Movie Review – Tomorrowland – A World Beyond

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Spoiler alerts 2015 My movie viewing at home took in a Disney double bill last night. The second of the films I watched was this science fiction adventure inspired, as with Pirates Of The Caribbean, by a Disneyland attraction. The film plays on the nostalgic despair felt by many adults of my generation as the promised just round the corner future of jet-packs, casual space travel, monorail-cities and endless invention failed to materialize. In the film, it did, but only in a parallel dimension artificially created by and for an elite class of intellectuals. A young boy genius trying to patent a failed jet pack ends up stowing away to Tomorrowland following a mysterious girl of his own age. Years later, thrown out, and rather jaded by failing there, he has grown into George Clooney, who finds himself reluctantly trying to break into the future utopia with a young woman fuelled by wild optimism in direct opposition to his pessimistic despair. The pair are accompanied by his old childhood crush, who is actually an android, and they are pursued by terminator style robots trying to keep our present out of their future. It proves that our reluctance to put right our world’s wars, pollution and global warming is going to destroy our world and the rose-tinted future ruled by a polite but Tyrannical Hugh Laurie, doesn’t want us taking such acceptance of failure and impending planet-death into the other future. The film is glorious to look at, with set pieces like the use of the Eifel Tower as a rocket launching pad but it is left terribly undecided whether to be intelligent or just a chase movie. Its indecisiveness crushed its box-office hopes. It is also strangely downbeat for Disney. The death of the robot girl and even Laurie, who is by no means portraying an outright villain, seem un-necessary, while its elitist Plato’s Republican vision of the future only admitting the chosen few like a techno-Heaven members-only club seems decidedly mixed up too. Like its own vision of the future, the film seems trapped in a rather wretched past, and lacks Disney’s usual feel-good optimism. I still found a lot to appreciate though. Arthur Chappell