MAGGI PICAYUNE

They had me at the mention of Brad Bird directing. If anyone can direct a movie about the future many envisioned during the somewhat more optimistic Fifties/early Sixties, Brad is definitely near the top three.

In short Tomorrowland isn’t a knockoff of the subpark at the Disney theme parks like The Haunted Mansion and has less ties to the rides than Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s more about trying to reawaken that optimism people used to have when it came to the future: personal jetpacks, monorails, artificial gravity, spaceports as busy as O’Hare, etc. As the trailers showed, it appears to exist in another reality or pocket universe and only George Clooney’s character knows how to get back. Why? How? Where? Huh? It gets answered well if you see this. Meanwhile, the reality we live in looks pretty bleak: Climate Change, famines, droughts, overpopulation, economic instability, energy concerns, floods, the list goes on and I think it gets longer every decade. This is an intolerable situation for our heroine Casey; as expected an actress in her mid twenties being passed off as teenager old enough to drive, thanks Hollywood. She’s practically at ground zero of the pessimism plague; her father’s career at NASA is winding down and he has to oversee the dismantling of Cape Canaveral. High school isn’t any better thanks to every teacher bringing up all the dystopian possibilities…well, it is Florida and they have a governor who looks like Lex Luthor on the Atkins diet.

Still I enjoyed it more than I planned. George Clooney and Hugh Laurie are very good. I’m indifferent to them both, meaning I’m neither pro or con Clooney. The little English girl who plays Athena was great (you’ll see why) and I loved the cameo from Keegan-Michael Key; you may know him more recently as President Obama’s anger interpreter.

If you’re expecting some kind of outrageous disaster movie, you’ll be disappointed. Otherwise, check it out. It may be a bit hard to comprehend if your under 30. The utopia Tomorrowland is showing was in its death throes when I was a kid in the late Seventies and Mad Max began to appear more likely.

Alamo Extras: Newsreels showing what experts though the 21st Century would look like: fashion, the kitchen; a proof of concept video for toy stores about something I never heard of called the Ding-a-lings (a form of wind-up robots); the Davis three-wheeler car and other future cars circa 1960; Space Patrol binoculars you can mail away for, only a quarter!; goofy predictions of the future house (a form of Internet was present using a microfiche viewer); Astrobase toys from Ideal (the Col. McCauley line); a robot repair skit with old-style mansplaining, I loved how the repair guy said “roh-but” like Zoidberg, future homework, Billy Blastoff toy by Eldon (sic), a hovercraft motorcycle or as the narrator called it, a hoverscooter!; a commercial for the Zeroids from Ideal; and Forties car driven by robots or as they would say then, rohbuts.