Disney's Tomorrowland

[Ryn]

Trailer #2 was released:

 

 

The teaser and first trailer had enough of a hook, but I'm hoping this isn't showing too much. However, Clooney and Bird are a compelling combination.

[ShadowDog]

Yeah I'm in. The first trailer was great.

[Driver]

I'm out, it looks really banal to me. Granted, I was out when I hear Damon Lindelof.

 

I also think that some of the rumors of what it would be about were infinitely cooler than what it's actually about and that bummed me out.

 

Also, it's a little over a month a way and there's been next to zero marketing, and this is after it was booted from a tentpole Xmas release date.

[NumberSix]

It's Brad Bird, so I'm automatically in, even though I keep having this weird non-reaction to the trailers. They feel like a series of Alex Ross Astro City covers -- really shiny and kinda cool in principle, but the actual contents are probably much more interesting.

[The Human Torch]

Wow. Clooney is looking like a catcher's mitt.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

So, when are the sequels Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Frontierland due to be out?

[Mara Jade Skywalker]

They've combined Disney, retro futurism, and a female chosen one. So I'm pretty much guaranteed to go see it.

[Ryn]

Granted, I was out when I hear Damon Lindelof.

And I just booted a puppy into a baby's face.

[The Human Torch]

The trailers for this run a bunch on Disney channels, duh I know, anyway so I see or hear them a lot. I dunno if they are brainmushing me or the exposure is just genuinely heightening interest. I'm really into this film's concept right now, more so than a bunch of other releases out or coming.

[ShadowDog]

Anybody see this? I wanted to but man the reviews are as brutal as the box office take.

[Good God a Bear]

I never had the desire to see it. I might check it out on Blu Ray

[Ryn]

Anybody see this? I wanted to but man the reviews are as brutal as the box office take.

Yeah, the reviews are disheartening. I saw eight minutes at Disneyland that were pretty exciting, so I came away looking forward to it.

[R.CAllen]

Anybody see this?

 

Short answer : saw it opening night.

 

Long answer : ummmmmmmmmm

 

 

 

 

FOR ONCE I CAN BE A PART OF THE BACKLASH AGAINST A NERD THING - V. EXCITING FOR ME

 

Real spoilers to follow - (so maybe actually watch the film before reading what I'm about to write next) - P.S. don't take that the wrong way it is not like this is a super-twist-y film or anything like that, I'm just being all spoiler-conscientious, it's a kid's film for kids not that movie from the 90s about the guy with the kidnapped wife and he finds her but uh oh she's been all along dead

 

1. Works of entertainment that are explicitly about little more than how other works of entertainment are bad (for whatever varying definitions of 'bad' you or the work of entertainment might have) are not something that I really like. I agreed with Mark Waid that a lot of comics in the early 90s were morally dubious poorly made garbage but that didn't make Kingdom Come any better for me at all. This movie takes that stance and really digs its feet into ... that stance. At first it is implicit and then by the end it is explicit - the movie has a guy basically say to you, the audience, that you liking some kinds of make believe is an active contribution to the impending collapse of our civilization. I mean, he's not wrong (Simon Pegg isn't wrong either) but it would help if the movie he was in was any better or offered anything more than what it did. I'm not sure that a piece of fiction which says that the world ends and here's what happens next is any worse than a piece of fiction which says that the world can be saved thanks to the efforts of a cabal of secreted otherdimensional near-immortals combined with a bitter George Clooney who has been nursing a hate boner for a robot child since ’89 (oh, and YOU!, the movie is very clear on this; it needs YOU! to save the world as well) (and I am actually forgetting the real main character but I think that’s more the movie’s fault than mine, she has a few good moments because Brad Bird isn’t no fool but mostly she just sort of exists there, alternately believing and disbelieving in the ridiculous craziness that’s entered into her life and getting pushed by Clooney into and out of weird places which, surprise, always end up being rocketships or whatever). My point is basically that this is a movie with a message and what’s more it is a movie that literally does not want you to walk out of the theater with any chance of not knowing what the capital-m Message is.

 

2. It’s not a very good movie. It’s definitely the worst thing Brad Bird’s ever done … and it’s weird because I suspect he thinks it’s the best thing he’s ever done and that the things he’s done before are bad, in some way, that this is his apology for those things. Okay. Remember (or, if you haven’t seen the trailer or the movie itself, take my word for it) the thing with the pin which transports the girl to Tomorrowland? Eventually it stops working and she goes on the Internet to find out all about it and gets a webpage for a nerd antique shop which advertises that it buys those pins (or, maybe, has those pins for sale, I wasn’t clear on this point anyway it is moot as you’ll soon see or did see whatever) and goes to the nerd store to see if they know what’s up with the pin and why it does what it does. The nerd antique shop is filled to the brim with costumes and toys and sound effects from all the classic sci-fi stuff you love and as well all of Brad Bird’s prior nerd efforts too. And then it turns out it’s a trap, the people running the store (Keegan Michael-Key and Katheryn Hahn, who are great) are robots from Tomorrowland and they run the shop so people who have been given the pins can be bribed or forced into giving the pins back and/or being killed. And the name of the guy running the store is Hugo Gernsback! I don’t know for sure what this scene means either to the audience or to Brad Bird (which is unique to this scene for this movie since every other one makes it completely clear at all times what’s going on in front of your eyes on every level, I mean this as a bad thing, the movie could have taken a step back from me once in a while instead of spending most of its time in my face screaming stuff like YOUR OPINIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE ARE BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD and JETPACKS ARE INSPIRING and HAH HAH GUESS WHO THE GOVERNOR OF TOMORROWLAND IS SURPRISE SURPRISE IT’S THE ONE OTHER GUY WE’VE SEEN FROM THERE SO FAR) but I suspect it’s some strange form of apologia for Brad Bird’s past efforts, which were better and more subtle at conveying their meaning (even if their meaning was some sort of toxic fascist brew like in the best movie of all time, The Incredibles was great but it’s really all about how there are some special people to whom the rules shouldn’t ever apply and the rest of us are just sheep, just sheeple sheep, and we should be happy to lose in a race to a ten-year old with superspeed who can win that race literally without breaking a sweat and p.s. if that ten-year old doesn’t run in that race, well, that’s OPPRESION) (but seriously The Incredibles is the best movie) but crucially contradicted this movie’s Message. This scene was like Brad Bird standing up and saying “Sci-fi is a honeytrap of bad ideas about the future, don’t buy those toys for that sci-fi, that sci-fi including my own is the devil’s work, the light and the truth and the way lies in fiction about the love between a bitter old man and a robot with the unchanging appearance of a ten year old girl and how that love literally saves the world entire” or maybe it wasn’t and I’m just reading things into it that aren’t there? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

3. The action was great and the design of things was also great. It feels weird not to mention that, even though the movie is awful and has an ending that makes no sense (the rest of Tomorrowland just goes along with Clooney’s plan after he and the girl break into their home and blow everything up and kill Hugh Laurie and the ten year old robot girl besides?) and a middle that makes no sense (a rocketship from the end of the 19^th century that has been left completely untended since then works perfectly no trouble at all, man if Edison and Tesla were that great at stuff you’d think the rest of their inventions would also last as long as this one, then again I’m quibbling about how make believe technology would or wouldn’t work so what do I know anyway) and a beginning that makes no sense (has Athena just been dragging people to their deaths all these years by giving them pins wait is this really a story about how a serial abuser and murderer was finally stopped by her first victim, was this a Lifetime movie with jetpacks) because a good movie isn’t just for me one where the action is great and the design of things is great and the actors and actresses in it are great (which they are, whoever plays Athena is like Kiernan Schipka from Mad Men but like if instead of uncannily imitating January Jones’ mannerisms she was pulling the head off of Kathryn Hahn with aplomb instead) it’s also one where I’m not noticing the stuff about it that doesn’t make sense. I am tempted to see this movie again but I know with a calm and bitter certainty that a second viewing will only remind me of flaws I’ve forgotten about (but then are they really flaws? I don’t even know sometimes) and show me new stuff that’s wrong with it.

 

4. That aside I’m not sure why everyone else isn’t seeing it or liking it. It’s a fairly well done kid’s movie with a crummy message, if the people behind it were semi-anonymous hacks or if it had been aired on the Disney Channel in the late 90s it’d probably be celebrated (article on nerd news site, “Brad Bird And The Guy From ‘Lost’ Made A Movie Based On A Themepark And It’s Awesomesauces”) instead of ignored or denigrated. Who is this movie really for? The parts of it that are for parents who don’t want their kids to imitate the Hulk in the living room when its bedtime --- those are the good parts. The bad parts of it are the parts that are for me, that are a shrieking polemic aimed at nerds to stop being all nerds about the wrong stuff and instead be nerds about the right stuff, those are the parts that fall flat on their face.

 

5. It really reminded me of a sci-fi story from the late 00s that was included in one of those big phonebook size Best Of The Year collections. Here’s what happens in that story : A tweenage kid in the early 1960s is a loner and sad and likes to go to the local drug store and buy comics and then take them to a nearby diner and eat french fries with ketchup and be sad in his loneliness by his lonesome when SUDDENLY a flying saucer comes down and out of it comes a robot and he goes with the robot in the flying saucer into space and slowly teaches the robot about language and life and humanity and the robot metamorphs into a girl like the one from summer camp who he almost made time with but never really got the chance to and him and the robot have sex and then fly back to Earth in the flying saucer but because of relativistic time dilation it is now present day or five minutes into our future and this kid with this sex robot are here now to punish us for not building the sci-fi future the kid imagined we would build but also reward us with the moonbases and jetpacks we apparently all secretly desire. That was the story! Tomorrowland is like if someone gave that story’s author one hundred and fifty million dollars and told them to keep the sex a little more toned down, just keep it bubbling beneath the surface, and made sure to remind them that here and now in the 21st century girls can be heroes in our fictions too and sure we’ll be generous brown people can be bit players and in the background here and there as well (I shouldn’t be so mean, that was good, that was smart, that was more than just a deliberate effort to soften the inherently creepy fascist allure of a city of the future filled with bright strong youth at play in a proud public display of their perfect bodies before they head off to the great new frontier in their phallic rocketships to conquer the void, and it was nice at the end that all of the people with big ideas and hope in their hearts weren’t all kids, it was clear that the wish fulfillment kid fantasy was being an awesome robot whatever-their-name-was-for-Athena’s-job-‘recruiter’-maybe and that in the movie’s schema even old people can have ideas and hope, what I’m saying is I liked it when the movie pretended at the last minute that old people weren’t useless) which if I’m not conveying it through this blather was actually something I liked a lot. More saris! More hijabs and niqabs! More fezes! More turbans! More yalmukes! More sheitels! Basically, if you’re wearing something on your head because God wants you to then as far as I’m concerned you have a place in the future and in popular entertainment’s depiction of the future and you can take that to the bank my friends. You can take that to the bank.

 

7. omg I was wrong it actually cost 190 million dollars for that amount of money why not just make and sell real jetpacks if they’re such an inspiration to you; for that amount of money Brad Bird could have built himself a literal Tomorrowland separate and sovereign from the laws of all other nation states and with the approval of his corporate Disney masters secure in his suzerainty he could have married that jetpack, raised little jetpack children, stood in front of his jetpack children and lectured them about how the videogames and movies they like are bad for their imaginations but the movie he makes about jetpacks are somehow much better for them, full of the vitamins a growing jetpack civilization needs

 

9. why would Tony keep multiple kinds of alternative AIs on disk drives but doesn’t bother with a single back-up of Jarvis

 

[NumberSix]

I saw it Monday and, while I usually agree with RC about 75-80% of the time, this one's up in the 98% percentile.

 

The best, saddest, most accurate pull-quote:

It’s definitely the worst thing Brad Bird’s ever done … and it’s weird because I suspect he thinks it’s the best thing he’s ever done and that the things he’s done before are bad, in some way, that this is his apology for those things.

Y'know those "Bible Stories for Children" books you see sitting in every dentist's lounge that no kid ever opens because they're some combination of boring and gutted? Tomorrowland is the filmic equivalent for humanist kindergarteners, except the Moral of the Story as I saw it was "All of us can change the world through the power of wealthy benefactors!"

 

Despite Bird's earnest efforts, it never transcends its origin as a frivolous theme park ride. It needs to be about 40 minutes shorter. And I haven't seen a lot of Lindelof's Hollywood work beyond Prometheus (UGH) but if he normally favors cleverness over sense, then I'd say he got his way here once again, because WOW were those riddles-wrapped-in-enigmas not really tantalizing to follow. I think my wife napped through a few scenes.

 

On the plus side: li'l Pierce Gagnon from Looper is still a prodigy even as a supporting player, and Athena the action robot girl needs her own merchandising line.

 

Also, if you think of the two main characters as Dr. House and ER's Dr. Ross, then some of the later scenes take on a silly fanfic subtext.

[Good God a Bear]

I read that as Brad Pitt and thought..."That's George Clooney, you big dummy."

[Guest]

So wait -- George Clooney is in a movie that exists solely to have a Very Important Message regardless of what it means for the quality of the film? Never.

 

Next you'll be telling me that Seth writes horror.

[ShadowDog]

Even when I vehemently disagree with RC ... as I do here ... he's still an extremely entertaining read. What a joy it must be to have that mind running in your head all the time rather than what the rest of us have to settle for which is these brief glimpses into it.

 

What I disagree with the most is this "message" stuff. I see where you get it from, but I don't think it was preaching to the audience at all, it's just a three dimensional villain with a relevant point of the view. Relevancy matters, by the way. If Hugh Laurie's character was pissed at Earth because of the Nazis it would be a semi valid point but its so outdated it wouldn't resonate with the audience. So modern day villains need modern day reasons. That's number one.

 

Number two, Hugh Laurie's character absolutely HAS to have a very strong, very well stated, very compelling reason to want the Earth destroyed. Because we're talking about a guy who is not only okay with SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE dying, he's not only unwilling to do anything to stop it, he actually helped it along! He needs a good reason for this or the entire movie collapses because he's the Bond Villain in Moonraker who wanted to set up his space station civilization and kill off the world because ... um ... basketball reasons? That's not good enough in this day and age. Hugh Laurie needs a reason.

 

This was a good one. It's a compelling one, it makes sense, and it was well stated and delivered. And, yes, it strikes a little bit of a nerve or it wouldn't have bothered you. And that, my friend, is where this movie succeeded. Because the villain's point of view clearly struck a nerve with you. Which means you can at least wrap your mind around him wanting SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE dead. (I put emphasis on that because it's such a staggering amount of murder the word murder itself, the word genocide itself, doesn't do it justice. It's more than all the previous murders ever, even counting wars, combined and by several billion.)

 

So, Hugh Laurie's rationale works in that his character makes sense even though we'd never go to his lengths. In fact, it gives him layers because he didn't just wake up one morning all like "Imma kill seven billion people today" because his original intent was to warn people. When he realized that instead of being warned and changing, people just didn't give a shit he gave up and washed his hands of us. That is a very understandable character arc. We've all done that on a very minor scale. The best friend starts dating a woman we KNOW is bad news, he won't listen to us, we have several arguments about it, he won't see our point, so we wash our hands of it. And when he comes to us next year whining about her doing him wrong, we have no sympathy for him. That, one a much grander scale is what happened with Hugh.

 

So maybe Brad Bird oversold it a little bit (I don't think so, I think it was just right) but maybe he did. But I'd rather he oversell it than undersell it and we can't wrap our minds around Hugh's character. And I know this is where Brad is coming from because he's a master storyteller. And good storytellers don't give two craps about messages. It's about the story and nothing but the story. If there is a good message in there (don't do drugs, etc) that's secondary and mostly accidental.

 

It's funny how nobody accuses filmmakers of wanting to broadcast bad messages when Russian Spies in The Americans preach their communist gospel to spell out their three dimensional motivations. Nobody's accusing those show runners of wanting to convert us all to communism. But go the other way and all of the sudden it's about messages.

 

I don't believe it. Not for one second. Not with this storyteller and not with this movie.

 

Now, the Eiffel Tower rocket? Brad's on his own on that one. LMFAO No defense.

[R.CAllen]

Oh boy it is my favourite time of year it is RC and ShadowDog talk about movies time everybody quick run out and buy your presents prepare the meal leave cookies and milk out for the Grumpus it is a happy RC and ShadowDog Talk About Movies god bless us everyone

 

I think if you look at what the movie is and what it does through only the very narrow lens of the question of "Does this make a good motivation for a villain?" then it's possible to arrive at the conclusion of "Yes" for you, you particular viewer, but for me and for whatever part of my joyful mind which is shared in common with other audience members that's not a question asked. I don't know what particular sequence of cues or choices makes me look at the actions of a character and see the creator's hand inside them, puppet-style, (and I know that universally applying that standard to all fiction is a kind of madness, an inability to recognize makebelieve when it is right in front of your eyes; it'd be like watching Mr. Rogers send the Neighborhood Trolley to visit King Friday and insisting that this is a clear message to the audience that Mr. Rogers wants us to bring back feudalism) but whatever they were they must have been there because I didn't feel like I was watching Hugh Laurie playing Governor Nix explaining his Evil Plan of Personally Justified Evil to the characters there and therefore to us, the audience. I felt very clearly that I was seeing the next-to-final step in an argument Brad Bird was having with himself (or maybe his collaborators too ?) about the correct approach to making a movie called Tomorrowland, about what the capital F Future means to us in fiction and whether what it means is what it should mean, and who is to blame for all of it. I don't know how masterful a storyteller he is but that's what I got from that scene and I got pretty much the same impression all the way nearly from the very beginning of the film (starting with Kid Version Of George Clooney justifying his invention to Hugh Laurie by saying that if he saw someone up there flying in a jetpack he'd feel inspired, like anything was possible if he tried --- that right there from the top was the first toe over the line for me; maybe that's just me then and so I suspect the pair of us have very different barometers when it comes to what it means for some aspects of a movie being oversold or undersold) and that explicit speech the whole "gobbling up makebelieve about the destruction of the world like it was a chocolate éclair" thing was therefore just the last and most obvious in a long line of speeches and statements about this particular subject.

 

I don't think there was anything secondary or accidental about what this movie had to say. I would also have much rather Bird had tried underselling what he had to say even if that put the audience at risk of not understanding Hugh's character (as it was, I still don't really understand his character and why he did what he did, or even why just about anyone in the movie did what they did) but maybe that's just me and the way I am. I think it's real easy to find any perceived flaw in a work of fiction and dig up a rule about how fiction should be done and then point to the perceived flaw and try to argue that the perceived flaw is necessary, that it's a strength, that it couldn't have been done any other way and that might even be true (sometimes easy things to do are nonetheless true) but maybe not here this time for me? I don't know. I start out all excited for RC And ShadowDog Talk About Movies but by the third paragraph I am all out of steam for it. I sort of plan on seeing Mad Max : Wacky Races a second time this week so maybe we can have RC And ShadowDog Talk About Movies for that one and it'll go better for me then.

[Driver]

And I know this is where Brad is coming from because he's a master storyteller. And good storytellers don't give two craps about messages.

Gonna have to disagree with you on that one. "Message" as in a big PSA moral story to the audience, maybe not-- but pretty much every writer worth their salt goes into their work with a healthy amount of subtext in mind.

[ShadowDog]

I agree with you to a point but we both know that if it served your story you'd go with a 100% anti gay vibe even though that stance is personally adherent to you. True storytellers serve the story first.

[Driver]

I'm confused now...

[ShadowDog]

Basically RC is saying that Brad Bird had a personal message he felt strongly about that he wanted to shove down our throats so he wrapped a movie around that message. I don't believe you would do that, even as personal a message you feel strongly about such as "how about people stop being mean to gay people".

 

Not a perfect analogy but that's what I was driving at, no pun intended.

[Driver]

For better or worse I think people like Brad Bird are exactly the type to do that because they recognize they are in a position to do so.

 

I've never met a single writer/director that didn't want to imbue more than what was on the page. Whether it succeeds or not, there's always a high concept, message or subtext involved.

 

I remember reading Cliff Notes in high school and saying that all the discourse about symbolism was made up-- but it turns out that's not the case.

[ShadowDog]

Its totally possible I'm wrong here. I don't know him personally obviously and I'm not a mind reader. But to me it just felt like good cutting edge characterization. Maybe oversold a bit.

[Driver]

And I do have my Damon Lindelof hate-blinders on, so I probably couldn't attest to anything with 100% sureness...