'Tomorrowland' isn't short on wonders
The only way Tomorrowland could be a more "Disney" Disney movie is if Walt Disney's supposedly frozen head was an executive producer.
It isn't, but director Brad Bird (The Incredibles) and screenwriter Damon Lindelof (Lost) are in charge of this family-friendly action adventure, which resembles its theme-park title. Tomorrowland (* * * out of four; rated PG; opens Friday nationwide) is a spectacular ride for most of it, and while you're a little let down at the end, you kind of want to jump back on and do it all over again.
Britt Robertson is Casey Newton, a Cape Canaveral kid and science whiz who gets in trouble for trying to slow down the dismantling of a NASA project, one that's keeping her engineer dad (Tim McGraw) employed. After a few hours in jail, she comes in contact with a retro-cool pin emblazoned with a "T," and when Casey touches it, she's transported to a wondrous future utopia.
This is obviously Tomorrowland, a place founded so all the brightest minds on Earth could have somewhere to work, think and be awesome without bureaucracy and other obstacles slowing them down.
It's not quite what it once was, and Casey discovers that she's the person who can fix it. Her journey finds her befriending an enigmatic, freckle-faced youngster named Athena (Raffey Cassidy), the keeper of these magical pins, and Frank Walker (George Clooney), a boy genius who grew up to be an antisocial shut-in.
As a kid, Frank was exposed to Tomorrowland after a fateful trip to the 1964 World's Fair, but later kicked out — the main reason why Frank is so crotchety in his later years. Yet he also has a vested interest in seeing Casey get to Tomorrowland and make everything right.
The movie is very much a nostalgia trip. When young Frank (Thomas Robinson) is zooming around Tomorrowland in his homemade jetpack, there are shades of The Rocketeer, a sense of wide-eyed wonderment not seen much since Steven Spielberg's 1980s heyday, and even the "kids are smart, adults are dumb" theme of E.T. and The Goonies.
Had this come out 30 years ago, it would be every child's favorite movie, and Bird and Lindelof seem to recognize as much: They fill a whole store with yesteryear items including a lifesize Han Solo in carbonite that would have been in a Gen Xer's dream bedroom as a tyke.
Still, Tomorrowland only really blasts off when the unlikely trio of Casey, Athena and Frank find each other, and their world-spanning quest includes escaping pesky humanoid robots via a bathtub and finding a new use for the Eiffel Tower.
Robertson gives Casey the needed amount of teen moxie without being obnoxious, Clooney exudes charisma even under a pile of gruff, but the real revelation here is Cassidy, a British newcomer who plays Athena as an entertaining blend of Hermione Granger, Bruce Lee and The Doctor of Doctor Who fame.
Where the film falls apart a bit is in its messaging, which boils down to the younger generation needing to step up where the old folks have failed. The theme is somewhat subtle in the first half of the film: The real world is pretty much a cornucopia of contemporary doom compared with Tomorrowland, a pristine place where diversity rules and everybody is overly nice to each other. (The locale is made even grander by Michael Giacchino's glorious score.)
But the point is sledgehammered home — and in megalomaniacal fashion — by the villain of the piece near the end, a gift-wrapped denouement that's emotional yet leaves viewers feeling as if they were suddenly left off at the souvenir shop.
Cynics might think Tomorrowland is just a cinematic set-up for a new ride at Disney World — and Uncle Frank's Magical Bathtub Explosion would sit well between Space Mountain and Cosmic Ray's Starlight Café.
For enthusiastic youngsters and the young at heart, however, the film is done well enough that it's hard not to get swept up in the visual spectacle and the thought that the future is literally at one's fingertips.