TOMORROWLAND

'''TOMORROWLAND. BRAD BIRD, dir., story and script''' (with Damon Lindelof for script, and Jeff Jensen, story), prod. (with Lindelof and Jeffrey Chernov). Scott Chambliss, production design. USA: Disney and A113 (prod.), Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (US dist.), 2015. See |IMDb for additional filmographic information.

Released shortly after EX MACHINA, TOMORROWLAND should be watched and listened to for its handling of the female-gendered android robot — one that can pass for human in the case of TOMORROWLAND — and the issue called flippantly but insightfully on Futurama "robosexuality." With an MPAA rating of PG, TOMORROWLAND offers no sex, but there are issues of prepubescent love felt by a human boy and the question of whether a necessarily never-pubescent android/robot, one named for the militantly-virgin Athena, can return that love. TOMORROWLAND suffers from "Spielberg's Syndrome" sufficiently that it's probable that Athena can indeed love, and has loved — and it's undoubtedly the case that the over-long and over-stuffed TOMORROWLAND offers a surfeit of additional robot types, from rigorously humanoid to descendants of the Enforcer Droids of ROBOCOP (1987) to robot forms of the alien slave-hunters in BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984). Still, there is a very unSpielbergian, unDisney undertone in a relationship between a female-gendered robot who looks like a girl but in most ways is fully adult (and a superwoman), and a prepubescent boy, and then the man the boy grew into (played by George Clooney, b. 1961) and the still-girlish-appearing robot (played by Raffey Cassidy, b. ca. 2002). See also for the Steampunk of the Eiffel Tower becoming a rocket launcher, with rocket, and with it the classic SciFi shot of awe-struck observers, but postmodernized to have them taking videos of the rocket launch with smart phones and pads. Thematically central to TOMORROWLAND is the potential for the world of the future as either the standard dystopic ruined city and wasteland (e.g., in MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME) or as Tomorrowland in the Disney fashion, along "The Gernsback Continuum," and featuring what H. Bruce Franklin called the great SF trope of "The Wonder City Of The Future."

If the film were more coherently executed, its economic politics would be significant: the attempt is a reinforcement of hope for an ecologically responsible agricultural abundance (imaged by an amber field of grain) along with a technological eutopia (imaged by the Emerald City-like City) — opposed to the negativity and despair of Hugh Laurie's significantly named (David) Nix, finally seen wearing what looks like artificial leather jodhpurs, which are either a witty visual allusion to the future-ruining military leader Chuck De Nomolos in BILL & TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY or have no justification whatever. Nix's negativism is broadcast back to our time in a combination of tachyon communication back in time plus a kind of very-remote conditioning and highly negative "feedback." With the destruction of the tachyon tower and the defeat of Nix, there is the hope of constructive innovation from what we'll call a «|thousand points of light» of "special" — a word from the film — mostly young, energetic innovators in a broad range of fields.

RDE, 22/V/15