Tomorrowland (2015)
This review contains some spoilers.
When I saw the trailer I thought I might enjoy this alright because it looked great and promised a fun adventure. For about 50% of the movie I thought this was exactly what I was getting. And then the hammer dropped.
So yeah, the consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that it is "unfortunately weighted down by uneven storytelling". Agreed. They should have made this thing a half hour shorter and skip the unnecessarily long and rather unremarkable introduction and focus more on what came after.
Ok, so the story is simple enough: a young boy is given a pin that transports him to an alternate dimension where the brightest minds can freely fulfill their creative instincts without having to worry about politics and other pesky things such as money. It's working out great for him up to the point when he accidentally develops a machine which can not only view the past with perfect accuracy but also the future. And the future, as it turns out is that humanity will plummet into nuclear war and destroy itself. So Casey, our main protagonist is chosen to literally fix the world and prevent it from ending.
I know you're probably assuming it's another "you're the chosen one. Do our dirty work for us because you think differently than us and can therefore do stuff better." kind of story. You're right. It is. But it doesn't matter because the story is just a vehicle for the all-important message.
And the message is rather interesting. Governor Nix (Hugh Laurie), who is the villain, gives a very interesting speech by the end on how humanity is actually perfectly OK with messing up our world because if they assume they're screwed from the get-go, they can tell themselves there is nothing to be done and therefore they don't
have to do anything. A pessimistic future doesn't require anything of them today.
And uhh... I didn't expect things to get so deep in a freakin' Disney kids' movie but it's actually a good point. It's exactly what we're doing and we continue to tell ourselves "Well, I bought a hybrid, and I did the Ice Bucket Challenge. What else do you want me to do?".
Here's what the movie wants you to do: Take that device you have in your pocket that you use for taking selfies and texting, you know, the one that can quickly access almost all of human knowledge, and actually put it to good use and learn stuff! Dream! Make things that benefit mankind! And next time NASA says they want funding for research and exploration, don't go raging about how we shouldn't spend money on such things because there are more pressing issues to worry about and we can't afford it. Did you know that NASA's budget in 2014 was just 0.5% of total US budget for that fiscal year? A lot of people apparently imagine they go about spending truckloads of money so that they can take pretty pictures of the Earth from the ISS. Well, that is not true. But I digress.
This movie actually stresses the importance of research, development, science and exploration over anything else because we can't fix our gigantic impact on the planet just by keeping on doing what we're doing and trimming it just a bit. We need great ideas for great solutions. And for that, great people have to be allowed to do their thing and thrive. They should be the pinnacle of our society.
But... most of the world would rather read a "news" article about the latest scandal involving Kim Kardashian's monstrous behind.
Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked what would surprise Carl Sagan the most about today's world. He answered that it would be the fact that we still need to prove that science is important.
Well, Tomorrowland appears to be the small step in the right direction our world needs so dearly by inspiring the young generation and telling it that they aren't "lame" for being geeks and nerds. They are the solution to our problems. Not quite the giant leap I'd like to see before I die, it's still a Disney Kids' movie, but it's a flicker of hope that finally the society is beginning to see science for what it is.
Tomorrowland is going on my "what I will definitely show my kid, if I ever have one" list.
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