Tomorrowland’s Optimism Looks a Lot Like Hope

As soon as the news hit that director and writer Brad Bird was beginning work on a script for The Incredibles 2, the Internet rumor mill went into high gear, speculating on everything from who would return to voice their characters to who would be the main villain. Apparently Baby Jack-Jack was the lead candidate for that role according to an enraged social media. Bemused, and a little irritated, Bird took to Twitter to quell the original movie’s fans. “Reports have been saying a LOT of nonsense about the plot of Incredibles 2,” he wrote. “Just relax. I’ve got this.”

You see, Brad Bird is an optimist. And not only is he an optimist, but he really, really wants you to be one too. So much so that his latest movie,Tomorrowland, reaches near evangelistic levels in its encouragement of an optimistic outlook on the world. And as with so many things with an evangelistic zeal, there are going to be a lot of critics who don’t appreciate it. Ignore them. Tomorrowland is perfectly fine, preachiness and all.

Without giving too much away, Tomorrowland begins with Frank (George Clooney), who tells us how, as a young boy, he traveled to the 1964 World’s Fair in hopes of entering his nearly-functional jet pack into the inventors’ competition. Though the judge of the contest, Professor Nix (Hugh Laurie ), was less than impressed with Frank’s pile of parts, a mysterious young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) was smitten enough with the boy’s optimism and “never give up” attitude to provide him with the means to enter Tomorrowland. This other-dimensional realm, Frank discovers to his awe, is a hidden utopia in which the scientific geniuses of Earth had been gathering in order to solve all of the world’s problems.

Fast forwarding to the present day, the movie picks up with Casey (Brittany Robertson), the brilliant teenaged daughter of a NASA engineer, as she details her attempts to sabotage the government’s efforts to close down the launch facility where her father works. Casey, you see, dreams of going to space, but with all the recent government cutbacks in the space program, those are dreams that are unlikely to ever be fulfilled. Casey refuses to give up on them, though.

Through a series of bizarre, often comical events, Casey finds herself being offered her own invitation to Tomorrowland by a mysteriously unaged Athena. The catch (there had to be one) is that the only way Casey can get there is if the now much older Frank takes her, and having been exiled from Tomorrowland for reasons he refuses to discuss, he’s extremely reluctant to do so. As in, "get off my lawn or I’ll destroy you" reluctant. To make matters worse, Casey is also being pursued by a squad of killer robots.

Oops, did I forget to mention the killer robots? Well, like I said, I don’t want to give away too much. Still, I should probably mention them because there are a few intense action sequences that might not go over too well with some of the more sensitive little ones out there. My own twelve year old found the scene in which a frightened-near-to death-Casey spends an entire minutes’ worth of screen time beating a robot to death with a baseball bat (just to be sure) pretty hilarious, but others might not, so consider yourself warned.

Unfortunately, by the time you read this, the flood of negative reviews out there (which oddly weren’t subject to a pre-release embargo like mine was) will probably have squelched most of your appetite to see this film, killer robots or no killer robots. Which is too bad in a way, because I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there like myself who might actually enjoy Tomorrowland. In fact, I have to say I’m actually a little puzzled at some of the criticisms I’ve heard.  

One is the notion that Tomorrowland is somehow a bad movie because the third act is a little weak, a somewhat common complaint whenever screenwriter Damon Lindelof is involved in a project. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the ending is a bit of a letdown. For a movie full of characters who are supposed to be mental giants, one would hope the denouement would involve a more cerebral solution than simply blowing things up. But, alas, it doesn’t. When push comes to shove, Tomorrowland ends up being just another big budget summertime action movie (the release date should have been a hint), and in those kind of movies, well, something’s going to get blown up. But you know, the exact same thing happened at the end of Big Hero 6, another movie about well-meaning scientific geniuses, and I don’t remember everybody squawking about that.

Of course, some of those who have gone into Tomorrowland wanting nothing more than a simple action flick have had their own criticisms as well. For them, the movie comes off as a bit too preachy, occasionally screeching to a halt so a character can deliver another monologue about the dangers of negative thinking. They’re not totally wrong. Like I said previously, Bird is nothing if not downright evangelistic when it comes to his gospel of optimism.

The entire conceit of Tomorrowland is that instead of concentrating on how to make the world a better place, mankind has instead focused so intensely on what’s wrong that we’ve developed a sort of self-fulfilling apocalyptic mind set. In short, the world is committing suicide by abandoning hope. That’s a big no-no, of course. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in the encyclical Spe Salvi (In Hope We Are Saved), “[T]he present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey" That goal for Christians, obviously, is eternal communion with Christ, and because of the hope we put in that goal, we don’t fear the future. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.

Of course, as a secular piece of art, the hope offered up in Tomorrowland isn’t quite the same as the theological virtue we Christians celebrate. Like Interstellar before it, Tomorrowland postulates that we should place our faith and hope in ourselves and our ability to imagine a better future. But unlike with Interstellar, for some reason, I didn’t leave the theater with the impression that Tomorrowland was closing the door on placing hope in something outside of ourselves. It felt like it was leaving room for that even if wasn’t stating it. Then again, maybe I’m just being optimistic. Which would probably please Brad Bird to no end.

In a world he didn’t create, in a time he didn’t choose, one man looks for signs of God in the world by… watching movies. When he’s not reviewing new releases for Aleteia, David Ivesspends his time exploring the intersection of low-budget/cult cinema and Catholicism at The B-Movie Catechism.