses the mark by so much.
Rating: ***
Panorama of the Mountains 