When we meet Casey, she’s zipping around on a motorcycle committing acts sabotage against government property in the pursuit of what she believes is right. And she’s not just a mouthpiece of positive change, all talk and no action. Casey is a damn fine female role model, one of the best in recent tentpole memory. Tomorrowland gives us not one, but two, wonderfully complex and filled out female characters. In the words of our leading lady, “I get things are bad, but what are we doing to fix it?” When it comes to fixing global problems, I don’t think there’s an app for that. Invention has pointed inward and become self-serving. With smart phones, we have palm-sized mini miracles in our hands and what do we use them for? We’re given to distraction rather than making an effort to cultivate a better world. Whatever your poison, whether it's cable news or celebrity gossip, more and more we're using the media to focus on issues that just don’t matter. But this is a problem that is in no way restricted to the geek sphere. We dismantle casting rumors and set photos rather than focusing our attention on real world issues that matter. In one specific example, Simon Pegg recently delineated the problems with geek culture and how our obsessions are infantilizing us.
With bi-weekly spats of moral outrage and armchair activism we’ve become a passive, ineffectual society that’s constantly spinning in circles. It’s a call to arms, and it’s about damn time. Bird’s Tomorrowland challenges us to be better To rise above the overwhelming odds, accept that the future is in our hands, "man up", so to speak, and do something about it. We’ve become content in the certainty of our doom and resigned ourselves to a dreary tomorrow because it doesn’t require us to do anything today. The film posits that the world has become inured to our eventual apocalypse through the onslaught of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction combined with the ever-negative, fear-mongering media. Image via Walt Disney Pictures It's All About Positivity I must confess, like our plucky heroine, I too am an optimist, and in that spirit I’ve laid out what makes Tomorrowland great and why we need more films like it. It’s a lovely film with a lovely message. It’s honestly baffling to me that Tomorrowland has taken such a critical beating. When Athena turns up again in the present, mysteriously unaffected by the passage of time, she’s taken with Casey’s ingenuity and spirit, and slips her the same pin that sent Frank Walker to Tomorrowland fifty years ago.įrom here the film takes off in all kinds of wonderfully entertaining, if occasionally muddled, directions. Casey is a dreamer with a life-long desire to travel to outer space, who spends her nights sabotaging the the cranes intended to tear down the Cape Canaveral launch platform. While the haughty judge ( Hugh Laurie) is unimpressed, a strikingly self-possessed young British girl, Athena ( Raffey Cassidy) slips Frank small gold pin emblazoned with a “T”, and ushers him into the fantastical world of Tomorrowland - an act he eventually claims ruined his life.īack in the present we meet Casey Newton ( Britt Robertson), an unfailing optimist and scientifically inclined teenager who lives at home with her NASA engineer father ( Tim McGraw) and her endearing younger brother ( Pierce Gagnon). Tomorrowland opens with grizzled grumpypants Frank Walker ( George Clooney) recalling splendid visions of the future from his childhood, “When I was a kid, the future was different,” he tells us as the scene transitions to the 1964 World Fair where we see his younger self ( Thomas Robinson) enthusiastically lugging his handcrafted jetpack for consideration. Tomorrowland is a flawed film, but since when does being flawed mean something isn’t beautiful? Let’s be very clear about something from the get-go. This is not the fate Brad Bird's ode to optimism deserves. With critics currently divided at a 50/50 dead heat on Rotten Tomatoes and opening weekend box office numbers disappointingly low, it looks like Tomorrowland is set to be labeled as a failure in the absence of serious legs or a major international turnout. Things are not looking good for Tomorrowland.
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