"Tomorrowland" PG
Disney has a habit of trying to make their rides into movies. Taking on the success of Pirates and the failure of Haunted Mansion, the newest ride movie is somewhere in between spaces. It seems like it wants to be Indiana Jones too, and can liberally make Star Wars references if it likes. Ditrect Brad Bird and Damon Lindehof, (yes from Prometheus). take the chosen one story to another dimension where a fantasy city is hidden in plain sight.
Somehow the 1960s world's fair includes Disneyland itself, where a boy tries to show off his rocket pack. The boy follows a Britsh girl's lead to another world. The boy finds that It's a Small World leads into an
elevator that takes him there in the beginning, he doesn't fly in a
rocket. This comes intro play later.
Then it's off to the present day as some kind of voice over of Clooney and some unknown girl are making a speech about the possible end of everything. Then the girl and her sabotage of a dismnatled rocket site in Florida is seen, and her eventual discover of a pin that takes her to an alien dimension where it's cheery and sunny, even fore so than in Florida.
The girl must meet up with the little girl robot, who hasn't aged a day since the 1960s, as she's a robot, and they must escape assassin robots that are trying to kill them, in a Disney movie.
The heroe's journey is as classic as Greek myth. Fantasy is based upon many tropes like that. This is no different. Modern scifi, such as Star Wars, uses this trope also.
They act like this trope is original, but it isn't, as anyone who has seen science fiction classics like Metropolis and Buck Rogers clearly knows the mantra. A disillusioned sage thinker has made his hose a fortress after being kicked out of dream land, and when he is visited by a teenage girl chased by robots, he must return with her to the other place to fix something.
In the future world, or other dimension, the greatest thinkers have made a robot controlled utopia of flying jet packs, monorails, ray guns and spire like shiny buildings like right out of the world's fair that Walt saw so long ago and made into his attraction.
Originally everyone was white and American, but this being the future he predicted, they had to toss in all sorts of ethnic groups at the end to cover up the obvious white washing. A little Bitritish moppet does not count!
Actually some of the movie is unexpectedly creepy. Clooney plays the doe-eyed boy who grew up, and is now over 50 inventor and mentor, while a relative unknown plays his robot mentor, still a little girl, as he was when he was a little boy, because she's a robot.
The teenage girl who has new ideas goes to his stalker looking farmhouse with booby traps and cameras all over to escape the robots and androids, and they escape through a bathtub while laser ray guns fire and blow up things.
The inventor and the girl then take a ride in a rocket under the Eiffel tower, because it so is a space rocket launcher, and fly to the other dimension. They didn't have to do this.
Getting to the utopia, it has become a dystopia, another trope of science friction. It is not a coincidence the actress was in Divergent, another such thing.
It's so so much Ayn Rand, which is boring, as it is Metropolis meets Tomorrowland. It's not boring so much as needlessly complicated. It was good how they handled trans-dimensional gates and such bvy just saying, it works that way, instead of making a long speech. Instead they make long speeched about doomsday and global destruction, which turn the movie into a forces message.
When you go to a movie you want escape, not reality.It should not have been about lecturing us on wars and climate change. It should have been a coming of age Disney princess movie.
Still is is kind of creepy Clooney plays the prince, as he's older than the father figure. Yeah sure he's like Obi Wan, but it comes off as he's more like her new boyfriend in the story.
Review by Adam Browne
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