Tomorrowland review

Disney’s “Tomorrowland” is the type of failure of a movie that leaves me more disappointed than angry. The potential was there; great cast, great director, and a fairly interesting set-up, but the screenplay by “Prometheus” scribe Damon Lindelof is so disoriented and terribly organized that it often blocked the narrative flow with a series of long, ponderous scenes that have almost no impact on the story that director Brad Bird is struggling to move along. That said, Lindelof cannot take the soul blame, despite being a multiple offender on this account.

Having established his name in animation with “The Iron Giant” and Pixar favorites like “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles,”and having proven that he can transfer his visual storytelling skills to live action with the surprisingly entertaining “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” Brad Bird’s staggering ineptitude to keep this story on its tracks is depressing, even when there’s occasional fun to be had along the way.

The movie begins in the past and the future simultaneously, as George Clooney’s character Frank Walker introduces his bright-eyed childhood self; a would-be inventor who’s trying to get his homemade rocket pack into an exhibit at the World’s Fair. This is where Bird introduces us to the magic world of “Tomorrowland,” as little Frank stows away into a secret portal within Disney’s It’s a Small World ride. We then flash forward to the present day, where our world is rife with war, hunger, political stress, global-warming and other depressing realities, but Casey Newton (Britt Robertson)  is a high-school tech nerd who’s trying to stay positive even as her own father—a NASA engineer—is struggling to keep his job. After being let out of jail for tampering with a government rocket launch, she’s invited by the mysterious elite to visit “Tomorrowland” via a magic pin. Casey must find the now-disgruntled and paranoid Frank Walker to get there and to convince him that the world is worth saving.

We get a glimpse of the utopian tech universe of “Tomorrowland” through flashes and flash-back, but it takes nearly 90 minutes to get there with our characters. Lindelof spends so much time front-loading the script with exposition and backstory that the plot becomes lop-sided, saving the most valuable information for the end of the movie, after things have already shifted into auto-pilot for a special-effects climax.  The production design and the architecture of the action sequences speaks to the raw talent Bird has to keep things alive and full of wonder, but when the story breaks to a near halt every twenty minutes to explain a piece of technology or to deviate into strange asides about Clooney’s prickly relationship with an android girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy), the direction of the narrative becomes encumbered with needless obstructions.

Despite sporadic moments of exuberance and creativity, the movie is undercut by the fast-slow-fast pacing and the multiple time-line editing. It has some interesting things to say about humanity’s cognitive dissonance when it comes to our unbelievable technological achievements and our absolute ignorance when it comes to maintaining our planet, but the themes drive the story in a way that feels preachy and reductive. Clooney and Robertson have good chemistry and in theory a road movie between the two should have been a lot of fun; it’s only a shame that “Tomorrowland” neither commits to the purposeful episodic structure of a yellow-brick-road narrative or at least something streamlined enough to keep my attention.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2015