Tomorrowland: the Unbearable Lightness of Optimism

In 1984, while I was busy being born, Milan Kundera wrote about two women, two men and a dog.
To one of them, life was unbearably light.

Well, this movie is unbearable too, in a way that extraordinaly resembles Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, though hopefully not bearing the same consequences.

Unbearable, I was saying.
And extremely banal too.
So banal that one might think the director completely incognizant of what he’s doing. And he had to be, if this movie is the reason he turned down The Force Awakens as he told Empire this month.
Better to work on something original, he says.
Better to have a blank paper, a sandbox, he says.

Yes, but that was Star Wars, you moron.
For good or ill, it will be remembered, it will stay in our memory forever and maybe we will curse his name, alright, but still, isn’t it better to be loathed than to be forgotten?

This movie, on the other hand, will be probably forgotten in… hey, what movie were we talking about?
Ah, Tomorrowland.
Right.
Actually, you know what? This movie is so bad it might take a while (and lots of vodka) to forget about it.

 And no, before you start it, I am not talking about George Clooney. I like the guy, and he’s probably the only good thing in this corny, bungled, technicolored mess of a movie.

But let’s try to get ourselves organized (and you might as well grab a beer, ’cause it’s going to take me a while).

Have you seen the trailer?
The trailer has everything.
It has pathos, it has rythm, it has good acting, and momentum. It has mystery, with this young girl discovering the fantastic pin that will lead her to catch a glimpse of this future that never was but might have been. It has tension, with that Edisonic count-down towards the end of the world. It has action, with laser beams and bathtubs rocketing into the sky. It has charm, with steampunk mechanical  wonders and a sci-fi city worthy of The Fifth Element. It has Hugh Laurie, dramatically looking into the middle distance, and a girl with wide eyes and a Nasa baseball hat. And it has the Tour Eiffel splitting apart and igniting. What’s there not to like?
Absolutely nothing.
Unfortunately, the movie has nothing else. Nothing apart from what you already saw in the trailer.

Ok, just to be frank it has a ninja robot child. And they were right not to put her in the trailer, as I would have never ever ever gone to see a movie with that thing on screen. Her absolutely shitty acting hasn’t improved since Snow White and the Hunstman. Only, there she was shining in comparison with her older self (yes, I’m talking about Raffey Cassidy vs Kristen Stewart). Here, she doesn’t have that luxury, as she plays never-aging robot-girl Athena, whose programatic reason for living is recruiting new dreamers to involve in the Tomorrowland project.
But she’s not the only reason this movie is totally despicable, and I’ll try not to give in to my personal loathing of children. If I can.

Let’s take it from the start.

This is a movie that doesn’t want you to be worried, because apparently this is not good for your soul. So it starts with a good old flash-back, with both the main characters telling you the story. Don’t you worry, child: they will have adventures and stuff, but nothing bad is going to happen to them, as you saw them exchanging jokes and pranks at the very beginning of the movie. And since the very basis of the movie is that we are running out of future, you can see how that is not working at all. It is as if someone took a very good novel by Ph. K. Dick (you know, the one about people seeing the future and the future getting worst because they are seeing it?), flicked through it, took its general principles and then someone else rushed in, saying that we have to give kids a happy ending. Ok. I know. They already did that. It’s called Minority Report. But I can’t shake the feeling that with Tomorrowland they did it again.
Why is the future bad, then?
Because someone, a while ago, in this far away place where scientists were brought together to imagine a bright new world, invented something that was not supposed to be invented.
Ok.
That sounds like good sci-fi stuff, I know.
But this thing that was never supposed to be invented is not a weapon, is not a disease, is not a Teletubby. It’s a screen that broadcasts the future. And since the future sucks, everybody is getting depressed and the future is getting worst, broadcasting itself. And so on.
The world is on the verge of annihilation, the Doomsday Clock is ticking again.
Which also sounds like good sci-fi stuff. I know.
Just imagine to take this, and squeeze it into ten minutes at the end of movie. Fill the rest of it with people that were apparently trying to kill you but magically they are not anymore. Shake it. Add a pinch of out-of-place comedy just to make the bad guys even less scary in case you just forgot that technically they are not even bad guys. Shake it again. Add some conspiracy which technically is not a conspiracy since apparently everybody knows about it. Add some father-and-daughter stuff, with no consistency nor explanation nor involvement in the main story. Add the robot-ninja-child. Add details and overload them with importance just to toss them away as if they carry no significance (and guess what? They don’t). Add some Star Wars merchandise, since it’s the same franchise after all. Then, take us back to the happy ending. And leave us optimistic, dreaming about pink elephants. The grand message of this 130 minutes pamphlet seems to be something that Walt Disney himself would have liked: the world needs dreamers. Just, old Walt himself had pretty good ideas of what to dream for, he was pretty damn specific. In fact he was so specific that he turned out to be controversial. Of course we can’t afford to be controversial, these days. So let’s be vague. Optimistic, of course, but vague. No actual message here. Just, nobody likes a whiner.

Honestly, I’m relieved that Brad Bird actually did turn Star Wars down.
I wanted to tell you this in your native language.
Thanks, buddy.