Does the future look bright for Tomorrowland?
In the movie, an unlikely duo—jaded inventor Frank Walker (George Clooney) and optimistic teen Casey Newton (Britt Robertson)—work together to unearth the secrets of a mysterious place somewhere in time and space. Despite what little they've seen, Tomorrowland may not really as utopic as it seems.
The PG-rated sci-fi adventure mystery movie also stars Raffey Cassidy as Athena, Kathryn Hahn as Ursula, Keegan-Michael Key as Hugo, Hugh Laurie as David Nix, Tim McGraw as Eddie Newton and Thomas Robinson as young Frank Walker.
Brad Bird directed the film, and he co-wrote the screenplay with Damon Lindelof.
"I think that it's an original film, and it's hard to describe to people," Bird recently told E! News' Catt Sadler. It's kind of all of these things wrapped up into one. That is a challenge in itself, finding the right tone for it, because it's not really like any other single movie." For Clooney, Tomorrowland presented an opportunity to put something positive on the big screen. "Brad and I talked about it a lot. The idea was that there is such bad news out there, and it's all bad news when you turn on the TV now. It's hard after a while. It's hard on your soul," the two-time Oscar winner told E!. "We said, 'Let's do one that's really entertaining that actually is positive.'"
Walt Disney Pictures' Tomorrowland is in theaters Friday.
Here's what the critics are saying about the movie:
• New York's David Edelstein writes, "Tomorrowland is the most enchanting reactionary cultural diatribe ever made. It's so smart, so winsome, so utterly rejuvenating that you'll have to wait until your eyes have dried and your buzz has worn off before you can begin to argue with it. And you should argue with it—even if you had a blast, as I did, and want to see it again with the kids, as I do—because it's a major pop-culture statement with all sorts of implications, both vital and nutty...To reveal too much of Tomorrowland's zigzag narrative would be criminal—the fun comes from being constantly disoriented."
• The film "is a great-looking, old-fashioned, at times soaring adventure ultimately brought down by a needlessly convoluted plot, some surprisingly casual violence and heavy-handed lectures about how we're our own worst enemy and we're going to destroy the planet if we don't get it together. Gee, where have we heard that before? I know: in a million other movies," The Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper writes. Calling the film "the first major disappointment of the summer movie season," he adds, "It's a bumpy, uneven ride, but Tomorrowland had just enough charm and excitement and visual treats where I was close to recommending it—until a final series of scenes that reminded me of certain particularly schmaltzy TV spots, and I'll just leave it at that. Instead of dialing up the fun, the filmmakers piled on with the lecture. In the last few minutes of this movie I was reminded of my days as a student, when the semester was over and it was the last day of school, and the teacher was still lecturing us as the final bell rang. Enough. We get it. We need to do better. Now can we get back to the flying cars?"
• The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy says Tomorrowland is "a sparkling work of speculative fiction." That being said, the critic asks, "How many sci-fi/fantasy films of recent years have climaxed with anything other than massive conflict and conflagration? Whatever the number, Tomorrowland is one of the few to place far more emphasis on talk than action, which is what will probably contribute to what, for some, will make for a softer experience than the genre norm. The film's general coolness and vision of a potentially serene future reminds more of Spike Jonze's Her than of anything in the Marvel, George Lucas or James Cameron-derived worlds, not to mention other far more violent ones."
• The New York Times' A.O. Scott says Tomorrowland "is not disappointing in the usual way," as it isn't "convincing or enchanting." Clooney, for example, "is wry and gruff, and then earnest and amiable, in a role that dozens of actors could have played." Robertson "is perky and panicky in the same way." Cassidy, on the other hand, "is an intriguing performer, funny and a little scary in her composure." According to Scott, "Everyone else...would be better as a cartoon. To some extent, that goes for the whole movie. Its enormous lapses in narrative and conceptual coherence—its blithe disregard for basic principles of science-fiction credibility—would be less irksome in the fantastical cosmos of animation."
• "Named after one of Disneyland's least interesting themed areas, Tomorrowland is a globe-trotting, time-traveling caper whose giddy visual whimsies and exuberant cartoon violence are undermined by a coy mystery that stretches as long as the line for Space Mountain on a hot summer day," The Wrap's Inkoo Kang writes, adding that it feels "like a narrative version of those videos that play above roller coasters today." Kang also found "the world-building" to be " unsatisfying," despite its "infrastructural marvels—tiered swimming pools, astro-commutes and beautiful tangles of airborne boulevards."
• "In a junk-food summer, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is 'Think smart,'" L.A. Weekly's Amy Nicholson writes. She says Casey is "one of the best female role models to hit screens this year," while Bird "layers on plenty of dazzle." In fact, she says, "Bird has made a film that every child should see. And if his $190 million dream flops, he'll be asking the same question as his movie: When did it become uncool to care?"
• According to The Chicago Tribune's Christopher Borrelli, "The film is pointedly an argument against apathy, a consistently beautiful vision that conjures a future better than the one we expect. Just as Disney himself could both market optimism and swallow it, Tomorrowland ingeniously weaves the theme park's bottomless sense of invention with a plot about our loss of confidence in the future. It is, in some ways, a two-hour act of furious clapping for Tinker Bell to wake up—or a kiddie adaptation of Interstellar." Though he has some issues with the film, Borelli also writes that the "secrets make you lean forward a bit, but the movie zooms past too quickly, becoming a mash of good intentions, a little too on the nose with its message of social responsibility and possibility to let its jet packets soar."
• "Tomorrowland is a film that benefits from little knowledge before you buckle in, which is good, because trying to explain its plot would take up the rest of this review. If that sounds like a negative, it is not," Empire's Olly Richards writes. Bird and Lindelof "have constructed a story in which you really don't know what's going to happen next. It's a rare thrill. In so many family action films the best you can hope for is a multiple-choice option—will the hero beat the villain now or in around 25 minutes?" he asks. "Yet here there is constant surprise, interesting ideas, and Bird's enthusiasm as a director never lets up."