Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 10 (Tomorrowland)

Optimism without the veil of context or the risk of interpretation, Tomorrowland is not so much optimistic Science Fiction as it is science fictiony optimism. If Her resembles those old World’s Fair showcase films, Tomorrowland is the fantasy of a child who never accepted that they were just highly produced advertisements, someone who as an adult probably chokes up during Windows product-launch commercials.
           
The film imagines a world in which the 1964 New York World’s Fair was actually the launch of a trans-dimensional recruitment effort for “Tomorrowland,” an idealized techno-showcase world of unimpeded research and development. It is a shining and soaring Jetsons meets Roger Dean applied sciences paradise that is recruiting “dreamers.”
           
            
The film has plot holes large enough to move you between dimensions but it is also chock full of spectacular visual invention and kinetically exciting action sequences that may well make you laugh with happy disbelief. For the purposes of the plot it turns out that mankind’s spiral toward war, death, and environmental destruction is the result of an unintentionally malevolent technology and not an inherent problem with people themselves.
          
Tomorrowland is preachy but not turgid. It maintains a quick enough pace to shake off the grandiose speeches and moments of cloying innocence on the part of the film’s heroine. What it risks however, by coming at the topic of optimistic futurism so bluntly, making it the headline instead of the message, is discrediting the topic by reducing its arguments to trite platitudes. Someone arguing against apocalypticism might now be met by an eye roll and the words, “Oh, you mean like in Tomorrowland?” And this hypothetical opponent will feel like they’ve scored a rhetorical point without addressing the subject because they were able to tie the opposing view with a Disney movie.
             
Tomorrowland also shows an elemental misunderstanding of the sources of cynicism and those of possible solutions when it shows the main character crushed beneath the dire predictions she hears in school, ignored when she asks how to fix it all. Education is not the enemy. A clear and honest accounting of the problems would be a miraculous outcome in current education. Religious doom merchants, greedy film producers, and 24-hour news producers should have replaced the montage of the dire and negative high school teachers. Education is a potential wellspring of solutions and no one should quietly accept a broadside against it from a slickly produced summer action movie, no matter how fervently cloaked in the postures of optimism.

For all its blunt force optimism about the future in general, Tomorrowland is basically cynical about people. The happy ending it presents us is one in which the best are separated to perform their function in Tomorrowland and the masses are left to mill about like mindless beasts waiting to be driven either toward or away from the precipice of oblivion.