The best argument for Tomorrowland is its release date; one week after Mad Max: Fury Road, a film about a world destroyed by an oil war, and a week before San Andreas, in which an apocalyptic earthquake destroys half of North America. Less a blockbuster action film than a stern but well-intentioned lecture accompanied by an elaborate audiovisual presentation, Tomorrowland argues that rampant cynicism is actively poisoning our future. People become so convinced by movies like Mad Max and San Andreas that the world is doomed that they start to believe it really is. So they give up, and dystopia becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tomorrowland tries, through sheer force of will and a heaping helping of bright, shiny special effects, to reverse that trend; to convince people that there’s hope for tomorrow.
It doesn’t want to entertain; its goal is nothing less than to inspire an entire generation. But it might have been easier to achieve the latter if it had worked a little harder to accomplish the former.
The film comes from Brad Bird, the modern king of retro futurism. Almost all of his movies, from The Iron Giant to The Incredibles to even Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol are set in or inspired by a “simpler” time defined by optimism and miraculous technology. True to form, Tomorrowland begins at the 1964 World’s Fair with “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,” the theme song from Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress. (Actually, if Tomorrowland hews closely to any actual ride from Tomorrowland it’s the Carousel of Progress, a lengthy, talky audio-animatronic-heavy show inside a circular theater that rotates around a central stage. Viewers enter, ride around for a while hearing how technology and optimism will improve their lives, return to the same spot they entered, and leave.)
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