Take Two Tuesday: Tomorrowland (2015) ...or, Put a Pin in It

2015 does not sound like that long ago, but three years feels like an eternity. I have distinct memories of seeing Tomorrowland in the theaters, and objectively it feels like only yesterday, even though the calendar tells me it was more than 1,200 days. Time flies, it seems, whether you’re having fun or whether you’re hurtling toward dystopia. The world seems like a grimmer place than it did three years ago, which is really saying something because I think we all recognize that the sky has been falling for some time now.

I’ve had a lot going on in my life of late, spending a lot of unpleasant time in my own head, and it feels like I hit a crisis point a few weeks ago. It was perhaps, then, appropriate that I came back to Tomorrowland at exactly the moment I needed it. When I reviewed it in 2015, you’ll recall that I was of two minds about it. “Tomorrowland is an important film,” I wrote, “playing to some of my political/aesthetic predispositions, but it’s not as good as it ought to be.” I was cynical about the film’s attempt to kickstart an imaginative revolution, frustrated that the film hadn’t delivered on its utopian promise. I wanted to goto Tomorrowland, and I expected the film to take me there.

Reader, I missed the point. Put another way, I had spent far too long asking, “Wasn’t the future wonderful?” without realizing that I should have been asking, “Won’t the future be wonderful?” (Light spoilers follow.)

In a way, Tomorrowland has never really left me. As a lifelong visitor to Walt Disney World, it’s around every corner of my memory, a direct right turn off Main Street in the Magic Kingdom. I’ve listened to the Michael Giacchino score more times than I can count; iTunes tells me I’ve listened to one track, “Pin-Ultimate Experience,” a whopping 113 times (which makes it #59 on my Top 100 Most Played list), and it’s almost certainly my favorite Giacchino score. A few months back, I finally read the tie-in prequel novel, largely because it includes a comic book, and I’ve continued to study Brad Bird’s career with great interest, most recently with Incredibles 2. And I bought the Blu-Ray about six months ago, knowing that I’d never fully dislodged the film, and noodled around the special features until finally plunking down a few hours last week to rewatch the film.

There is a great big beautiful tomorrow animated short on the Blu-Ray, “The Origins of Plus Ultra,” that was originally intended to be the film’s opener. I understand it was cut for reasons of pacing and because it reveals some of the film’s mythology a little too early (Clooney covers some of it at the top of the third act, in Paris). But it does queue up the film such that I find it difficult to imagine the film without it, because the short prepares the audience for the central question of the film – “What happened to human endeavor? Aren’t we better than this?”

Tomorrowland is an intervention film, no doubt about it, but I think critics mistook Bird’s frustration for mere crankiness, and I share his frustration. Our world seems paradoxically broken, with one crowd shouting that the world’s problems don’t exist, and the other insisting that the problems aren’t fixable. Then there’s Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) in the middle, amazed that no one has thought to ask how to save the future. There’s something endearing about Casey’s deadpan naiveté, about her complete disbelief that no one has considered pursuing a solution. Bird has stacked the deck, no question; you get to do that when you’re writing an allegory. But there is something so inspiring when Casey’s relentless optimism forestalls the apocalypse, if only for a few seconds – a jarring moment of hope for fallen cynic Frank Walker (George Clooney). The way the film stops on this beat is downright chilling, and it’s a credit to Bird that the film doesn’t need to overexplain what’s just happened; a pause on a ticking clock is enough for a thinking audience to understand that Casey is, quite literally, our last hope. And yes, I am a sucker for films that talk about how to save humanity from its fallen state (cf. Batman v Superman).

The film remains a little bit clunky, with an occasional exposition dump like the ones co-writer Damon Lindelof employed on Lost, but there is here a simultaneous charm to them. “Now I finally answer your question, you’re gonna interrupt me?” Walker interjects, at which time I realized that the mythology of the film was all just window dressing for Bird’s real message – that there is no time to waste, that the future is now, and that someone has to step up and build it. It’s as if Brad Bird is shaking the collective audience by the shoulders and imploring us, “Get off your ass and build Tomorrowland!”

There’s a wonderful line in another Bird film – Ratatouille, one of my all-time favorites – in which a critic discards his pessimism upon realizing, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” It’s this message that infects the film’s final moments, in which the next generation of prime movers is recruited. Many of them come from humble beginnings, yes, but if Casey believes in them, we’re in good hands. I realized only now that the film’s framing device, narrated by Walker and Casey, isn’t a screenwriting cheat. It’s a fully integrated part of the story because the entire film is the advertisement on the pin. When Casey touches the pin in what is undoubtedly the film’s best, most breathtaking sequence, she sees the promise of Tomorrowland; the next set of pins, then, will essentially show the film Tomorrowland and take its beholders to that promised land. In this way, the film teaches us how to read it; we are, all of us, the next Casey Newtons.

It’s a scary position, but it’s a promising one. It’s a hopeful one, and heavens, do we need it. I no longer think the film is a failure – I think its success will be measured by what we do with it. As a piece of fiction, the film is a bit unwieldy, as the ambition of its ideas perhaps surpasses what you can reasonably accomplish in a two-hour Disney movie, but I’ll always take a movie of ideas over a movie of mere spectacle. Bird has denied that his work is influenced by Ayn Rand (the director doth protest too much, methinks), but both are creators whose stories are life-support machines for philosophies; Bird is more optimistic than Rand, but he shares her notion that the creators of the world cannot be shackled by conventional wisdom, that they must be allowed to save the world. “I was designed to find dreamers,” the animatronic Athena (an underrated Raffey Cassidy) declares, and I think Bird senses a kinship with her. Athena oddly becomes the heart of the film – oddly, because she has no heart – but then that’s the way of most science fiction. She’s the one who dispenses the pins, and she points the way for the dreamers, but she can’t take us to Tomorrowland without our help.

On second watch, I think I’m ready to go so far as to say that Tomorrowland is a Personal Canon film. Remember that the idea of the Personal Canon was always that these were movies that helped explain me to the world, and I think so much of what I believe about politics and art is in Tomorrowland. It’s the reason why I sought out an orange T pin (the Chevrolet giveaway, not the unreasonable facsimile) even after having a lukewarm reaction to the film; it’s the reason I can’t stop listening to the Giacchino score. I wanted to possess the film’s ideas in some tangible remnant. Maybe I couldn’t have exactly the film I expected, but I could distill that ideal into a few symbols – a circular enamel promise of tomorrow and a majestic swooping score that flies as lofty as our aspirations. 

Tomorrowland is a film that looks at me and asks me to get out of my rut and help save the world by doing the things I am uniquely qualified to do. It’s a film that makes me laugh and makes me cry; it’s a film that has high philosophical debates and spectacular explosions. It’s got nods to Star Wars and Disney World and the promise of a bright future. It’s a movie that needs to be seen because it’s an idea that needs to be heard. I’m so glad to have given the film another chance, because Tomorrowland asks me to give myself a second chance, too.

Tomorrowland (2015)

Tomorrowland, by Brad Bird (with some script assistance from Damon Lindelof), is sitting somewhere around 49% on Rotten Tomatoes, while his other films are solidly in the 90th percentile. What happened here? I’m not, as you might suspect, about to place Tomorrowland on a pedestal opposite its detractors, nor do I find myself agreeing wholly with the film’s detractors. Instead, the answer lies somewhere in the middle; Tomorrowland is an important film, playing to some of my political/aesthetic predispositions, but it’s not as good as it ought to be, making a few disappointing narrative mistakes on the way to its underwhelming third act.

Wasn’t the future wonderful? Tomorrowland asks why our visions of the future bend toward dystopia when our dreams used to be so optimistic. On the eve of the demolition of a NASA launch site, Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) finds a pin that promises a great big beautiful tomorrow where they’re saving a seat for her. Her quest to find Tomorrowland brings her to Frank Walker (George Clooney), a child prodigy turned jaded recluse with a long-standing link to Tomorrowland.

Here’s the thing about Tomorrowland: I cannot tell whether its most distinguishing feature is a narrative failure or precisely the point of the film. I’ll get right to the point; the entire film is predicated on the grandeur of Tomorrowland, on the gleaming promise of the future. The fable-like quality of the film relies on the wondrous spectacle of Tomorrowland, yet Tomorrowland takes entirely too long to get there, and when we do, it really fails to live up to expectations. To be fair, there’s a perfectly valid plot-related reason for this, but on the larger scale of narrative it’d be a bit like The Wizard of Oz revealing that the city of Oz is in a state of mild disrepair.

Put another way, Tomorrowland spends entirely too long getting there, dwelling in the imperfect world of the present without sufficiently jarring us out of the familiar. We sympathize with Casey (played quite well by Robertson), and after the initial glimpse of Tomorrowland we want to be there too. Ultimately, though, the promise of Tomorrowland is deferred – not, I think, to the sequel which it seems box office receipts won’t justify, but rather to the viewer’s own imagination of what Tomorrowland ought to be.

And I can’t say whether it’s a complete mistake or exactly the message of the film. That is, I can’t tell if Bird has dropped the ball entirely or if he wants us to imagine Tomorrowland for ourselves and kickstart the imaginative revolution the film is meant to provoke. Either way, I think it’s a shortcoming of the film; either it ought to fail spectacularly or soar triumphantly, but Tomorrowland simply falls short and doesn’t quite reach its target. I wanted to like the film more than I ended up doing. I never felt bored during it, thanks to the puzzle-box storytelling Lindelof seems to have perfected, but by the end of the film I was left very much with the feeling of, “Oh, that’s it?”

How then can a film which ends up being mildly disappointing simultaneously be an “important” film? We usually reserve that label for cinematic game-changers like Citizen Kane or Star Wars. But I think – I hope – that Tomorrowland might be seen as a paradigm shift in the current cultural fascination with dystopian futures. Part of the reason I love superhero movies so much is because at the end of the day they promise that everything is going to be all right. The present is often a dismal affair, and I’d much rather the entertainment I consume not amplify that feeling of dread. I’ve not read/seen Divergent or The Maze Runner in large part because I’ve already seen The Hunger Games, and there is only so much gifted-child-in-dystopia I can take. I am becoming bored of this, and in that sense Bird is preaching to a choir of one with this filmic plea for brighter imaginations.

I’m not sure why exactly Tomorrowland flopped. The opening shot, in which Clooney narrates directly to the audience about the difficulty of narration, is a solid indicator of the kind of clumsy storytelling not befitting this story, and I do wonder what Bird (who flew solo on scripts for The Incredibles and Ratatouille) could have done entirely on his own without tethering his vision to someone else. (And no, Mr. Lindelof, I haven’t forgiven you for Prometheus.) At the same time, there is a vocal group who run screaming at the merest whiff of an Ayn Rand reference, and there is what could be a strong Atlas Shrugged allusion in the midst of all this. At the end of the day, though, I think most of us wanted the film to earn its place at the innovative science-fiction table next to Inception, and it just didn’t. But if Tomorrowland can make us dream again the way Inception did (well, not quite the same brand of dreaming), its importance will outweigh its reviews. Here’s to tomorrow, and a once-more wonderful future.

Tomorrowland is rated PG for “sequences of sci-fi action violence and peril, thematic elements, and language.” There’s a really quite stunning sequence in which robots chase our heroes through their home – honestly worth the price of admission – and a few other scenes in which robots meet melty ends and people are zapped by disintegrator rays. Discussion of the fate of the world might unsettle milder viewers.