Tomorrowland

Scott Hardie: “It sucked.”

Another one of those movies where the studio spent two gajillion dollars on CGI but only two weeks on the story and dialogue, Tomorrowland is a messy pile of ungainly, half-realized ideas about a fantastical society of big-brains, in which the conflict culminates in a ho-hum finale where the male geniuses punch one another while the female geniuses scream and panic over a ticking bomb. The plot frustratingly has more holes than Swiss cheese, and the film is barely interested in interrogating the moral and philosophical implications of its ideas, such as whether a genocidal Eloi-like super-society can be redeemed merely by replacing the officious British elitist in charge with a couple of blue-collar Americans who continue most of his policies. There are a lot of details in this movie that make zero sense except as contrivances for the plot or production, and the film extends its in-medias-res opening so very long without explaining what's happening that it becomes clear that movie is aware of and trying to conceal its shortcomings.

The movie comes alive only during three thrilling sequences, one reimagining the 1964 World's Fair and two others giving the heroes their first glimpses of the titular futuristic city, especially the one where a teenager explores a hologram of the city on foot. For these brief few minutes, the film becomes genuinely thrilling, especially if you're a Disney fan who can spot the many Easter-egg references to company and theme-park lore lovingly embedded in these sequences. It's too bad that the rest of the movie doesn't come anywhere close to the magic of these three scenes, but what a treat it could have been if it had.This review contains spoilers. Reveal it.

− March 5, 2025 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply