Much like the box-office gold Disney hit when it created a movie franchise out of an already existing theme park with Pirates of the Caribbean, it tries to create a more futuristic and optimistic film about humanity's future and relationship with technology based upon the park, Tomorrowland.
The film stars George Clooney as Frank Walker, a boy genius inventor who grew disillusioned with humanity as he grew older, and Britt Robertson as Casey, a smart teenager who comes into possession of a Tomorrowland badge which somehow transports a projection of her into the utopian future.
The film is most decidedly a Disney film, according to more reviews. Marketed towards wide-eyed younger audiences who can still look in awe at technology. The world of Tomorrowland is painted with hope for the future rather than with bleak predictions of a Robot apocalypse as has been the trend in recent futuristic films.
According to Steve Rose's review for The Guardian, Tomorrowland is a bold and "sincere attempt to jump-start humanity's technological optimism, which it reckons stalled with the decline of the space race with potentially planet-threatening consequences. Whether or not that's the answer to the planet's current problems, director Brad Bird deserves praise for packing such big ideas into such an accessible, rip-roaring, retro-futurist adventure."
But to some reviewers, it is this very attempt to inject optimism into the future relationship of humanity with technology that causes the movie's narrative to fall flat. As A.O. Scott for The New York Times wrote in his review, "Its idea of the future is abstract, theoretical and empty, and it can only fill in the blank space with exhortations to believe and to hope. But belief without content, without a critical picture of the world as it is, is really just propaganda."
Despite the drawbacks of trying to create a utopian future of Tomorrowland created by history's greatest inventors, critics still praise Brad Bird's direction of the film as a worthy but doomed effort.
Although he seemed like the perfect pick to direct such a family-friendly film after the successes of his other hits like The Incredibles and Iron Giant, Brad Bird could have had a wealthy of material to be inspired from for Tomorrowland. "But these moments are relatively few and far between - separated across long stretches of clunky storytelling, overbearing action and tiresome character interplay, and undermined by a narrative that never delivers the surge of escapist excitement seemingly promised at the outset," as observed by Justin Chang for Variety.
Nevertheless, Tomorrowland still has enough tender moments to make it an enjoyable ride despite falling flat-footed at times. In a nutshell, the film is "a noble failure about trying to succeed [and] is written and directed with such open-hearted optimism that you cheer it on even as it stumbles," wrote Peter Travers for Rolling Stone.
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