Bird brings his blue-sky storytelling to bear on Tomorrowland: A World Beyond, a eyed sci-fi fairytale with elements taken straight from classic pulp magazine stories. It’s The Wizard Of Oz retold by Ray Bradbury or Hugo Gernsback, with bits of The Terminator and Buck Rogers thrown in for good measure. It’s an entertaining yet sometimes befuddling bag of intricately moving parts, not all of which fit together too well. Like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Tomorrowland is steeped in post-Space Age nostalgia. In Bird’s version of the present, the rockets are in mothballs, NASA’s launch platforms are being torn up, and the scientists have been put out to pasture – including Casey’s father, who sits at home, wanly fiddling with his soldering iron. Casey, on the other hand, remains upbeat about the future. The question is, how to convince everybody else? Things suddenly change when Casey comes into possession of an enchanted pin badge, which, when touched, gives her intoxicating glimpses of a utopian future: gleaming towers reach up into the sky. Youths fly around on jetpacks. Explorers prepare to blast off on space missions in rockets. Tomorrowland begins with a superbly-realised prologue set at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, where we meet a young Frank (here played by Thomas Robinson). Thereafter, the plot whisks us from place to place, tickling us with one mystery before rushing off to another. Brad’s creativity as a director – not to mention Walter Murch’s superb editing – is evident throughout the first half an hour or so, particularly when Casey’s experimenting with the dimension-warping properties of her new-found pin badge. But the story suffers for being so obtuse about its direction or the motivations of its characters. Imagine if Charlie And The Chocolate Factory was reworked so that it was a mystery where you didn’t know what the golden ticket did, why lots of characters wanted it, or even what the chocolate factory was – that’s the fault that lies at the heart of Tomorrowland. For a film clearly aimed at a family audience, the plot remains opaque for far too long. By the time Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof, have finished moving all their pieces into place, it’s worryingly late in the film. By this point, MacGuffins have been introduced and then forgotten about, villains have come and gone, and a final mind-bending gadget’s wheeled in to throw everything through a loop. Something of a throwback to the films Disney was making in the 70s before Star Wars changed the cinematic landscape – cute stuff like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes or Escape To Witch Mountain – Tomorrowland is a fun, unusually upbeat adventure. Had the story retained the same simple purity of the pulp sci-fi tales that inspired it, the result could have been a work of genuine wonder. Tomorrowland: A World Beyond is out in UK cinemas on the 22nd May. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
