Retro-Future City: TOMORROWLAND

Tomorrowland tells a science fiction story we don’t usually hear these days. It’s a story of hope, saying the future doesn’t have to be as bleak as we fear. After a couple decades worth of cultural output drumming the dystopian beat, not to mention the generally terrifying disasters worldwide, how wonderful it is to find a movie taking on the mission of encouragement. Director Brad Bird, who also co-wrote with Damon Lindelof and Jeff Jensen, looks towards an imagined world in which science and progress really can change the world for the better, if only we allow it to be shared. The filmmakers give us a shiny city on a hill, chrome and glowing with Art Deco spires and Space Age retro-futurism. Jet packs and flying cars, robots, teleportation and Jules Verne-inspired rockets fill the frame, as a great big beautiful tomorrow comes to life, beckoning us to shake off cynicism and join in the fun.

This is a vision of the future straight out of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where, coincidentally enough, our story begins. A young boy (Thomas Robinson), visiting the fair with an optimistic invention in tow, follows a mysterious girl (Raffey Cassidy) through a secret doorway contraption to Tomorrowland, the futuristic city full of scientific wonder. Skipping forward to our time, we meet an irrepressibly sunny teenager (Britt Robertson) who remains excited by a potential for good in the world despite the her NASA engineer father (Tim McGraw) losing his job. After a great many (too many, perhaps) complications, she discovers a vintage pin. When touched, it shows her and only her a glimpse of Tomorrowland off in the distance, untouchable and irresistible. So begins the mystery powering the plot engine, as she tries to figure out what this city is and how to get there, a quest that leads her eventually a middle-aged man (George Clooney), who once was the boy who went there, and is now cagily reluctant to return.

The film trusts the very fact of mystery to pull us along, keeping characterization thin and the obfuscation thick. Late in the game, the truth about the city is revealed and the full extent of the stakes is known. The way there is a series of thick tangles of exposition punctuated with whiz-bang special effects sequences as the teen learns of secret societies, killer robots, laser guns, quantum particles, and ultimately the answers she and we desire about Tomorrowland. Bird and crew take great pleasure in concocting complicated backstory and appealing design, then hiding it, parceling it out in frustrating and tantalizing doses between cliffhangers and info dumps. There’s a cheery sincerity to this clunking structure, recalling early sci-fi stories in which an ordinary person discovers extraordinary secrets in episodic dreamlike fashion with great wonderment. It plays like an updated serial, with bigger effects, but the same potentially hokey spirit.

Although the cluttered exposition bogs things down, Bird comes to life when staging his exciting flights of sci-fi with an animator’s flair for visual timing. Would you expect any less from the director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol? Tomorrowland isn’t as fluid an experience. Though the actors mostly sell the sloppy connective tissue, it could've used more showing, less telling, and telling, and telling. But then a toy store is suddenly the stage for a martial arts battle, or a farmhouse bursts forth with high-tech booby traps. And I won’t even begin to spoil what happens to a famous European landmark, but it’s like something out of an eye-catching old pulp magazine cover. It’s a film full of images of wide-eyed speculative goofiness, and completely committed to meeting them on that level. The film’s design is charming, and photographed in cheerfully luminous ways. Who cares if the characters are vaguely defined and the world’s a jumble? Look at this thing go!

Bird approaches the concept with evident delight in conjuring, with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, these bright images and gleaming theme park (it is named for a section in Disney parks, after all) spectacle. But there’s also a sincerity of purpose and earnestness of tone as it moralizes about the power in the stories we tell ourselves about our future. It asks us not to accept dystopia as our only option, but to realize it’s never too late to change the world for the better. It may be given a cornball hard sell here, with a big speech at the end laying it on thick. But, boy, is it an honest sentiment, too. What we learn about Tomorrowland eventually sets a selfish figure intent on keeping progress to himself against those who’d rather open the possibilities to anyone willing to pitch in. Our heroes discover that even a perfect, gleaming city can’t survive without those willing to work at make things better for everyone.

It’s ultimately another film with world-ending stakes, but Robertson and Clooney, two utterly charming performers who work well together and steer the film lightly, embody a more humanist ideal. What good is a secret world for special smarties if you can’t invite people in? Why accept a bad outcome for humanity when you can work to change it? The message – and the worldbuilding – gets muddled in the telling, but Tomorrowland asks us to reach for the best of humanity instead of tolerating the worst. If our imagination dies, so do we. Accepting dystopia is easy and cynical. Making utopia requires talent, cooperation, creative thinking, and hope. We’re in this together, so we might as well imagine ourselves a nice, fun, shiny future where anything is possible. In its own imperfect, heartfelt way, Tomorrowland wants us leaving the theater thinking a little brighter.

Highflying Action: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL

Brad Bird, the remarkable animation director behind such freshly minted classics of the form as The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille has completed his first live action film, which happens to be nothing less than a massive action-thriller and a new entry in an established franchise. Debuting with the fourth in the Mission: Impossible series is not indicative of a lack of courage. But the risk paid off.  Perhaps not since Looney Tunes animator Frank Tashlin switched effortlessly to cartoony Technicolor farces in the 1950s has an animator so successfully ported over his skills with imagery into a live action setting. With Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Bird removes all doubt that he’s at the top of his game as one of modern cinema’s finest pop filmmakers, a genre expert adept at crowd pleasing with confident, energetic, hugely satisfying features.

The Mission: Impossible series is Hollywood’s most successful accidental experiment in auteurism. Each film has been given over to a different director, each allowed to put his own stamp on the material. Way back in 1996, Brian De Palma got to introduce us to Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force, a plucky agent who will pull together with his team to execute complicated plans, defeat the bad guys, and save the MacGuffins. That film, a thriller loaded with plenty of action and plenty of backstabbing (at the very least double- and triple-crosses) indulged De Palma’s love of long takes and intricate visual playfulness. It was a complicated (convoluted?) story stylishly told.

For the sequel, which arrived in theaters four years later, Hong Kong action master John Woo spun out a tale of spy vs. spy as an overheated action buffet by way of a crypto-remake of Hitchcock’s Notorious. It’s no Face/Off (Woo’s greatest American effort by a mile) and a seriously compromised vision. It was reportedly edited down from a much longer director’s cut. But it has a paradoxically glossy and shaggy wild-eyed charm.

After another six years, the franchise fell to J.J. Abrams, a television director and writer making his feature film debut. He brought his always-be-closing, serialized thriller chops from shows like Alias and Lost to make M:I:III what was the best of the bunch to date. It’s a film with a great, gnashing villain in Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and a tight script that’s a constant jolt of cliffhangers and set pieces with a surprisingly emotional romantic undertow.

Now it’s been five years and Brad Bird has his shot to make the series his own. He actually hews pretty closely to the slick narrative style that Abrams’s used in his entry, but Bird jazzes it up with his sensational eye for action and his remarkable sense of visual space. The film gets off to a bit of a slow start (relatively speaking, of course) with two agents (Paula Patton and Simon Pegg) instigating a prisoner riot in order to break Ethan Hunt out of a Russian prison. “If you broke me out of there, things must be really bad out here,” he gravely tells them. Sure enough, the villain this time around is a crazed expert in nuclear war (Michael Nyqvist) who for some reason or another wants to spark just such a conflict between Russia and the United States. Like Salt, the best pure action film of last year and which also made great use of cinematographer Robert Elswit, this film gets a lot of mileage out of its cold-war revival scenario. It’s all so scarily plausible. Well, plausible enough, at least.

Through a series of unfortunate events, the three agents find themselves disavowed by the United States, blamed for a bombing they didn’t commit and trapped overseas without easy access to the Force’s equipment and assistance. They’re all on their own to stop this sinister threat by tracking down vital pieces of technology, intercepting black-market nuclear code swaps, and doing whatever they can to ensure nuclear war won’t break out on their watch. They’re not completely alone since they managed to find themselves joined by a State Department analyst (Jeremy Renner), but that still only brings their team up to four. Four against the world!

The film hurtles through Budapest, Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai, staging sensational (and rewarding full-scale IMAX) action sequences every step of the way. I can hardly remember the last time an action movie had moments that had me feeling like I was clenching every muscle in my body. And I certainly can’t remember the last time a vertiginous moment, a near literal cliffhanger, turned my stomach in suspense so viscerally that I briefly worried I’d be grossly putting my popcorn back into the empty bag. From a dangerous climb up the side of the world’s tallest building to a car chase through a blinding sandstorm, and from a host of foot chases, shootouts, and hotel room brawls to a multi-part climactic sequence that’s a masterful cross-cut thrill, the film never stops to take a break. It sizzles with suspense every step of the way as the characters continually set up intricate plans only to see them fall apart in various ways, each time leaving them scrambling to save the world.

Brad Bird not only proves that he can handle live-action action, but he sets the bar high with sequences so delightfully imagined, impeccably staged, and flawlessly executed that my jaw would have dropped more often if I hadn’t found myself so breathless. It’s also shot through with a welcome kind of playfulness and one-liner energy that feels of a piece with the kind of tone Bird struck in The Incredibles. It’s thrilling, yes, but it’s also such a hugely enjoyable good time. This series has always been in nothing more than the set-piece delivery business. Here, there’s a kind of perfect marriage between characters’ minimalism and the elaborateness of the action. In that way, Bird’s approach is the perfect melding of the previous films’ greatest qualities. It’s the best action thriller of the year, a propulsive juggernaut of action and thrills that put a smile on my face and had my heart racing long after the credits ended.