FANTASY; 2hr 10min
STARRING: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Thomas Robinson, Hugh Laurie
Aiming for the future: Robinson
Sandwiched between dimensions, its futuristic spires wrapped in wheat fields and accessible only by a magic electronic pin, the city of Tomorrowland is a dreamy, Disneyfied ideal. Eleven-year-old wunderkind inventor Frank Walker (Robinson) makes his way there via the 1964 New York World’s Fair and the blessing of a singular little girl (Cassidy as Athena). His bedazzling has experience soured, however: decades later, Tomorrowland is the changed domain of Governor David Nix (Laurie), whose view of humanity is dim, while Frank (Clooney) has become a bitter, hermetic man. He probably would’ve stayed that way, too, if Athena hadn’t led high-octane teenager Casey (Robertson) to his farmhouse bunker.
Having sampled Tomorrowland, Casey is fixated on getting back there. Making that happen makes quite some trip: The Incredibles director Brad Bird’s mind-bending fusion of space-age whiz-bangery and hard-edged reality is explosively inventive. But the core of the screenplay, co-written by Bird with Damon Lindelof, is a rosy drive to fix what globally ails us and the elemental belief that dreaming big is the way to make it happen. Maybe that’s as it should be when you wish upon a star.
