Tomorrowland *** (2015, George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie) – Movie Review

The production designs and digital images are superb in this fun future fantasy, with good bantering chemistry between teenage heroine Britt Robertson and disillusioned veteran George Clooney.

Director Brad Bird’s curious, but original and intriguing movie is loosely based on Tomorrowland, the future themed land Walt Disney conceived back in the Fifties and Sixties to showcase what the future would hold for the world and it is still one of Disney’s top draws in the theme parks.

So, although the movie looks to the future, it has a real. old-fashioned, down-home Disney feel about it. It’s SO old Disney, it hurts. It wants to lecture you and philosophise, at the same time as distracting you with entertainment and visual delights. Which it does. But it does have its teacher’s hat on big time.

Talking old, George Clooney plays a white whiskery veteran, once a boy-genius inventor (played in flashback by Thomas Robinson) in the Sixties, who went to the New York World’s Fair in 1964, and was inspired. He’s now, we guess, in his late 50s, and disillusioned.

As the world has definitely gone mad and gone to the dogs, as the very grumpy old man character Clooney plays, Frank Walker, continually points out, the movie wants to be pointing out to kids today that they need to be looking after the world a bit better, otherwise there won’t be no Tomorrowland. This is its dire warning.

Well, fair enough, you can’t fault its good intentions or its attempt to suggest a better way. If Tomorrowland can change teenager’s attitudes for the better, and make them more aware of the world around them, then good. That presumably was Uncle Walt’s mission back in the Fifties. He liked the idea of mixing improvement with entertainment.

He promoted scientific and artistic innovation and the idea of a utopian society, in many ways at odds with the Disney Studio business and its emphasis on capitalism, globalism and money-making. Of course, the idea is that you can have both, maybe everything if you have personal genius, are true to yourself  and strive hard enough.

It does come at you a bit, though, with a slew of ideologies and concepts, discussing climate change, the apocalypse, scientific genius as well as personal realisation. Wow! They used to say in Disney’s day that messages were for Western Union. Some will prefer their futuristic adventure entertainment undiluted with do-gooding, like, say, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015), which Brad Bird declined to direct this. Some not.

I get that this is quite an original movie, but its un-cynical stance seems odd in the real world that the Clooney character describes. Despite the presence of Clooney and fellow veteran Hugh Laurie (as Nix), it is very much a children’s adventure with daring rocket escapes and soaring jet pack flights. That should keep the teens and adults’ inner kids happy.

The film hinges very much on the performance of Britt Robertson, who’s 25 but playing a feisty teenager, heroine Casey Newton, who trades views with old Clooney and has a way with solving scientific problems. Those who find her cool, which will mainly be actual teenage girls, may like the movie.

And they will have to, for they are the target audience, in their zillions. No wonder they’d have like Divergent/Insurgent’s heroine Tris, aka Shailene Woodley, to play heroine Casey Newton, hoping to bring Tris’s girly fan base to Tomorrowland. But she turned them down.

Robertson does manage to create a ‘real’ individual, quite idiosyncratic character out of Casey, and she does well to establish bantering chemistry with Clooney, though he is a bit hamstrung by his one-note grumpy characterisation, forcing him to leave the charm and twinkle back home in Lake Como. At any rate, they’re loads better than Raffey Cassidy’s weird Brit robot girl Athena.

The production designs and digital images are superb, as you’d imagine, probably the best thing about the movie. It is a fun fantasy, but it remains in the interesting rather than the fascinating category.

Bird is the director of The Incredibles and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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