Bad Movie Night- Tomorrowland
Over an hour into Tomorrowland, there was a mass exodus of people either heading out for more treats or needing the restroom. At the time, I was debating whether to stay in my seat or join the crowd, but since we were over an hour in and we still had not reached Tomorrowland nor did we really know what the plot was supposed to be, I joined the crowd. When I got back, literally nothing had happened and my brother-in-law had fallen asleep. Still not in Tomorrowland and no plot development.
And it's sad because Tomorrowland does have some good moments and positive aspects... but they get bured under this uneven mess of a screenplay. It's like the Disney people had a list of stuff that they wanted to include (atomic age Disney nostalgia, It's a Small World, Coca Cola, the queue outside Space Mountain which prompted my sister to lean over and whisper "OMG there's no line! Get on Space Mountain now!!!", think positive, Star Wars toys, more Star Wars stuff, oh right we should put in some Tomorrowland I guess... and I think the heroine's phone was product placement as well...) and a bunch of scenes they wanted to gank from better movies (Terminator 2 was an obvious one) and then they shoved it in a blender without ever figuring out what story they wanted to tell or what the tone should be or whether or not they were making any sense at all. The end result is more depressing than uplifting with a message so garbled that it felt less like "Optimism will help give us the drive to fix the world!" to "Acknowledging that problems exist is a bummer so just pretend they don't exist and it will all work out somehow... oh wait, we're taking all the people who could fix the world to Tomorrowland so I guess we're screwed."
The film begins with George Clooney narrating the plot for us... sort of... and we all know what narration means, yep, it means the screenwriters are LAZY. There's also a doomsday countdown clock which is, once again, LAZY. George begins at the 1964 World's Fair which is actually pretty cool. Since they make a point of focusing on Disney's Small World exhibit and Alice in Wonderland characters, which gives it a feel of nostalgic Disneyland. It's a world that you'd like to visit for a while. George is just a kid, but he is here to win a prize for his invention- the jet pack from Rocketeer. Now, granted, young George should be dead either from being set on fire by the rockets or being dragged to death when his invention only propels horizontally, but we can forgive that. Meaniepants Hugh Laurie is not impressed, but a little girl named Athena (who we are told is 12 but she could pass for 11 or even 10) takes a shine to him and gives him a Tomorrowland pin... which doesn't function anything like the Tomorrowland pins we will run into later. This pin actually allows him to visit Tomorrowland... and Tomorrowland looks fantastic. The visuals are great and it really works as a future city that people would actually want to live in. People look like real people who wear the kind of fashions that real people might want to wear (as opposed to Star Trek's drab colors and dumpy lines or The Hunger Games Party City at the club collection) but don't get too excited because we won't be exploring this world. Nope, we're here to waste three minutes on a sequences stolen from the Rocketeer and then we swap to a new story.
Our second narrator is a 25-year-old teenager named Casey. Actually, there is plenty to like about her. She is smart. She is tech-savvy. She has engineering skills and may be an inventor as well. She doesn't have a love interest nor does she spend her time worrying over what the boys think of her. She's also an optimist which takes the form of asking "Can we fix it?" when presented with the world's problems... in a sequences of scenes that are horrendously depressing because all of the problems presented are very much real and won't be solved by happy thoughts or Disney movies. This is the first time we run into major problems with the tone of this film. We are supposed to thinking about an optimistic tomorrow that we will need to save from some unknown threat and what we get is this downer, almost mean-spirited tone. Casey may be an optimist but the makers of this movie are not. They want you know that when you walk out of the theatre, you have just wasted time and money and being part of the problem when you could have been elswhere being part of the solution. Thanks, Disney!
Casey spends her nights vandalizing cranes at Cape Canaveral because... okay, I don't understand why this is an expression of optimism. Does she think that this one launch site represents the entire space program? Is she trying to save her dad's job because he works for NASA? I don't get what the pay off is, other than showing us that she is tech savvy and badass-ish-kind-of. Her efforts land her in jail, but when she is released, there's a Tomorrowland pin with her stuff. Does it take her to Tomorrowland which is what this movie is supposed to be about? No. The pin is like a techie LSD that induces hallucinations... hallucinations that prevent you from seeing where you're going so Casey walks into walls and falls down the stairs (which is played for laughs but she could have been seriously injured or killed.) The hallucination takes us to Tomorrowland and we finally get to spend a little time in this world... this wonderfully conceived future world that looks like a place everyone would want to live in (but you don't get to live there unless you're special, so screw you, losers) and by the time the hallucination ends, she is determined to find this place (and she is standing waist deep in a swamp, so she also could be drowning or attacked by gators.) I suppose Tomorrowland is realistic in the sense that its techie visionary creators are also clearly idiots (note- there's a tech company in my area whose employees wear logo T-shirts and are incapable of crossing a street, they literally stand there with thumbs up their butts when the light is with them, but when the oncoming traffic goes they walk right into it. idiots.) Anyway, from this point forward, the rest of the movie will be getting from one place to another place while pretending we're in some other movie.
Location 1: Casy goes to a scifi memorabilia store run by two cliches who turn out to be robots. Why? Clearly the best way to sell Star Wars is by making fun of the people who like Star Wars, who are clearly sad and pathetic losers. The people of Tomorrowland hate scifi geeks so much that they programmed robots to act like pathetic losers. Nice one, Disney. At this location, the writers attempt to write Men in Black only minus all the humor and fun. At the end of the sequence, Casey is rescued by childlike robot Athena, and three innocent police men are obliterated with no consequences because optimism is not giving a crap when bad things happen... wait... no.
Location 2: At George Clooney's house of awesome traps we visit the fim Home Alone. This is probably the best part of the film. George Clooney's house of robot slaughter is a lot of fun, keeps the action moving quickly, has easily defined stakes (our mains staying alive) and is the one segment just about everyone praised. We also loved it in Home Alone. Clooney and Casy escape the house in a bathtub that takes them to... some lake not far away... WHY ARE WE NOT IN TOMORROWLAND??? At this point, we're an hour in and we're still trying to get to where the plot is.
Location 3: George Clooney has some kind of teleporter (are we in Star Trek now? I think we might be in Star Trek now... or maybe Galaxy Quest) and it takes us to... Paris??? Wait, what??? We are over and hour in and we are still going from place to place. This is the point where the audience exodus began. Screw it, let's get that free popcorn refill. Do they refill the soda? Cool. Tell me if anything interesting happened. In Paris, more innocent people die and we finally travel to Tomorrowland... in a steam punk looking rocket because why the hell not? Tone? Tone is for losers. Consistent concept and visuals? Boring. Just throw whatever in because, say it with me, LAZY.
Location 4: The queue of Space Mountain. No. Really. Tomorrowland is all busted up and all that's left are some robots who don't matter, Hugh Laurie, a CGI ship and that space upstairs where they wrap the Space Mountain line... and that isn't the story. Whatever messed up Tomorrowland is not the story. The story is that our world is being destroyed in some unexplained way, because the writers couldn't really work that bit out (LAZY LAZY LAZY), because of pessimism beams being sent from Tomorrowland. Or something. Also cranky Hugh Laurie speechifies for like ten minutes about sad and depressed he was over the world being so horrible. Basically, they set him up as a frustrated idealist, then we're supposed to laugh at his horrific death. Optimism!
Did I mention that 50-year-old Clooney has apparently spent his entire life bitterly pining over the robot he fell in love with when he was 12? There's a scene where he interacts with her as if they were romantic partners and it is hella creepy. I get that she's supposed to be a robot that doesn't age, which I guess means the writers saw Interview with a Vampire and decided that their optimistic movie needed a child who does not age, because that worked out so well for the vampires. Only they clearly don't get that it's squicky. Clooney is a middle aged dude who is still not over the crush he had as a kid. Oh wait, are we in Twilight now? Did he imprint on her? Is that how true love works now? See what I mean about this? It's just weird. Well, the robot saved the day and learned to love and have ideas, so I guess this was her story all along... wait... Then why did we spend the whole movie with Casey if she has zero character development, doesn't grow and learns nothing? What was the point of all that?????? Why didn't we spend the movie with Athena the robot??????
So the world is saved and now Tomorrowland can be repopulated with all the people who were going to save the world, so I think that means we're screwed now but hey, optimism means ignoring problems. Or something.
Honestly, I think someone said to write a movie about Tomorrowland and make it seem Disney-ish (and plug Coca Cola). The writers have no idea what story they are trying to tell or how to pace it. They also make use of my new least favorite plot device called "Try to fake a mystery be jumping around in time." We could have followed little kid Clooney in which case we would have understood how Tomorrowland went bad and why it needed fixing. We could have followed Athena and had the same result. Instead, the writers say "Oh there's a plot you need to care about, but we won't tell you what it is. Guess!" Then, the characters who are in the who make pointless excuses for not explaining themselves. Clooney is just too grumpy to explain and Athena is pulling a Glinda (refusing to divulge crucial information because you're not ready or won't believe it or it will blow your puny mind.) It's annoying and sad because there are some good ideas and visuals in this film but they're buried under the mess.
And they stole the field from "Field of Dreams." Damn you, movie!
And it's sad because Tomorrowland does have some good moments and positive aspects... but they get bured under this uneven mess of a screenplay. It's like the Disney people had a list of stuff that they wanted to include (atomic age Disney nostalgia, It's a Small World, Coca Cola, the queue outside Space Mountain which prompted my sister to lean over and whisper "OMG there's no line! Get on Space Mountain now!!!", think positive, Star Wars toys, more Star Wars stuff, oh right we should put in some Tomorrowland I guess... and I think the heroine's phone was product placement as well...) and a bunch of scenes they wanted to gank from better movies (Terminator 2 was an obvious one) and then they shoved it in a blender without ever figuring out what story they wanted to tell or what the tone should be or whether or not they were making any sense at all. The end result is more depressing than uplifting with a message so garbled that it felt less like "Optimism will help give us the drive to fix the world!" to "Acknowledging that problems exist is a bummer so just pretend they don't exist and it will all work out somehow... oh wait, we're taking all the people who could fix the world to Tomorrowland so I guess we're screwed."
The film begins with George Clooney narrating the plot for us... sort of... and we all know what narration means, yep, it means the screenwriters are LAZY. There's also a doomsday countdown clock which is, once again, LAZY. George begins at the 1964 World's Fair which is actually pretty cool. Since they make a point of focusing on Disney's Small World exhibit and Alice in Wonderland characters, which gives it a feel of nostalgic Disneyland. It's a world that you'd like to visit for a while. George is just a kid, but he is here to win a prize for his invention- the jet pack from Rocketeer. Now, granted, young George should be dead either from being set on fire by the rockets or being dragged to death when his invention only propels horizontally, but we can forgive that. Meaniepants Hugh Laurie is not impressed, but a little girl named Athena (who we are told is 12 but she could pass for 11 or even 10) takes a shine to him and gives him a Tomorrowland pin... which doesn't function anything like the Tomorrowland pins we will run into later. This pin actually allows him to visit Tomorrowland... and Tomorrowland looks fantastic. The visuals are great and it really works as a future city that people would actually want to live in. People look like real people who wear the kind of fashions that real people might want to wear (as opposed to Star Trek's drab colors and dumpy lines or The Hunger Games Party City at the club collection) but don't get too excited because we won't be exploring this world. Nope, we're here to waste three minutes on a sequences stolen from the Rocketeer and then we swap to a new story.
Our second narrator is a 25-year-old teenager named Casey. Actually, there is plenty to like about her. She is smart. She is tech-savvy. She has engineering skills and may be an inventor as well. She doesn't have a love interest nor does she spend her time worrying over what the boys think of her. She's also an optimist which takes the form of asking "Can we fix it?" when presented with the world's problems... in a sequences of scenes that are horrendously depressing because all of the problems presented are very much real and won't be solved by happy thoughts or Disney movies. This is the first time we run into major problems with the tone of this film. We are supposed to thinking about an optimistic tomorrow that we will need to save from some unknown threat and what we get is this downer, almost mean-spirited tone. Casey may be an optimist but the makers of this movie are not. They want you know that when you walk out of the theatre, you have just wasted time and money and being part of the problem when you could have been elswhere being part of the solution. Thanks, Disney!
Casey spends her nights vandalizing cranes at Cape Canaveral because... okay, I don't understand why this is an expression of optimism. Does she think that this one launch site represents the entire space program? Is she trying to save her dad's job because he works for NASA? I don't get what the pay off is, other than showing us that she is tech savvy and badass-ish-kind-of. Her efforts land her in jail, but when she is released, there's a Tomorrowland pin with her stuff. Does it take her to Tomorrowland which is what this movie is supposed to be about? No. The pin is like a techie LSD that induces hallucinations... hallucinations that prevent you from seeing where you're going so Casey walks into walls and falls down the stairs (which is played for laughs but she could have been seriously injured or killed.) The hallucination takes us to Tomorrowland and we finally get to spend a little time in this world... this wonderfully conceived future world that looks like a place everyone would want to live in (but you don't get to live there unless you're special, so screw you, losers) and by the time the hallucination ends, she is determined to find this place (and she is standing waist deep in a swamp, so she also could be drowning or attacked by gators.) I suppose Tomorrowland is realistic in the sense that its techie visionary creators are also clearly idiots (note- there's a tech company in my area whose employees wear logo T-shirts and are incapable of crossing a street, they literally stand there with thumbs up their butts when the light is with them, but when the oncoming traffic goes they walk right into it. idiots.) Anyway, from this point forward, the rest of the movie will be getting from one place to another place while pretending we're in some other movie.
Location 1: Casy goes to a scifi memorabilia store run by two cliches who turn out to be robots. Why? Clearly the best way to sell Star Wars is by making fun of the people who like Star Wars, who are clearly sad and pathetic losers. The people of Tomorrowland hate scifi geeks so much that they programmed robots to act like pathetic losers. Nice one, Disney. At this location, the writers attempt to write Men in Black only minus all the humor and fun. At the end of the sequence, Casey is rescued by childlike robot Athena, and three innocent police men are obliterated with no consequences because optimism is not giving a crap when bad things happen... wait... no.
Location 2: At George Clooney's house of awesome traps we visit the fim Home Alone. This is probably the best part of the film. George Clooney's house of robot slaughter is a lot of fun, keeps the action moving quickly, has easily defined stakes (our mains staying alive) and is the one segment just about everyone praised. We also loved it in Home Alone. Clooney and Casy escape the house in a bathtub that takes them to... some lake not far away... WHY ARE WE NOT IN TOMORROWLAND??? At this point, we're an hour in and we're still trying to get to where the plot is.
Location 3: George Clooney has some kind of teleporter (are we in Star Trek now? I think we might be in Star Trek now... or maybe Galaxy Quest) and it takes us to... Paris??? Wait, what??? We are over and hour in and we are still going from place to place. This is the point where the audience exodus began. Screw it, let's get that free popcorn refill. Do they refill the soda? Cool. Tell me if anything interesting happened. In Paris, more innocent people die and we finally travel to Tomorrowland... in a steam punk looking rocket because why the hell not? Tone? Tone is for losers. Consistent concept and visuals? Boring. Just throw whatever in because, say it with me, LAZY.
Location 4: The queue of Space Mountain. No. Really. Tomorrowland is all busted up and all that's left are some robots who don't matter, Hugh Laurie, a CGI ship and that space upstairs where they wrap the Space Mountain line... and that isn't the story. Whatever messed up Tomorrowland is not the story. The story is that our world is being destroyed in some unexplained way, because the writers couldn't really work that bit out (LAZY LAZY LAZY), because of pessimism beams being sent from Tomorrowland. Or something. Also cranky Hugh Laurie speechifies for like ten minutes about sad and depressed he was over the world being so horrible. Basically, they set him up as a frustrated idealist, then we're supposed to laugh at his horrific death. Optimism!
Did I mention that 50-year-old Clooney has apparently spent his entire life bitterly pining over the robot he fell in love with when he was 12? There's a scene where he interacts with her as if they were romantic partners and it is hella creepy. I get that she's supposed to be a robot that doesn't age, which I guess means the writers saw Interview with a Vampire and decided that their optimistic movie needed a child who does not age, because that worked out so well for the vampires. Only they clearly don't get that it's squicky. Clooney is a middle aged dude who is still not over the crush he had as a kid. Oh wait, are we in Twilight now? Did he imprint on her? Is that how true love works now? See what I mean about this? It's just weird. Well, the robot saved the day and learned to love and have ideas, so I guess this was her story all along... wait... Then why did we spend the whole movie with Casey if she has zero character development, doesn't grow and learns nothing? What was the point of all that?????? Why didn't we spend the movie with Athena the robot??????
So the world is saved and now Tomorrowland can be repopulated with all the people who were going to save the world, so I think that means we're screwed now but hey, optimism means ignoring problems. Or something.
Honestly, I think someone said to write a movie about Tomorrowland and make it seem Disney-ish (and plug Coca Cola). The writers have no idea what story they are trying to tell or how to pace it. They also make use of my new least favorite plot device called "Try to fake a mystery be jumping around in time." We could have followed little kid Clooney in which case we would have understood how Tomorrowland went bad and why it needed fixing. We could have followed Athena and had the same result. Instead, the writers say "Oh there's a plot you need to care about, but we won't tell you what it is. Guess!" Then, the characters who are in the who make pointless excuses for not explaining themselves. Clooney is just too grumpy to explain and Athena is pulling a Glinda (refusing to divulge crucial information because you're not ready or won't believe it or it will blow your puny mind.) It's annoying and sad because there are some good ideas and visuals in this film but they're buried under the mess.
And they stole the field from "Field of Dreams." Damn you, movie!