Despite an A-list leading man in George Clooney and a scene in which Katheryn Hahn plays a ray gun-shooting robot (as good as it sounds), the film bombed. The questions Tomorrowland asked, film-goers seemed uninterested in answering. The 1950s aesthetic of the alternative reality Casey discovers in the film – a silvery city called Tomorrowland – is designed to ask audiences: where did the optimistic attitudes of past generations disappear to? And when our pop culture only ever imagines disastrous futures, is that the future we become doomed to inherit? (The first act of the movie is full of TVs broadcasting scenes of destruction, with Casey’s classes in school similarly filled with gloom: “ punching a one-way ticket to dystopia,” one teacher proclaims, before looking lost for words when Casey asks in response: “What are we doing to fix it?”) The movie was an ode to utopian aspiration: Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof’s screenplay centred around a tech-savvy teenager called Casey (Britt Robertson), who dares to dream of a better future instead of the apocalypse-fetishizing one constantly imagined in the movies and video games around her. Instead, it’s the ill-fated optimism of Bird’s film that evokes the Swedish noisemongers’ magnum opus. The DNA it shares isn’t anti-capitalist attitude – this is, after all, a bright, shiny family movie named after a Disneyland theme park area, that from the outside looked like a cynical, post-Pirates of the Caribbean attempt at corporate synergy. If popcorn cinema has an equivalent, it might just be Brad Bird’s hugely underrated Tomorrowland.
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