Tomorrowland – Movie Review

Tomorrowland – PG
Release Date: Fri 22 May 2015

Casey (Britt Robertson) is a teenage girl who teams up with a curmudgeonly former boy genius named Frank (George Clooney) to get to the bottom of a mysterious pin. With the pin, Casey was able to see a future that had flying trains and time travel capabilities. But was this a true future, or is it a possible future that only she can bring about? Who left that pin in her belongings in jail?

Writer Damon Lindelof (Lost, Prometheus) and director/writer Brad Bird unravel the mystery in tiny pieces. We’re still getting new information well past the 100-minute mark and the movie does a great job of keeping you guessing. Camera movement and some of the special effects are really well done, while others (an early sequence of a jetpack in the futuristic city comes to mind) look terrible.

While Tomorrowland has interesting ideas and a good message about not giving up on scientific endeavors or giving in to the apocalypse a foregone conclusion, the mystery within the film has a very tired payoff that cancels the message out. The movie wants to inspire people to work together for a better tomorrow, yet the message gets lost by the time the full truth of what’s happening is revealed due to how lackluster it is.

Though the movie is rated PG and is successful entertainment for adults and high school aged kids, the long running time and some violence may be too much for younger viewers. Similar to Bird’s The Iron Giant, the movie has a good message and lots of good ideas but becomes bloated and unwieldy for younger kids not ready to see androids getting smashed and decapitated. It’s a solid science fiction movie with good ideas but could have used tighter editing for the theaters and left this 130-minute version for the “director’s cut.”

Amber, Cal, Aaron and I saw it in the theater and had a discussion in the car: