Much of Brad Bird’s Disney sci-fi adventure Tomorrowland is terrific fun, but it’s one of the strangest family movies I’ve seen: Bird’s not just making a case for hope, he’s making a furious, near-hysterical case against anti-hope.
After a perplexing prologue in which George Clooney in a futuristic suit addresses an unseen audience, Bird flashes back to perhaps the 20th century’s most enduring symbol of technological optimism: The 1964 New York World’s Fair. Clooney’s character, Frank Walker, is a preteen science nerd who is demonstrating his semifunctional homemade jetpack to a British scientist called Nix played by Hugh Laurie. Nix belittles Frank, but a young girl named Athena, who appears to be Nix’s daughter, secretly slips the boy a World’s Fair pin that transports him somewhere fabulous.
I can’t describe where that is because the fun in Tomorrowland comes from being constantly upended. What I can say is that for Bird the ’64 fair is utopia. This was an era when kids made rockets in garages out of vacuum cleaner parts; when a clean, cheerful “city of the future” inspired awe instead of cynicism. For Frank, anything seems possible.
Frank is not the movie’s protagonist, but it’s someone cut from the same cloth. Casey Newton is a present-day Florida teen (played by Britt Robertson) whose dad works for NASA overseeing the dismantling of rockets that will never be used. A budding rocket scientist, she’s so outraged by the failure to support the space program, she sends homemade drones to sabotage the equipment — and gets caught. Sprung from jail, she finds in her belongings the same kind of pin that sent Frank on the ride of his life. Every time she touches it, she’s in what I’m tempted to call a field of dreams.