Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland wants to be a movie about the future, and it has the pieces for one: a jet pack that fails, a pin marked with a “T,” a hidden city in another dimension, and a teenage girl who refuses to accept that the world is ending. What it does not have is a way to hold those pieces together.
Trailer, via Disney.
A Failed Jet Pack at the 1964 World’s Fair
The film’s story begins at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where young inventor Frank Walker tries to show off a homemade jet pack. It fails. The judges are not impressed. Then a girl named Athena sees something in him, hands him a lapel pin, and sends him onto the It’s a Small World ride, where the pin opens a transport to Tomorrowland.
That stretch is the best thing in the film. It is quick, strange and confident.
Casey Newton and the NASA Launch Platform
In the present, teenager Casey Newton keeps sabotaging the demolition of a NASA launch platform, hoping to save her father’s job. She is arrested. After that, she finds a Tomorrowland pin among her belongings. Touching it projects her into the futuristic city — until the pin’s power runs out and she snaps back to her normal reality.
Britt Robertson plays Casey with a bright, optimistic energy the script does not always earn. George Clooney plays Frank as an adult, a bitter recluse in upstate New York who was banished from Tomorrowland years earlier and wants nothing to do with it.
The Device That Predicts the End
Casey finds that Frank has built a device predicting the imminent end of the world. Her refusal to accept that future drops the probability — something Frank has never seen. Then robotic assassins arrive to kill them, and Frank reluctantly joins Casey and Athena.
Hugh Laurie plays David Nix, and Raffey Cassidy’s Athena carries more weight than the film gives her. The reveal that Athena is an animatronic built to recruit people who fit Tomorrowland’s ideals should land harder than it does.
A Story by Bird, Lindelof and Jeff Jensen
Tomorrowland is based on the Disney Parks themed land of the same name, with a screenplay by Bird and Damon Lindelof from a story by Bird, Lindelof and Jeff Jensen. The film runs 130 minutes.
Bird and Lindelof drew on the progressive cultural movements of the Space Age and Walt Disney’s optimistic philosophy of the future, notably his vision for the planned community known as EPCOT. You can feel that ambition in every frame.
Five Countries and a $120–150 Million Loss
Principal photography began in August 2013, with scenes shot at multiple locales in five countries. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures released the film in conventional and IMAX formats on May 22, 2015.
It grossed $209 million worldwide and was considered a commercial failure, losing Disney $120–150 million at the box office. That is the part worth watching. The film’s reach was never the problem. Its grip was.
What Tomorrowland Gets Right
The tagline promises “a place where nothing is impossible.” The film believes that. The problem is that belief is not a plot.
Tomorrowland stacks ideas — a parallel dimension, animatronic recruiters, a doomsday probability machine, a memorabilia shop in Houston whose owners turn out to be Audio-Animatronics who self-destruct and blow the place apart — without deciding which one matters most. The result is a movie that keeps introducing a better version of itself and then walking away from it.
The Numbers
- Director: Brad Bird
- Screenplay: Brad Bird, Damon Lindelof
- Story: Brad Bird, Damon Lindelof, Jeff Jensen
- Runtime: 130 minutes
- Release date: May 22, 2015
- Worldwide gross: $209 million
- Disney loss: $120–150 million
- Metacritic: 60/100
Our Score
Tomorrowland is not a bad film. It is an unfinished argument. The cast is strong, the premise is generous, and the first stretch is as good as anything in the family science fiction of its moment. But my impression is that the film keeps explaining itself instead of dramatizing itself, and the ending arrives as a statement rather than a payoff.
A movie about refusing to accept a predicted future should not feel this resigned to its own. Bird built something worth saving. He just never found the machine to save it.
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