Sunday 31 May 2015

Tomorrowland movie review

Brad Bird's Tomorrowland seemed promising from all the previews, and it's clear that he has a vision, but in just about every area, this vision is compromised by its own muddled screenplay.


Casey (Britt Robertson) is a teenager who, after being arrested due to her efforts to prevent the dismantling of a NASA launch pad, finds a mysterious pin among her stuff upon receiving bail. This pin shows her a vision of a futuristic utopia, which she seeks to visit. However, she's hounded by machines who seek to stop her... or something. You see, it's never exactly clear what's going on in this film. A lot of elements are thrown around, but none of them are explained, leaving huge blank spaces where details to help understand the plot would usually be. This starts at around the second act, where things get increasingly muddled until a point is reached where it's not entirely clear what the point even is any more. Casey wants to go to Tomorrowland, but why should we care? We're not left in this part of the movie for long, as soon we start to receive answers, but these answers only serve to further mire the plot in confusion. There's one scene that I saw out-of-context before The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and when it played in the movie itself, I had just as little idea what was going on.

It starts promisingly enough, though. The first act has a sustained sense of wonder even in spite of the occasional hiccup. One of the first things Tomorrowland shows off is its dazzling visuals, which showcase a constant level of craft and ingenuity throughout. This is a beautiful movie, with a brilliantly realized style and fantastic special effects. With all the initial bright colours and creativity, it almost seems like an animated movie realized in live action. It's when director Brad Bird allows us to just take in the majesty of these visuals that the film truly shines, which is why it's such a shame that more often our eyes are drawn to the main characters due to shaky, unnecessary action scenes that not only add nothing to the plot, but actively detract from it by wasting time that could be spent getting to the point. Tomorrowland isn't an action movie, and yet it keeps trying to be, thus shying away from where its true strengths lie, and providing a lot of unsatisfying scenes with its mediocre action direction.

Worse still, all the space taken up by these action scenes contributes to a negative side-effect of the film's focus on its visual effects: It wastes a lot of time. There's the aforementioned action scenes that prove completely useless, but there are scenes in the film which take far too long to actually get to their point. It's frustrating, because all of the time wasted could have been used to explain the plot, but instead it's explained in info dumps that aren't even Tomorrowland's worst violation of the show-don't-tell principle. No, the worst example of that is the repeated statements of the movie's theme in dialogue. By the third act, the constant hammering-in of the "be optimistic" message gets wearying, especially when it's communicated primarily by being told to you or through contrast with blatantly exaggerated strawmen, and then said third act transforms the whole message into some bloated, ridiculous plot device to provide a bad guy for our heroes to stop.

If nothing else, though, the way that Tomorrowland challenges the audience to change their way of thinking is admirable. In its pro-optimism preaching, it asks what people are doing to change the future they're so pessimistic about. As with the discussion of optimism, all the finger-pointing gets really old by the end, but there's a nugget of a good idea in there. Unfortunately, in all the narrative murk, this idea winds up compromised, and the amount of emphasis placed on one person being positive seems almost naive. It's often presented that one person's optimism can cause just the slightest amount of possible change, but it's very hard to buy that there's only one optimistic person in the world. Brad Bird really does have the right impressions with this film, but somewhere along the lines-likely as a result of infamous writer Damon Lindelof-all his ideas came out as deeply compromised shadows of themselves.

The poster prominently features George Clooney's character, Frank Walker, but this character only really enters the story at the halfway mark after effectively disappearing in the first act. This character has some issues with his family, and of all the optimism vs. pessimism conflicts in the film, Frank's resonates the most, but it's barely touched upon and his outlook-one that shifts between optimism and pessimism throughout the movie-works far better for keeping the plot moving than for thematic resonance. One really has to wonder at what point the filmmakers decided not to deal further with Frank's family issues and instead decide just to tell us what they're trying to say yet again.

With Tomorrowland, it's hard not to wonder what could have been. Both Bird and Lindelof are credited with the screenplay, so it's possible that there was an earlier, much clearer version of the script that doesn't fall into the traps of the final version. However, at some point it transformed into what we have here: A confusing, preachy disappointment. The film isn't completely worthless, which is never more obvious than in the moments where you get a glimpse of its potential, but that potential is buried underneath mountains of wasted time and unexplained elements. For the record, if you still plan to watch Tomorrowland, I highly suggest seeing it in the IMAX, as the effects are clearly built to function as a giant-screen 3D spectacle. However, even in the IMAX, this film wouldn't be any less disappointing.

4/10

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