One thing I’ve never understood about people who love action movies is the thrill they get out of seeing skyscrapers, cities, and the world explode à la Michael Bay. Popular blockbusters like 2012, Godzilla, Man of Steel, and Avengers: Age of Ultron have played on our fears of environmental disaster, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Even the fantastic post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road plainly tells us to just settle for the broken, insidious world we have.
We are more than comfortable with our inevitable demise: we have fully embraced it, to the point at which we get a thrill of seeing the world destroyed. Tomorrowland, a lighthearted and subversive but rather messy ordeal, proposes that the reason we can’t avert the apocalypse is because we are constantly feeding our cynicism through popular media. And heck, someone even made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles depressing — what is going to happen next, the end of the world? Well, yes.
In Tomorrowland, the catastrophe that will finally end humanity is not just one single thing like global warming in The Day After Tomorrow, nuclear weapons in Captain America: Winter Soldier, or a widespread infection in The Walking Dead. News reports reveal civil unrest in the Middle East, warming of glaciers in the arctic, and massive floods all over the world.
Tomorrowland borrows from all the previously mentioned films and mixes all the catastrophes into one mega-cynical apocalypse epic. We’re not just going to die off from environmental problems but also wars, terrorism, floods, and pretty much everything else imaginable. Somehow, this might still be the brightest-eyed movie of the year.
In the film, Casey, a teenager unaware of the close proximity of the impending end of the world, is fed up with hearing how screwed humanity is. School, which was once about discovery, teems with fear-mongering. Her science teacher exuberantly preaches about the threat of climate change and in social studies she learns about the MAD doctrine.
As if everything around her didn’t seem to be collapsing already, her father, an engineer for NASA — a symbol of human progress — is going to be out of a job because the launch pad he works at is being shut down.
After trespassing and sabotaging NASA’s attempts to close the plant, Casey is put in jail, and subsequently released on bail. When collecting her belongings from the prison guard, a pin from a 1960s experiment at Disneyland is put with her belongings. Turns out it magically transports certain people to a futuristic utopia with vibrant greenery, innovative transit systems, and countless other ground-breaking technology. Is this place another dimension, a product of Casey’s imagination, or just many years in the future?
For all its flaws as a coherent and comprehensible story, Brad Bird’s odd family movie has an inspiring message and an unflinching optimism that comes through crystal clear — if we become comfortable with the end of the world, we’re not going to do anything to fix it. What makes Tomorrowland so interesting is how it utilizes the tropes of cynical action films and puts them into a work that is not dark and gritty, but adventurous and spectacular.
Although this is an unabashedly uneven film that does not pay off the initial intrigue unravelling the mystery (everything makes as much sense at the end as it did at the beginning), Bird’s film is infused with wonder, awe, and optimism in almost every nonsensical moment. Tomorrowland would much rather inspire with grand embellishments than supply distinct answers. As one character puts it, “can’t you just go with it?”
Despite this plot convolution, though, Tomorrowland’s theme is profoundly simple and accessible for children. This is a film about taking action and thinking outside the box that is itself inventive and subversive. Unlike any recent action movie I’ve seen, I left this one wanting to create, not destroy.
