Kritiken

Tomorrowland is the year's least subtle allegory, at the very least eccentric and occasionally bordering on batshit. But there's not likely to be a zippier, dafter, more fascinating piece of family-friendly pop-art all summer.

If George Clooney is our Cary Grant, then Tomorrowland might be Clooney's Monkey Business, the movie in which he acknowledges the schoolboy fantasies underlying his star persona and mines them for both humor and pathos.

What matters is Bird's passion, and the film's sincerity: it really does long for the old can-do spirit, really does believe in our power to shape our own lives. There are glorious action scenes in Tomorrowland, lots of cute jokes and some great imaginative bits – I liked the "flashes of future", Casey paired with a five-seconds-later Casey who anticipates her every move – but the film is deadly serious, urging us to tell our children the story of the two wolves.

In form and theme, then, the film is Disney to its very core. Tomorrowland's concrete and glass curves call to mind Frank Gehry's Los Angeles concert hall as well as Epcot's own architecture... Its closing call to arms for humanism and environmentalism is so saccharine as to stick in the craw. Still, it's a hard heart that would resist Clooney's appeal to his audience to just – for once – be amazed.

The problem with Tomorrowland isn't that it's a movie about Walt Disney's highest ideals that can't help also being an advertisement for Disneyland; it's that it just isn't much of a movie. It takes some cool chase-scene set pieces and some admirable articulations of unfashionable positivity and spackles the gaps between them by having people deliver nudge-winky shorthand lines like, "It's important — they need to know the stakes!

Tomorrowland is a folly and a failure, though there is something touching in its failure, tied as it is to the vision and personality of Walt Disney himself.

In the eclectic and ambitious Tomorrowland, Bird aims for a Miyazaki-like blend of action, humor, and poignancy. The result, I'm shocked to say, is a spluttering misfire... Bird's movie lacks clarity and authentic exuberance, and adopts peculiar, self-defeating strategies.

[Bird is] the right director for Tomorrowland, and does just about all he can; you just wish it had the right script (Bird is co-credited). But the film zips along gamely, postponing its plot problems with a bevy of clever set pieces, and for a good while it keeps you fully entertained.

Director Brad Bird brings his vivid widescreen compositions and kitschy retro-futurism to a screenplay he co-wrote with Damon Lindleof, but his storytelling, a strong point in The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004), is harsh and inelegant.

Those who criticized Bird's Pixar-produced superhero tale The Incredibles for its vaguely disguised Ayn Randianism will have a field day with the third act of Tomorrowland, which posits this lustrous world to come as a utopia where the human race's most imaginative citizens can brainstorm all of Earth's problems away... This truly is a movie dear to Bird's heart, even though it's corny, childish gibberish writ large.

Tomorrowland gradually leans away from narrative coherence and toward underbaked moralism... Like most of his protagonists, Bird is a "special" artist with a rare gift for visual invention and narrative momentum—and as Tomorrowland evolves into a weird, pained discourse on the maker's dilemma, it's hard not to wish he'd just put his head down and keep dreaming.

If you treat "Tomorrowland" mainly as an immense cinematic theme park that unveils a new "ride" every few minutes, its weaker aspects won't be deal-breakers. In this sense, if in no other, Bird's latest owes more to "Metropolis," "Blade Runner," "Dark City," the first "Tron" and other works of top-shelf eye-candy than to most of the SF-and-fantasy-tinged franchise entries that modern studios churn out.