Tomorrowland
Director: Brad Bird
Talent: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie, Raffey Cassidy
Release Date: 22nd May 2015
Tomorrowland is a parallel dimension that was created at the beginning of the 20th century so that humanity’s intellectual elite could be given the freedom to pursue their visions without the restraints imposed on them by quotidian existence. In the mean time, their invention of a future-predicting probability machine seems to have made the apocalypse of the real world an inevitability, insofar as people are given to submit credulously to its readings. However, when Casey (Robertson) defies humankind’s form, asking instead ‘How can we fix it?’, all certainty is thrown into doubt. Will the evil Nix (Laurie) relinquish his control over Tomorrowland, and thus the future of the real world for which he feels only contempt?
At its best, the film preaches, Al Gore-like, a wishy-washy, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, sleeves-rolled-up reformism as a solution to the world’s problems, cloaking its conservatism in the language of dreams and hope rather than with sincerity as their material opposite. This has always been Disney’s ideological project; in Tomorrowland it just stinks more strongly than before. At its worst, it eventually reasserts as utopia the conditions it had initially set up as evil. The problem, it turns out, is not the existence of a parallel fascist dimension that excludes based on reactionary notions of worth and use-function, but rather the way in which Nix had been running it: that is, without a smile and a can-do attitude. In the film’s happy ending, Tomorrowland is not destroyed, and the barrier between it and the real world remains exclusionary as before, open only to those plucky children willing to dream the stultified dreams of the ruling class, selected from above. Ultimately and crucially, however, Brad Bird struggles to make the fantasy appealing on any level. Tomorrowland is nostalgic for the World’s Fair, American entrepreneurialism and NASA’s Space Program. It is a vision of the future that looks backwards to the worst of the detritus of its past, one that is difficult to share.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
