Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Tomorrowland" (PG - Disney - 2 hrs, 10 mins)

Directed by Brad Bird
Written by Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof

Alo Party Peoples.

There's a running joke that circulates around film circles that Pixar veteran Brad Bird is a secret Objectivist, mostly built around really cynical readings of The Incredibles, a story about natural-born superheroes being forced into normality by society, with a villain who's big master plan involves forcibly leveling the human-superhuman playing field. "If everyone's super, no one is." 

I don't necessarily agree with that reading of his work - part of the message of The Incredibles is that the exceptional have a responsibility to use their talents for the betterment of society as a whole, which runs directly counter to Objectivism's putting fulfillment of selfish desire above all else, but most creative folk have thought "the rules and regulations inherent to the social contract only hold back human progress" at some point.

So if Brad Bird really does sleep with a copy of The Fountainhead under his mattress, it's no more so than most other film makers. That being said, if The Incredibles is Brad Bird's Anthem, then Tomorrowland is his Atlas Shrugged, mostly because it's also Disney's happy, family friendly, explicitly sci-fi version of Atlas Shrugged.

To wit, we open at the 1964 World's Fair, where plucky young inventor Frank Walker has designed a prototype jetpack which catches the eye of Athena, a young girl that invites him into Tomorrowland, a retro futuristic utopia where mankind's best and brightest minds have gone to freely create all sorts of wonderful things. Sustainable cold fusion, faster-than-light space travel, honest to god flying cars, all of these and more have been achieved in Galt's Gulch - I mean Oz - I mean Krypton - I mean Tomorrowland.

Then we cut to the present, a grey, washed out dystopic hellscape that has all but forgotten how to dream. But some, like Britt Robertson as Casey Newton haven't lost the spark of optimism, to the point that she's breaking into Cape Canaveral to stop the dismantlement of the Space Shuttle program, which sparks the attention of Athena and sets her on a quest to reach this Zeerust paradise. She finds George Clooney as the now adult Frank, who was kicked out of Gene Roddenberry's Shownotes for inventing something he shouldn't have, and they discover that something's gone wrong, and that Tomorrowland has become a decaying shell of a million broken dreams.

Just as the fictional Tomorrowland is contrasted with the real world's pessimism, Tomorrowland the movie posits itself as a direct contrast with the grim, self serious state of 21st Century blockbusters in general, and the current glut of post-Hunger Games dystopic sci-fi in particular, emphasized by both a running gag of a fake movie poster for ToxiCosmos 3 (no, seriously), and by multiple characters directly stating this to the audience. Brad Bird has achieved a level of visual mastery on par with Neill Blomkamp, and he has also achieved his level of subtlety, which is to say he believes it involves sledgehammers. (not that Bird was especially subtle to begin with, The Incredibles was essentially Watchmen for third graders)

Here's the thing, I'm on the same page as Brad Bird vis a vis being absolutely sick of grim, dystopic futures in popular culture, and I'd like to see us return to a mindset where science can actually improve the world rather than end it - and if he had written an editorial on that subject I'd totally back him, but he went and hung a story around that framework, and it doesn't quite fit.

Not that Tomorrowland is a bad movie, it's masterfully directed and better designed, it's a godsend to see bright, vibrant colors in a live-action feature, Britt Robertson is a for real rising talent, the action, although it leans a little heavy on slapstick for my taste, is consistently exciting and makes fine use of all the wacky raygun gothic super-science on display, in all honesty it feels like a fully realized exploration of the good parts of Interstellar. But it's script is at once incredibly optimistic and incredibly cynical, and not in a good way, especially since it feels like the current wave of dystopian futures is finally starting to crest.

I can imagine Brad Bird as an old man waving a cane and screaming "Back in my day, the future was a better time, what happened to us?" I get where he's coming from, and I want to back him up on it, but at the same time I feel like he's blinded by nostalgia for a "good old days" that never really existed.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B