Channel Awesome
The land of tomorrow awaits, but is it everything it’s cracked up to be? Doug checks out Tomorrowland.
Tagged with: 2015 channel awesome disney disneycember disneyland doug walker movies tomorrowland
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What really bothered me in that movie is that they never explain what happened to Tomorrowland. I was really curious and expected a reveal or something, or at least an explanation, but instead I got nothing at all! That, and, well, what -or rather, where- IS Tomorrowland…
Tomorrowland is in your imagination YOUR imagination, MY imagination, DOUG’S imagination, in every mom’s basement homespun internet critics’ imagination. If only you open your minds and, oh, I don’t know, USE IT! Of course, if they had a more definite ending then you’d all complain and say the filmmakers should have left it more open to interpretation, because, by golly, we know that you know more about making movies than the movie makers. Look…
Did you like it? Great. Did you hate it? Whatever. You haters can all meet at a Waffle House and talk it out over coffee and hash browns with gravy.
>Did you like it? Great. Did you hate it? Whatever. You haters can all meet at a Waffle House and talk it out over coffee and hash browns with gravy.
Wow. All of the overly defensive fanboyish bullshit of the post-2010s packed into one paragraph. Somebody frame this.
Well. Apparently by not understanding a part of a movie, I now not only hate it, but I also think I know more about movie-making than the movie-makers.
Also, it seems the audience is not allowed to have any negative opinions about a movie, like not liking parts of it for example, unless they make movies themselves.
Sorry man, I didn’t know we are not allowed to criticize movies IN A SITE ABOUT CRITICIZING MOVIES!!!!
Really, who’s the greater hater, I wonder…
Oooh, I’m so SCARED!
Not!
Not scared of what? He wasn’t threatening you.
OK, this is just immature…
Yeah this movie was OK a bit hard to follow but fine at the least. I totally thought the Hugh Laurie villian pointless though thought he was just in there to be the big baddie and that’s it. Also thought some of the scenes with George Clooney and the robot girl were creepy. Other than that though and a few other nitpicks its a fine flick.
I was going to see this in theaters but I was out of money at the time so I never saw it.
For me the trailer made this movie hard to figure out so I didn’t see it until recently. It tried to follow a formula but the story and writing was obviously making that difficult. It ended up with a mess that was visually spectacular, had a few good ideas and a few great bits of dialog.
It wasn’t quite theater worthy but I still liked it.
This film was Atlantis: the Lost Empire meets Paycheck meets Doctor Who. Casey is dumber than she thinks and acts like her views are the only important stuff. She deserves to go to jail for her actions because SHE is right that the rocket gantry (a landmark in its own right) shouldn’t be taken down despite NASA moving on from such type of rockets and committing domestic terrorism to protest it. And her genius could easily be swapped out by optimistically naive as a character trait minus the arrogance. And the soapbox Aesop theme of the story seems out of place.
Yeah, the main thing I took away from this was a hope for Raffey Cassidy that her career really takes off from here (and that she doesn’t end up falling down the child star pit in the process). She gave the best performance I’ve seen from a kid in a good while.
The aggressive whimsy of it made me avoid it. I’m sorry, but enough with the “dreaming and imagining is sooper-awesome!” stuff in movies, because imagination in itself is not enough.
And the whole obnoxious nostalgia made it even worse.
It kinda came off as a Bioshock played too straight–that if all the super duper smart people were taken away from all the common dirty masses and all put together, there’d be no limits to what they can do…even though that’s not what happens even when we do put super duper smart people together…basically, a bit too Ayn Rand, which is not to my tastes. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it was a similar feel in the Incredibles–though there, you could overlook it more easily.
It’s no coincidence, a lot of Brad Bird’s work has objectivist themes.
I actually thought the beginning was the best part, when they abandoned the story of the boy and started with the NASA demolishing it’s rocket louching facility, at least for me, the movie went downhill and become a run of the mill action flick/kids movie.
Oh gods the whole NASA demolishing its rocket launch pad bit was probably what bothered me the most about the entire thing. It was such a “Hollywood” type message of “feelz” over actual reality. I mean yes NASA just demolished the Launchpad they used for the Space Shuttles. But it isn’t because they are ending Space Launches at Kennedy. They demolished it because it was made to launch that one unwieldy badly thought out over priced and underperforming vehicle. The Space Shuttle. While they tore down that platform they have built new and refurbed several old in order to support an increasing number of both NASA and Private Commercial Space Launches. The tearing down of the Shuttle Launch Tower is the very definition of the Creative Destruction that drives advancement into a place like Tomorrowland. But the Hollywood types pull out exactly the wrong takeaway from it all.
I saw it at the Ziegfeld in nyc, one of the few theatres that showed the plus ultra animated short before the movie started, and that helped it immensely imo
Doug is surprised that a Brad Bird movie had such horrible dialog? he missed the most important part. While Bird directed it, the script was yet another Damn Lindelof masterpiece. You know the guy who helped make Star Trek Into Darkness and Prometheus such tightly scripted comprehensible quality films. The man is a professional “Script Doctor Kervorkian”.
Ug…THIS movie. Half the reason I went to see it was for Hugh Laurie. Boy was I disappointed. His biggest scene has him preaching on and on (pretty much talking directly to the audience) about us destroying ourselves and the world. It got so bad I was doing that ‘blah blah blah’ motion with my hand at the screen. The entirely of FERNGULLY was more subtle than that scene.
Oh that’s right, I went there!
This was a great looking movie with some nice scenes of whimsy, but the liberal preaching and inability to question its adherence to its Utopian ideals was boring and has been done so many time before by better movies.
For me, this movie has problems but is a huge guilty pleasure for me. The biggest reason is because I overlook the flaws as I really love the scenes that I like a lot. The opening at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair is incredibly cheesy, but I like that. The scene at the Sci-Fi collector’s shop was filled with too many in-jokes and references, but I liked that. Tomorrowland was shown in its heyday for only five minutes or so, but I liked that. Like Doug said, the overall creative ideas that are presented, I really like that. Those aspects I really do love of this movie, even if as a whole it becomes a huge disjointed mess.
What I will say, however, is that I love the message in the movie. To some it may seem too big and complex, but to me I see the message as “Hey, you know what? The world can be a big and scary place, but we can change that. We can make a better tomorrow.” It’s a message that I find rather rare. In our modern day and age, the movies that are released show a really nitty gritty and sometimes downright depressing future. Mad Max in the dry post apocalypse, The Hunger Games in a dystopian ruins of the United States, hell even Star Wars with another Empire rising up wanting to rule all. I don’t know about you, but it is rather refreshing to have a movie that tells us to have a positive outlook on the future, and that we have a chance to make it happen.
You second paragraph. Yes. Exactly. >___< <3
I know I am in the minority, but I personally loved this movie, like one of my favorites of the year liked. I liked the part at the 1963 world fair, I liked how campy it got at times, I liked the actors, I liked the story, I liked the visuals. I liked almost everything about this movie (the only thing I didn’t quite like was the exposition towards the beginning). When I saw it, I was personally appalled at the reviews it was getting, I shouted in the car (I was at the drive in) “How the F*** did this movie only get a 50% on Rotten Tomatoes” as soon as it ended.
Sorry 1964.
Bravo.
Doug, FUCK YOU. If you don’t get it, I can’t explain it to you. Damned kids….
Thanks for saying what I was thinking.
I’ve been wanting to say that ever since he ripped on ‘Cartoon All-Stars To the Rescue’.
This movie is a real mixed bag. Personally, I like it because it has some great ideas and great scenes. However, it does have a lot of problems. I feel like there was potential for a really good, really solid movie here, but it needed a lot more work to get to where it wanted to be.
I never watched this movie, but I want to talk about its trailer (and let’s be honest, the trailer is an important incentive to watch a movie, and this one failed at the box office)
It took me over a week to watch the trailer. I always skipped it when it was a commercial and only after skipping it dozens of times I felt guilty and watched it entirely.
As far as trailer-craft goes, this one was horrible.
Clooney appeals to a adults, but these are immediately driven away by having a female teenager as the protagonist, because this signals “Young adult movie”.
So this could be a Young Adult movie, but teenagers do not want to see an aged George Clooney in a movie (they want Edward or Jacob), neither do they like the “secret world”-plot. Secret worlds a very popular theme in children’s movies (Peter Pan, Narnia, Spiderwick, …). But if you want to feel as a “Yound Adult”, you want to distance yourself from these “childish” stories as far as possible.
The children themselves, however, would probably be turned away by all these “old people who talk” (e.g. Don Bluth-movies have mice or little dinosaurs as the protagonist – something very young persons can relate to. Same for many Disney/Pixar movies)
So it doesn’t cater to adults, it doesn’t appeal to teenagers, and it doesn’t feel like a children’s movie.
…
Who exactly did they expect to pay money to watch this movie???
I’m surprised so many people are so down on the ‘villain’ in this story. He’s sour and joyless, and if something isn’t exactly to his liking and flawlessly realized, no matter how cool the concept, he dismisses the lot as junk and remains convinced everything is doomed. Much like many of the armchair critics of this movie. Laurie’s character allowed Tomorrowland to fall into disrepair, and whether the critics realize it or not, they are dream killers, too. He was the wrong man to head up this project because he couldn’t understand that creations are flawed in the in the beginning. If something isn’t perfect the first time, it’s rubbish. If you can’t produce something totally streamlined, shiny and new at the snap of your fingers, you are not a genius. This movie is a rollicking shaggy-dog-story of an adventure, and you need to sit back and enjoy the ride.
There’s a difference between dismissing something as rubbish because of its flaws and just pointing out that it has them. Pretending something is perfect when it isn’t doesn’t do anyone any good either.
Maybe so, but when did I pretend anything was perfect, in actuality, or flawed perception?
Well you did suggest that people should just sit back and enjoy the ride, it seems like that would mean ignoring any flaws or parts they don’t like. Not to mention you got mad at Doug just for pointing out the problems he had with the film as well as what he liked about it, which is exactly what a critic is supposed to do. You did the same thing with Captain America, and he was almost completely positive on that one. And both times you dismissed anyone who had a problem with the movie as a “kid”.
I’m 61. For real. Compared to me, a lot of you ARE kids. I see a lot of things in a contexts you won’t understand just yet. I know this because I used to be young and full of myself , too. By the time you do get it, I’ll be dead. At least, I hope you get it. You will laugh this off as cornball, but I have to believe there is still some vestige of nobility in the human spirit, and that there are still dreamers out there who will refuse to let the goal of a Tomorrowland die. I have my pin, and wear it proudly. Go ahead, mock me. Your scorn will not stain me. I hold my head high. I bid you a happy new year, and a good night.
I’m certainly not going to mock you for that. It’s not the message of Tomorrowland that’s at issue so much as the execution. Most of the people on this site may be kids compared to you, but I still think you’re underestimating a lot of them. All the same happy New Year to you as well.
I personally couldn’t stand the actress that played the android. I thought she was so annoying. In the scene where she dies I was actually smiling.
Plus, I think the thing that really surprised me is that they threw the word “damn” in this film like a few times. This was a PG film, right? That’s going to be okay with the general Disney audience!
For a PG film? I would say yes. It’s fine as long as they don’t put the “G” word in front of it.
So I left the theater absolutely in love with this one and came home to an internet where…nobody was talking about it and I wasn’t sure why. I guess you helped pinpoint some of the problems most people had with it.
For me, I come from a family that tends to be very pessimistic and doom and gloom about everything, and that attitude really jives against my more optimistic dreamer personality. To see a movie that not only validated optimistic dreamers but also insisted that they were NECESSARY to the survival of the human race really spoke to me, and it’s a message I thought was presented in a more mature way than a Disney cartoon, even if it was a bit hammered in. It just seems as an adult that the message that ‘the world CAN get better so long as you focus on what you can DO about the situation’ is so rarely presented that I found it pleasantly refreshing. Too many adults dwell on how terrible the world is without making an attempt to fix it. It’s nice to know someone else thinks the same way I do.
I never saw this movie. It just didn’t seem like anything that special. I’m not finished with this (last?) year’s Disneycember. I was just more interested in seeing certain reviews. What are you doing next year? The OTHER Marvel movies? The direct to video sequels?