TOMORROWLAND PRESENTS A FUN FANTASY ADVENTURE – At The Movies With Kasey

June 5, 2015 Kasey Butcher

Last weekend, the box office offered a remake of a campy old ghost story and an original, if Disney-ified, adventure tale. Although I’ll undoubtedly eventually see Poltergeist, as the story that both terrified and amused me when I was a kid, I opted instead to check out Tomorrowland, starring George Clooney and Britt Robertson.

In Tomorrowland, the greatest minds of the world—engineers, artists, inventors, and the like—come together and create another dimension in which they can live peacefully together. But, naturally, they mess it all up. Years later, a teenage girl, Casey (Britt Robertson) is busy vandalizing government property, trying to keep NASA from shutting down a launch site and putting her engineer father (Tim McGraw) out of a job. After getting released from the police, she discovers a retro pin from the 1964 World’s Fair in with her possessions. When she touches the pin, it transports her to another time and place, Tomorrowland, sparking her curiosity more than a little bit. Through trying to figure out where the pin came from and where it leads to, Casey meets Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a powerful little girl, and Frank Walker (George Clooney), a grumpy, reclusive inventor. Together, they have to get back to Tomorrowland in order to fix past mistakes and save the earth from fast approaching doom.

Although it would be hard to gather from the previews or summaries of the film, Tomorrowland reminded me at turns of The Wizard of Oz and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but with much higher stakes for its heroes. And, unlike the former, the young heroine does not go on an adventure only to learn the virtues of staying home. Tomorrowland has its sentimental and pedantic elements, but they are balanced, somewhat unevenly, by a fun and imaginative story and gorgeous cinematography. Furthermore, much like the lauded Gravity, arguably the main character, Casey is a girl, but her gender is not in and of itself a plot point, or worse, an obstacle for her to overcome. The character could easily have been written gender-neutrally and cast as either a girl or a boy. Finally, while the film’s message seems to rest on the sentimental notion that children are the future because of their optimism, the story tempers the cheese-factor by giving hope some real grit. In the face of defeatism, Casey’s brand of optimism is not so much an action-less belief as it is actively striving to change things despite the odds.

Although the characters do not really evolve much over the plot of the film, there is plenty of implied growth behind their development and the actors do well to bring out the nuances where they exist. In particular, Britt Robertson and Raffey Cassidy carry a large portion of the film with their charm and comedic chemistry. Robertson is able to downplay the saccharine potential of her character, instead creating a fun and compelling heroine. There isn’t much in Tomorrowland that we haven’t seen George Clooney play before, but his performance does not feel stale. I have to tip my hat to the casting directors for finding Thomas Robinson to play a younger version of Clooney’s character. The resemblance and the mannerisms are uncannily similar. As an ensemble, the cast works well. The combination of a very grumpy Clooney and two optimistic girls is funny in ways that may not have been intended, but that highlight the film’s themes well.

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Tomorrowland is uneven in its storytelling at times. For example, its “bad guy” played by Hugh Laurie is especially flat. Where the story lacks, it creates the impression that the film is adapted from a wonderful novel, but it really isn’t. Still, the fun fantasy adventure is original and charming enough that I genuinely enjoyed the film’s entire run. I rate it 4/5 stars.

Tomorrowland was written by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird, who also directed. It runs 130 minutes and is rated PG for sequences of sci-fi action violence and peril, thematic elements, and language.

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Kasey Butcher

She is proud to be a Ft. Wayne native, a graduate of Homestead HS, Ball State University & Miami University.She became involved with journalism editor-in-chief for her high school magazine. She authors the "At The Movies with Kasey Butcher" review.

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