(Tomorrowland SPOILERS ahead)
By this point of the Great Summer
Film Extravaganza and Flying Hype Machine Show, you’ve likely heard the general
consensus that has formed around Tomorrowland,
Disney’s latest stab at spinning a lower-profile preconceived property into box
office gold. You’ve probably read the
wildly mixed reviews, and the critical opprobrium consisting of words like “sermonizing”,
and “underwhelming”, and “unbearably preachy.”
You’ve witnessed its branding as one of the company’s biggest financial
flops of all time. And you’ve possibly
lumped it in with the dynamic duo of recent Disney live action flops, John Carter and The Lone Ranger, yet another misguided venture outside of the safety
of their animation wheelhouse…although those two films were intriguing
cinematic works in their own right.
And if this ends up being the
lasting take on Tomorrowland….well,
that’s a shame. Because what Brad Bird
and his creative team have crafted is a film very much of and for our time, an
unabashed paean to imagination and optimism, and in some ways a self-reflexive
critique of the modern corporate Disney machine. It’s a cinematic dreamscape that profoundly
embraces nostalgia for a bygone sense of adventure and hope, while also
rejecting notions of becoming trapped in the prison that said nostalgia can so
easily construct.
It should come as no surprise to
anyone who’s followed Bird’s career that Tomorrowland
is a rousing rejection of cynicism, and a nakedly earnest appeal for the
wholesale embrace of idealistic passion.
Aside from the pre-Elizabethtown
Cameron Crowe, Bird might be one of the few modern Hollywood directors to so
ably balance such an approach while also delivering compelling drama (and in
his case, widescreen thrills.) With The Incredibles, he reshaped the
contemporary superhero film as a Watchmen-inspired
tale of familial dysfunction and the idolatry of heroism, all the while the
centrality of such heroism in the cultural zeitgeist. With Mission:
Impossible-Ghost Protocol, he trumped standard expectations by delivering a
fourth entry in an action franchise that played up the larger than life aspects
of the series and the living cartoon hero aspirations of Tom Cruise. The
Iron Giant is still one of the ballsiest animated films of our era, a
touching anti-gun, anti-violence manifesto in which we are the enemy and the
classic giant robot antagonist is the ultimate defender of humanity (the
climactic “Superman” scene still gets most people I know altogether
misty.) And there’s Ratatouille, a film about a cooking rat!
But even beyond his previous
directorial efforts, Tomorrowland
traffics in the intensity and necessity of rejecting cynicism. And it does so in what seems to be some of
the most obvious ways possible.
Following an apparent fourth-wall shattering address to the camera by
Frank Walker (George Clooney), the action flashes back to young Frank’s trip to
the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. There’s
a distinct possibility that some of the film’s financial struggles are the
direct result of what this scene hearkens back to, and the cultural gap that
such a hearkening invokes. For so much
of what is lost in the intervening years between that World’s Fair and the film’s
present revolves around the wonder of the Space Age, the glorious Science
Fiction aspirations of the ‘50s and ‘60s, when the dream of reaching the Moon
and beyond was ingrained in the cultural DNA.
When young people imagined a near future of interstellar luxury and
mind-bending explorational possibilities.
It’s no mistake that young Frank’s homemade invention is a jet pack;
several generations of children grew up with such a concept as the fantasy toy du
jour.
What the modern era of technology
has given us has been both surpassed some of those expectations and wildly disappointed
them. The power and breadth of globally
interconnected communications continues to progress at an astonishing rate, and
nanotechnology promises to upend so many of our long-standing notions of health
and longevity. But the dreams of yore
are too often left subservient to the wow factor of today. There’s such easy mass access to most
consumer technology, but the emphasis of so much of it is on the cycle of
planned obsolescence, science fiction dreams reduced to superficial fashion
chasing.
That stark dichotomy is what
might shape reactions to the film amongst viewers under, say, 30 and anyone
older. I grew up in the ‘80s, and yet I
still felt a strong sense of that old Space Age wonder in the cultural
influences that shaped me. Bird
establishes Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) as a young woman clearly shaped by
the remnants of that philosophy, and yearning for a return to it. Facing the end of her NASA engineer father’s
livelihood and the shuttering of the space program in general, she continually
returns to sabotaging the planned dismantling of the Cape Canaveral launching
pad, a Sisyphean task that still brings richness to her life (even as dad tries
to disabuse her of her idealistic notions.)
Casey checks off many of the boxes of a modern YA heroine: smart,
beautiful, sassy, a bit of a tomboy and a bit of a prom queen. It’s her total commitment to her idealism
that really sets her apart. She’s never
chasing the unreachable boy, or cheating cancer, or railing against social injustice. No, her aim is the resurrection of hope, the
Proustian regaining of a lost time that she was never old enough to experience
firsthand.
The manner in which the film
deals with this desire is fascinating.
It’s clearly advocating for the goodness, the rightness of the
pre-Watergate, pre-reduced expectations era that it so lovingly evokes. Yet it also proffers barbed criticisms of the
exploitation of that nostalgia. The
entrance to Casey’s journey is her stop at the Houston sci-fi nostalgia store Blast
From the Past. But its run by a pair of
androids masquerading as quirky eccentrics (a wonderful cameo by Keegan-Michael
Key and Kathryn Hahn), and the scene ends with the complete obliteration of
this temple of easy remembrance. Walt
surrogate David Nix continues to run the empty theme park that is Tomorrowland
as his own personal refutation of the outside world’s progress. He uses his greatest innovation (the tachyon
harnessing monitor that the younger Frank invents…another nod to Watchmen?) to ultimately exploit the
worst tendencies of humanity, abandoning the possibility of change when the
intermittent broadcasting of the Earth’s potential fate yields only a further
embrace of apocalypse culture. This plot
point, in particular, deftly walks the tricky line between hope and despair; it’s
made quite clear that too much of the human race doesn’t want to strive for a
future that makes today uncomfortable, and yet the possibility that those who haven’t
given up this hope could sway the majority is the mission on which the film’s
end rests.
At the heart of this mission is
Clooney, slyly subverting his confidence merchant screen presence as a
broken-hearted boy trapped in an aging man’s body. His pseudo-Nabokovian sadness over the loss
of eternally youthful android crush Athena forms the most obvious emotional
thread of his psyche, although his greater existential despair is over that
magical Space Age world of his childhood.
The country house in which he lives his hermetic existence bears all the
trappings of a youthful imagination, even though it’s gone to seed and sealed
itself in a milieu that merely observes collapse instead of striving to change
those conditions. Clooney is so good in
this role because above most modern screen icons, he’s maintained a youthful
playfulness in the shaping of his suave, modern-day Cary Grant persona. And he’s always shown a willingness to
display his classically, philosophically romantic side, especially in service
of characters whose sense of that feeling has been terminally bruised or
damaged. His real-life political and
social activism can’t be entirely escaped when watching his performances, so
seeing a man who is the ideal on so many levels for so many people portraying
such a disillusioned dreamer is moving on a dramatic and meta-level.
It’s the potentially larger
meta-commentary on display in the film that also makes it compelling beyond just
the optimism and awe. For as earnest as
Uncle Walt’s proselytizing for the Space Age might have been, it was also (to
paraphrase Frank’s initial admonishment to Casey) a commercial for the Disney
empire. Tomorrowland itself serves as not only an extended commercial for
the Magic Kingdom’s sub-section, but for the newly acquired Star Wars properties (prominently
featured in the toy store scene.) But
this is quite the subversive bit of self-advertisement, as this Tomorrowland is
a faded paradise that has been too often neglected or exploited for the
few. It’s shades of the old
Eisner-Katzenberg Disney kingdom, which rejuvenated the company before
descending into a steady stream of projects aimed more at shareholder profits than
artistic greatness. Even in the
post-Pixar, post-Lasseter era, Disney is still one of the largest corporations
in the world, as much profiteer as cultural inspiration. But if the Pixar era has done anything, it’s
proven that corporate cash cows can still double as transcendent works of
art. And it’s brought a renewed sense of
the old Imagineering ideal that the Walt-driven studio pioneered, even as
accusations of wage-fixing have dogged the company in the interim.
But on a meta-level, that’s sort
of the point that Tomorrowland drives
home. The world is deeply flawed, but to
believe in the potential for change is what gives humanity its soul. It’s only by cynically exploiting or
abandoning idealism that things become worse.
Such a sentiment might seem treacly and preachy to some, but in an era
in which so many possibilities exist, it would be sad to only focus on dreams
that end in Big Data results or data-mined profits. It would be sad to give up on dreams, even
ones that spring from childhood, and the infinite paths down which those dreams
could take us.
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