“What if there’s a place where nothing is impossible?”
This question, asked by George Clooney’s sardonic and grumpy inventor character, Frank Walker, carries a tempting tone that makes itself an interrogative form of a matter-of-factly revelation, inviting its audience to entertain the possibility.
The place is called ‘Tomorrowland’, a bustling futuristic metropolis where world’s brightest minds are gathered together to save the world from impending destruction. It’s a place with ‘Perfection’ written all over it: trains zoom across the sky through air rails snaking between and around looming skyscrapers, while other airborne automobiles fly here and there like the entire space between sky and earth is nothing but a single boulevard, layers of waterpools hang adrift in the air, and swimmers swoop down from one to another, while flare rockets surge toward the sky in whistling upward projections.
The idea thrown holds power, sounding able to erect a foundation of curiosity that is capable of sustaining hold over its spectators. But the idea is just an idea the film is ever struggling to realize. As the story moves forward, the narrative itself keeps breaking its potential, losing the chance of realizing its optimistic output, in the wake of its ever-conflicting elements. There’s Frank, who has long been drowned in his own pessimism, embittered by his personal tragedies and hopelessness, and there’s Casey (Britt Robertson), a jubilant modern day-genius, who can’t let go of her hopes of a better world. The film lectures that the impending destruction is inevitable, and yet it clings tightly on the possibility that it’s still fixable. The latter notion has an enduring appeal, but it gets crushed each time by the more imminent horror of unavoidable extinction.
Turns out, ‘Tomorrowland’ is a phantasmagorical utopia that may be only existing in few people’s hopes, like Casey’s, ever threatened of dissipation in the presence of a brutal fate that people had long made for themselves. It’s a long trip to a dead end, but it keeps fixing itself for no fathomable reason. On times when it flies, the narrative takes Casey’s optimism as its wings, ever attempting to reconstruct its promises while its messed-up conflicts keep pushing everything asunder. It’s an unsettling experience that leaves the audience in a perplexing decision-making, whether to care or not at all, about where everything is headed.
Tomorrowland makes itself sound an anomaly when it throws questions that even itself can’t provide an answer, let alone a sure one. It feeds on many ‘What Ifs’, but struggles to deliver something that could satisfy the curiosity. Tomorrowland fails largely on promises it presented during its build up, and it gets itself dragged toward a bland and unaffecting climax.
It would be unforgivable though to dismiss the movie’s biggest surprise: Athena, the female version of Peter Pan, who gives both Frank and Casey, the magical Tomorrowland pin. Played by newcomer, Raffey Cassidy, the forever 12-year old Athena, possesses an otherworldly charm which Frank himself couldn’t resist. She’s precociously a real charmer, and she stands out despite of her incoherently structured storyline. This doesn’t make a substantial force to lift the overall narrative failure from its convoluted mess, but it’s a one beautiful portion to stick your attention at when everything else loses its appeal.
In the end, we’re all like Casey, still dreaming to reach the stars while her parents keep hinting her the possibility that there might be nothing there waiting. The Tomorrowland she stumbles into, is nothing but a hanging possibility that is ever positioned at the verge of collapse. This is the world that the movie is trying to make us realize, and maybe, just maybe, it only mines the horror of possible extinction to actually make us propel into action, and do something to stop the destruction. Casey believes in mankind and that there’s still hope for something like Tomorrowland to actually exist, Frank is convinced that the Earth’s horrendous fate is sealed. I’d like to put my faith on the former.
RATING: 6/10 (JE)
