Tomorrowland 5-22-15

[Snaploud]

1. The world is a toilet, because Tomorrowland spent 70 years taking the smartest people, and brainwashing everyone left behind into wanting the world to yank the toilet's chain.

2. The solution? Stop the telepathic brainwashing, butand keep taking the smartest people in the world to tomorrow land.

Stoopid movie.

I think point two could have been fixed by a few lines at the end (talking about how bringing the dreamers over was stage 1 and that stage 2 would involve bringing the rest of humanity over once the dreamers are able to build a core structure for society to build-upon). I filled in those blanks in my head and therefore came away with a much more positive vision than perhaps was shown directly on screen. My wife, on the other hand, did not fill in those blanks and felt that the ending was elitist garbage. She enjoyed the beginning, though. *shrugs*

 

[auntiehill]

Saw "Tomorrowland" tonight. It was OK; not terrible but not terrific, either. I think it's a bit too intense in the beginning for very small kids--a few were frightened by the attack-androids. However, hubby and I really enjoyed it, up until the last 25 minutes or so. The message is delivered in such a clumsy, heavy-handed fashion that it borders on cheesy. I think the message of optimism and forward-thinking is a good one but the way in which it is delivered makes a sledgehammer seem subtle. I think the 8-13 year old crowd would love this and it would probably have the greatest impact there.

Overall, it's an OK film. It has some very good moments, but in the end, it doesn't stick the landing.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

I've loved everything Brad Bird has done so far, so I really wanted to love this, but it was a mess. In broad strokes I can appreciate the message he was going for of optimism and using scientific advancement to improve society and save the world, but the execution of that message was so poorly handled, convoluted, and often openly contradictory that it undermines his own point. Clooney seems like he's just phoning in his performance here. The little girl who played the robot was really good though. I'd give the film a "C."

In short, Dr. House AKA Governor Nix is a scientist/bureaucrat/dick who's mad at the world for not fixing itself while he's hoarding the means of fixing everything inside Eureka... err... Warehouse 13... err... Stark Industries... err... Tomorrowland, so he's using Space Mountain (which can both see possible futures and do mind control and was built by a ten year old —take that iPhone) to brainwash the world into thinking it's coming to an end, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy that actually makes it begin to come true in a ridiculous number of ways that shouldn't just be able to happen out of the blue in under sixty days.

The Audio-Animatronics at Disneyland were secretly always trying to murder you or were in love with you and couldn't express it. Suddenly, so much is explained about my last visit to Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. It's a Small World is a laser-equipped portal to another universe, and Monorails can fly.

Having any kind of formal training in a scientific field is unnecessary as long as you grin like an idiot and repeatedly shout "Optimism!" at people like Phlox high on crack and indoctrinating you into that sneaker and tracksuit cult that all killed themselves. If you have relentless optimism, you can invent jetpacks and micro-nuclear weapons (they literally saved the day with a nuke, which is an odd message for a Disney film, and especially one that treats unrestricted nuclear war like it's still a very likely end of the world scenario) and brainwashing future Circlevision domes which nearly destroy the world and make you question the lack of government oversight at this Galt's Gulch in a parallel universe —which undermines the entire point of the film's Ayn Randian message that creatives and individualists need a place free from the mediocrity of normals and the interference of governments.

 

[auntiehill]

Is it just me or did the killer androids resemble Tom Cruise, creepy smile and all?

 

[Guy Gardener]

They were the Cruisiest.

That was an empty world that were going to maroon Clooney on right?

"We can't bring there here... But we do have access to billions of other habital worlds with our pandimensional portal tech, but we're not cutting humanity up into manageable packets of a hundred million or so and send them off to their own worlds, because of spite".

 

[auntiehill]

No, it was an isolated island, far away from the eventual bombs, so they would survive, for a little while.

 

[Guy Gardener]

"It's time to go home."

"Uninhabited and uncharted, it looks like a lovely place to spend your last days."

Oh.

Well.

Damn.

Next stupid question.

It she's an immortal robot 40 years older than Clooney, who only looks like a little girl, why couldn't she and Clooney run away and be together earlier before the movie started?

 

[Grendelsbayne]

1. The world is a toilet, because Tomorrowland spent 70 years taking the smartest people, and brainwashing everyone left behind into wanting the world to yank the toilet's chain.

2. The solution? Stop the telepathic brainwashing, butand keep taking the smartest people in the world to tomorrow land.

Stoopid movie.

I think point two could have been fixed by a few lines at the end (talking about how bringing the dreamers over was stage 1 and that stage 2 would involve bringing the rest of humanity over once the dreamers are able to build a core structure for society to build-upon). I filled in those blanks in my head and therefore came away with a much more positive vision than perhaps was shown directly on screen. My wife, on the other hand, did not fill in those blanks and felt that the ending was elitist garbage. She enjoyed the beginning, though. *shrugs*

Well, no one said what the ultimate goal was, but they were basically going back to the original plan which had already previously been described as 'going public'. I suppose that could just mean heavy recruiting, but it seems to me the far more logical deduction that going public means letting all of humanity in on the secret and really going to work on fixing problems. Whether that involves bringing everyone to the new world or just importing solutions back to the old one doesn't really matter.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Nah. It's been proven that I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been, so was the speech right at the beginning, being recorded onto the pins for dreamers, or was it a direction briefing for the kid-droids.

Because when the narrative/stories started in the beginning of the movie, the timer was still counting down (00 00 63 09 22 59), but at the end of the movie it was "one year later". So unless it took those two to a year to tell a story about 3 days, that is an unreasonable disconnect.

Of course what that probably means is that they moved the apocalypse uptime a little, but not that far?

 

[Awesome Possum]

Nah. It's been proven that I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been, so was the speech right at the beginning, being recorded onto the pins for dreamers, or was it a direction briefing for the kid-droids.

Because when the narrative/stories started in the beginning of the movie, the timer was still counting down (00 00 63 09 22 59), but at the end of the movie it was "one year later". So unless it took those two to a year to tell a story about 3 days, that is an unreasonable disconnect.

Of course what that probably means is that they moved the apocalypse uptime a little, but not that far?

I think that was just part of the flashback and meant to introduce the concept of the countdown. By destroying the tower, the negative thoughts were no longer being broadcast and people would stop working towards bringing about the end of the world. There was even a scene where Casey's magical optimism stopped the countdown and showed a bright future for a few seconds.

 

[Mr Light]

I mostly loved the movie but I had some big problems with it. I thought the three leads were fantastic, particularly the little girl who played Athena. She carried such incredible gravitas and competence and was such a bad ass. She's gonna be a hugely famous actress ten years from now.

The mystery of Tomorrowland and the first half of the movie held great promise and I loved the audio-animatronic bad guys chasing after them. I love the interactions between the three leads. Lil' Frank's introduction to Tomorrowland is a perfect scene that unfortunately promises something amazing that we never get to see.

My big problem is in the last act. We finally get to this amazing wonderful place... and it's decayed and abandoned. It looks like Hugh Laurie is the only guy living there anymore with a couple of robots. (At the end of the movie we see a few people wander out) So we never get the perspective of the general populace and it just feels like a dead and empty place. Were the rest of them going along with Nix's plan? Did they even know? I'd rather Casey met with the others and got them to turn on Nix.

Speaking of Casey. The entire movie is predicated on her being the only one to save the world. And what was her big contribution? To guess that the Monitor was broadcasting bad vibes. Since Frank was the one who built the damn thing, did he really need HER to tell him that? And Frank is the one who does all the fighting and drops the bomb. So really, she didn't do anything. This movie could have basically been Frank and Athena with the same result. (she convinced Frank to go help, but surely the love of his life Athena could have done that?)

I was hoping that she would invent something that would save the world. That would stop nuclear bombs from going off or something. Or she would broadcast a vision of Tomorrowland to everyone on the planet to get them to stop their evil ways and look to hope. Her inventive genius contributed nothing to the movie.

Having Nix be behind the entire world going to hell was also just way too simplistic. I would have loved if he was an asshole that they convinced to help them because she showed him the light.

Also, I'm pretty sure Nix caused 9/11.

Also, I thought it was hilarious that George Clooney was in love with an 11 year old girl. Pretty ballsy, Disney.

 

[DWF]

I thimnk Frank was too disillusioned by Tmorrowland to see the truth about the monitor. I also think young Frank fell in love with Athena and was upon learning that she was a robot helped to disillusion him about the future, it was nice how he still seemed to be in love with her without it being creepy in any way.

 

[Mr Light]

This is one of those stories where they avoid the most fascinating part of it, the time when Tomorrowland was actually up and running when Frank was a kid. I saw the ten minute preview at Epcot a couple weeks ago which showed the Frank flashback ending with him jetting around Tomorrowland, which just set up the expectation of this incredible story that never happened in the movie. I was dying to see that period in the story.

 

[Unicron]

I mostly loved the movie but I had some big problems with it. I thought the three leads were fantastic, particularly the little girl who played Athena. She carried such incredible gravitas and competence and was such a bad ass. She's gonna be a hugely famous actress ten years from now.

The mystery of Tomorrowland and the first half of the movie held great promise and I loved the audio-animatronic bad guys chasing after them. I love the interactions between the three leads. Lil' Frank's introduction to Tomorrowland is a perfect scene that unfortunately promises something amazing that we never get to see.

Agreed. Almost every review I've read has said that the three main cast members were great, they just didn't have the best script to work from that could have made the movie more epic. Someone joked in the panel interview with the cast that the relationship between Casey, Frank and Athena is pretty dysfunctional in the first half of the movie, and that Athena is the grownup in the truck. I thought it was funny when Frank mentioned that her "switch off protocol" was just a ruse to manipulate Casey.

My big problem is in the last act. We finally get to this amazing wonderful place... and it's decayed and abandoned. It looks like Hugh Laurie is the only guy living there anymore with a couple of robots. (At the end of the movie we see a few people wander out) So we never get the perspective of the general populace and it just feels like a dead and empty place. Were the rest of them going along with Nix's plan? Did they even know? I'd rather Casey met with the others and got them to turn on Nix.

Speaking of Casey. The entire movie is predicated on her being the only one to save the world. And what was her big contribution? To guess that the Monitor was broadcasting bad vibes. Since Frank was the one who built the damn thing, did he really need HER to tell him that? And Frank is the one who does all the fighting and drops the bomb. So really, she didn't do anything. This movie could have basically been Frank and Athena with the same result. (she convinced Frank to go help, but surely the love of his life Athena could have done that?)

I agree the last act is the big problem, and I'd have liked to see more of the "real" Tomorrowland than we actually get to see. I'm not sure I'd entirely agree about Casey not having a purpose, although I understand your point. I think her main role is to be the optimist with the bright mind, who can provide the vision to help get Tomorrowland running again. Frank certainly has the intelligence and experience, but he's largely bitter and cynical about his exile (understandably). Athena mentioned that she had tried to recruit others but it's not clear what happened to them, and Casey was the last possibility.

I also think Athena was reluctant to confront Frank directly, which is why she pushed Casey out of the truck and only came back for them later. Frank had a lot of bitterness towards her, justified or not, and had probably convinced himself that he could no longer feel affection for her since she couldn't return it in a human way.

 

[Mr Light]

Oh yeah that's another plot hole/mystery. What happened to the other 11 people that Athena recruited? Did the A-A robots kill them all?

Surely if Athena walked up to Frank's farm and used her feminine wiles (not in a sexual way but an emotional one; he was in love with her and she's actually older than he is) she could have gotten him to come along with her, no matter how bitter he was.

 

[DWF]

Athena's badges all had a limited charge, it's doubtful that the other 11 figured out what Casey did. And really it looked pretty expensive to show what they did of Tomorrowland both in the young Frank scenes and Casey's invitation, the multi-leveled swimming pools were amazing enough, I can't imagine how much of the movie's budget those scenes alone took to make.

 

[Mr Light]

Oh, man! I forgot about those swimming pools! That was the coolest idea ever!

 

[Admiral2]

That was meh... Eureka meets Wall-E with a sprinkle of House, MD...

 

[JD]

I saw the movie this morning, and I enjoyed it overall, but I do agree it did have some issues. My biggest problem was I was still not entirely clear on what exactly Nix's big master plan was. I didn't get why he was just letting things go to hell, and why he was so determined to let it happen that he willing to send his Animatronics to kill anyone who tried to get to Tomorrowland.
When I first came out of the movie, I absolutely loved it, but the more I think about it and think about the issues you guys/girls are pointing out it's starting to kind of fall apart.
One thing I did absolutely love was the visuals and the design of Tomorrowland itself.

 

[Enterpriserules]

I really liked this movie. I honestly had to sit down and review it. it was all about the optimism and hope of the movie for me and I hope more people will give it a chance.