Mild spoilers for Tomorrowland follow.
There's one great moment in Tomorrowland where all the world-building clicks and anything seems possible. Frank Walker (the ever-affable George Clooney), his protégé Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), and their android helper Athena (Raffey Cassidy) are atop the Eiffel Tower; Frank is explaining the secret history of the monument, which is actually the brainchild of Gustave Eiffel, Nikola Tesla, Jules Verne, and Thomas Edison.
Then—no spoilers—something incredible happens.
It's the kind of thing that the Imagineer in all of us dreams of: a glimpse of an unknown magical world, hiding just below the surface of our pedestrian one. It's a look at a place where scientists are saviors, and we solve problems with creativity instead of brute force. All of Tomorrowland is like that. It's told with the enthusiasm of a 12-year-old: "And then this happened, and then this happened, and then there was a rocketship!"
That kind of enthusiasm is infectious, but there's a reason 12-year-olds don't make movies—they're great with premises, but not conclusions. Sadly, that's the problem with Tomorrowland, out today. It's a fun movie, clearly built with enthusiasm and love, but it's an intellectual litterbug. It presents you with a scintillating idea---Nikola Tesla hiding scientific wonders in the Eiffel Tower, say, or a secret place in another dimension where people are trying to save humanity from its own self-destruction---only to discard it like some half-melted Dippin' Dots in a theme-park trashcan. (It's the ice cream of the future!)
The point of Tomorrowland, much like its namesake attraction, is about better living through imagination, about optimism's triumph over cynicism. And ultimately it celebrates the kind of exceptionalism we all hope to have. It's a really nice idea, one nearly impossible to dislike, but it's a concept that we already feel at a cellular level---just watch some footage of the Moon landing and see what the hairs on your arm do.
In a way, that kind of 1960s forward-looking optimism is exactly what inspired writer/director Brad Bird's main "optimist," Casey. Her father (Tim McGraw, surprisingly) is a NASA scientist at a site where the launch pad is being dismantled. (This is Florida, after all, where proximity to both Walt Disney World and Cape Canaveral produces a certain kind of visionary.) Casey, a natural tech whiz, keeps trying to sabotage that dismantling---which Athena takes note of. Mankind's on a course for mutually assured destruction, Athena knows, and showing Casey Tomorrowland (via that pin we saw in the trailers) might just inspire her to help save the world.
To do that, though, Casey will need some help from Frank, who first got chosen to go to Tomorrowland in 1964 after inventing a jetpack. (Like a few things left unresolved in this film, it's unclear exactly what dimension/time Tomorrowland exists in---and whose invisible hands created it. Walt Disney? The Tesla/Verne/Edison/Eiffel cabal? You're never told, so be ready to roll with it.) He's since given up hope, but Casey's appearance rejuvenates his optimism. Will they be able to right the course Earth is on? Will they outsmart the doomsaying of Nix (Hugh Laurie)? You'll have to wait and see, but you can probably tell where this is going.
Make no mistake, it's a fun journey, and is worth seeing---especially for families with kids. There are great bit performances from Kathryn Hahn and Keegan-Michael Key. (Keep your eyes peeled for Star Wars sight gags when these two are around.) The visuals and production design are stunning. Clooney is always worth the price of admission and Tomorrowland gets serious props for being a movie where a young woman gets to be the hero.
But by the end, it's hard to ignore that all that greatness doesn't tell a novel or surprising tale. The things that make it wonderful—solid female characters, a sense of hope in a genre (speculative fiction) that so often favors cynicism—just don't add up to enough. It shoots for the stars, shows you the lovely view, and then falls flat. The ideas are all there, but after nearly two hours they feel like they're not really saying anything we don't already know. Any dreamer could tell you that.
