"Tomorrowland" Is a Mess!

Doh! The reviews are starting to come out on Disney's new $190 million blockbuster summer release, and they ain't good:

In his Pixar triumphs “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille,” writer-director Brad Bird proved himself not just a wizardly storyteller but also an ardent champion of excellence — of intelligence, creativity and nonconformity — in every arena of human (and rodent) accomplishment. All the more disappointing, then, that the forces of mediocrity have largely prevailed over “Tomorrowland,” a kid-skewing adventure saga that, for all its initial narrative intrigue and visual splendor, winds up feeling like a hollow, hucksterish Trojan horse of a movie — the shiny product of some smiling yet sinister dimension where save-the-world impulses and Disney mass-branding strategies collide.

These are weighty, provocative, worthwhile themes to implant in a PG-rated family film, but the glaring failure of “Tomorrowland” is that its central premise — children are the future — is almost completely negated by the preachiness of the execution and the clumsiness of the storytelling. This is not, frankly, a movie that evinces much faith in the cognitive and imaginative powers of young people. Its attitude toward the tykes in the audience can be more or less summed up by the aggressively cheeky interplay between Clooney and Robertson, and by the blunt, often poorly motivated chase/action sequences (none of which rise to the level of Bird’s previous live-action feature, “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”).

Still, it’s hard not not to feel cheated, or to wonder if it was Lindelof, still best known for his work as a showrunner on “Lost,” who effectively turned this movie into such an evasive and unsatisfying game of narrative keepaway — one whose final revelations are dispensed in haste, and with a frustrating lack of rigor. ...Even when delivered with the best intentions, a lecture is a wretched substitute for wonder.

http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/tomorrowland-review-george-clooney-1201493855/


There are going to be a great many so-called “think pieces” written about Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland over the next few weeks. If I say that the film does not quite live up to its subtexts, then I will also admit that it is a mostly entertaining adventure movie. It is not the wave of the future, but rather a nostalgic jaunt through a time when Hollywood made big movies explicitly for kids. For most of its two-hour running time, it is an engaging and exciting road-trip mystery film. It ironically only stumbles in the final act when it has to peel back the curtain and reveal its secrets. The fault lies in its screenplay that is credited to Damon Lindelof, Brad Bird, and Jeff Jensen. Said script leaves several seemingly key story points somewhat unexplained and ends on a rather simplistic and arbitrary note of razzle-dazzle that barely plays on the film’s ideas. Moreover the crux of said ideas, specifically the attempt at examining our current worldwide pessimism, overlooks or outright ignores several very real reasons as to why the so-called future has not lived up to the hopes of the 1950′s/1960′s era dreamers.

...The film suffers from John Carter syndrome, in that it pads its narrative with multiple prologues and a needless wrap-around device before getting to the actual story, but the results are at least more entertaining this time. ...At the risk of lazy simplification, Tomorrowland feels like the six season run of Lost. As you recall, a bunch of worthwhile character work and intriguing mystery threads were set up in service of a final lap that discarded most of the mysteries and introduced a whole new and simplistic good-vs-evil threat right at the end of the race.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottme...with-george-clooney-cant-stick-the-landing/2/


Doh! I'm still going to see it, but it's disappointing that the film ain't the home run out of the park like I was expecting.

 

The trailer looks interesting, but I thought it was all over the place. While watching it I found my understanding of what kind of film it was changing several times.

 

Well look who it is.

Damon Lindelof: responsible for Lost (with a controversial final episode), partially responsible for the Star Trek reboot (and the questioned-by-fans sequel featuring not-insignificant franchise rehashing), Cowboys and Aliens (YMMV), Prometheus (currently unclear whether Lindelof or Ridley Scott are more responsible for it's epic failings), and World War Z (mixed reviews from fans of the source material, at least.

I can't say the guy's a hack as he's had successes but uh dude does have a habit of making people go WTF with the things he's done.

 

This is the second movie named after a Disneyland attraction and did Bob Iger expect something great? I guess we should see "Escape To Space Mountain" or something like that in the future. Anyway, I'm intrigued by the trailers and still go see it. If it's really this bad, I can only hope Brad Bird can recover his touch with the oh-so-overdue Incredibles sequel.

 

The reviews are not getting better...

Unfortunately, the rest of this willfully optimistic film is nowhere near as smart, despite centering on two science prodigies, played by George Clooney and Britt Robertson (“The Longest Ride”). Named after one of Disneyland’s least interesting themed areas, “Tomorrowland” is a globe-trotting, time-traveling caper whose giddy visual whimsies and exuberant cartoon violence are undermined by a coy mystery that stretches as long as the line for “Space Mountain” on a hot summer day.

It’s all goofy, exhilarating fun until the film is weighed down by its own delaying tactics: What is Tomorrowland, and why is it no longer thriving? Who created those robots, and why are they after Frank and Casey? Clooney supplies non-stop exposition throughout, and yet never enough by design, of course. For all of Tomorrowland’s infrastructural marvels – tiered swimming pools, astro-commutes, and beautiful tangles of airborne boulevards — the world-building is thin and unsatisfying.

Blame the plot structure: the would-be emotional payoff arrives long after we’re worn out and no longer interested in the mystery, like an overcooked steak that reaches the table after we’ve filled up on bread.

http://www.thewrap.com/tomorrowland-review-george-clooney-britt-robertson-hugh-laurie/

 

Hmmm: Haunted Mansion was a bomb (but they're doing a new one), Mission to Mars and Country Bears did not do well, Pirates of the Caribbean did fantastically well, and now we have Tomorrowland plus a new movie being developed on It's a Small World. It never ends.

 

I'm waiting for It's a Small World. It'll be directed by Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp.

 

I was totally joking when I made my comment.

 

Don't laugh -- stupider things have happened. If they get Damon Lindelof to write it, it'll be a lose-lose-lose proposition.

 

The guy really needs to stick to TV, it sounds like. His neverending interest in neversolved mysteries works much better in an episodic format.

That way, there's time to forget that all the big questions posed never get answered!

 

I saw a couple of previews for this and it was never entirely clear to me what the heck the premise of the movie was, so I really never had any desire to see it.

 

Sometimes you can milk a formula past its productive life

 

The Damon Lindelof bashing is as usual, hilarious, especially considering how often he's not solely to blame.

Tomorrowland - co-written with Brad Bird (and story elements from another writer) - of course, just blame Lindelof.
World War Z - Lindelof hired for the 3rd script re-write to undo the mistakes made by others before him - of course, just blame Lindelof.
Star Trek: Into Darkness. 3 screenplay credits also including Robert Orci and Alex Kurtman, ignore them - of course, just blame Lindelof.
Prometheus - co-written by Jon Spaihts with input from Ridley Scott - of course, just blame Lindelof.
Cowboys & Aliens - 8 credited writers - of course, just blame Lindelof.

 

Well, he DOES seem to be a common denominator.

 

Funny, how many of those scripts concern mysteries without clues, and endings that answer very few questions at the end. One key ingredient for any mystery involves how long you can delay doing a reveal to the audience, and the three reviews I've read of the movie each cite how the film ultimately became frustrating and a chore to watch for this reason. You can only tease and taunt audiences for so long.

 

I won't argue that point, my point is people have the tendency to throw 100% of the blame at his feet, probably because they're too lazy to look up the writing credits on IMDB.

 

What percentage of heroin users have drunk milk?

 

This is exponentially more specific than that.

 

I would certainly agree that you can't lay the blame for these things at the feet of just one person. I say blame them all.

 

I guess I like mysteries because I liked Prometheus and for me Star Trek's problems were with the motivations of the Kahn character. I haven't seen the other two so I can't comment on those, but I think the real problem is that these films have too many writers so there is no single voice in their creation.

I liked Lost very much, including the ending.

 

Seeing Lindelof's name associated with any project is an instant mustn't-see for me.

 

Lindelof has a pretty good track record with me. That being said, I'm not particularly interested in watching Tomorrowland.

 

True, and I would point to the Variety review as an example of a major industry news source that specifically singled out Lindelof as being a source of trouble. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can't say how good/bad/ugly the movie really is... but three fairly-negative reviews right off the bat make me wince.

I agree -- there are quite a few TV shows that seem to go all over the place in terms of intent, story direction, character issues, and resolving plot details over time. The many imitations of Lost for TV over the years -- Heroes, Flash Forward, Alcatraz, The Event, Terra Nova, No Ordinary Family, Revolution, Ascension, Helix, Threshold, Zero Hour, Kyle XY, The 4400, Falling Skies, The Dome, Extant -- were certainly worse, and if anything it proves that trying to mix a large ensemble cast, a massive conspiracy, sci-fi elements, and a long story arc filled with mysteries is very, very hard to pull off.

Feature films are different than TV, and I'm not sure if Lindelof's talents are best served in this particular kind of media. But from what I've seen of most of Lindelof's talents, there's no payoff with the mysteries he's writing. The fact that several of the above reviews (which I had nothing to do with) observe the same thing convinces me we're on to something.

 

To be fair, Roberto Orci has taken plenty of heat for this one. He was forced out of the director's chair for the next Star Trek film, his original script for the next film was scrapped with new writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung being brought on board to start from scratch, and it appears that he is basically a producer in name only.

 

I think I've seen more threads hijacked by Lost lately then the Beatles. That's pretty impressive.