Tomorrowland (2015) We'd put this movie completely out our memory until we came across a fascinating rant on the internet.......
A few folks noticed and bitched about "Tomorrowland" getting kicked off the Disney Plus streaming site....
Huh? Say what now?
You mean to say the Mighty House Of Mouse exiled one its own movies.....a $190 million budgeted potential tentpole that featured spectacular special effects and George Clooney, a major movie star?
True, considering the amount of money and marketing thrown at it, the film underperformed, to say the least.......the best that critics and audiences alike could rate it was something along the lines of a B Minus.......
Sad indeed, cause the film represented a rare attempt by the corporation to create an original product instead of another remake, reboot, reinvention or ruinous live action version of one of Uncle Walt's old classic movies.
Three years after this film, in 2018, they tried yet another stab at crafting an original effort, "The Nutcracker And The Four Realms"......it died even faster than 'Tomorrowland'......
The result..... it'll be a warm day in "Frozen" before you ever see another Disney film that wasn't strip-mined from their back catalog......
And now, with the banishment of 'Tomorrowland', they'd like rewrite history and pretend this movie never happened.
Not so fast, Mouse-kins.......we tracked down a Blu-Ray and watched it.
And damn, we liked it......even with its many, many problems that probably turned off kids and parents who went to see it.
The major problem.....it's way, way, way too convoluted and complicated to digest within the context of a fantasy-sci-fi adventure that hoped to please the masses....and set up multiple sequels.
Kind of like figuring out the ins and outs of inter-galactic trade agreements in "The Phantom Menace"......
Most of the scenes containing the exposition of the film's dense backstory were deleted to streamline the pace......which left lots of acrobatic battles and frickin' ray gun zapping but only a precious few breathless lines attempting to explain it all......
We could only shake our heads imagining perplexed parents trying explain what's going on in this movie to their equally confounded kids.
We'll take a very quick stab at it......as far we could tell, geniuses like Jules Verne, Tesla and Edison zapped themselves into another dimension to build Tomorrowland unencumbered by foolish humans bent on wars and global destruction. A child genius, zapped into the futuristic city at the 1964 World's Fair, grows up into George Clooney to produce a huge machine that predicts the eventual end-of-times for Earth...ya know, nuclear war, climate change, yada, yada. The current malevolent bigwig in charge of Tomorrowland (Hugh Laurie) had decided the apocalypse is inevitable.....so why not let it happen and give humanity what it deserves.......
But wait! A young teen girl genius (Britt Robertson) has been recruited to save Tomorrowland (and the world) by a cute-as-a-button robot child sent out to find fresh saviors. And so teen girl genius and cute robot further recruit grumpy genius Clooney, (who'd been bounced out Tomorrowland by the evil bigwig.) The quest proceeds, with the trio hounded at every step by creepy robot commandos with disintegration zappers, sent out by.....you guess it.....bigwig Laurie. ...
As much as we admired this ambitious storyline, it's barely explained overall in the midst of the dazzling renditions of Tomorrowland and the superbly orchestrated action sequences
Yet through all the stuff jammed into it, the movie somehow maintains a sense of innocent charm and optimism.......and it's tremendously scored to grandly exciting music from Michael Giacchino, underlining the wondrous vision of Tomorrowland created by Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic.
So we strongly advise BQ visitors to ignore Disney's backhanded attempt to cancel out this movie from their very own streaming service.......(supposedly begun as a one-stop destination for the best of their output)
, Seek it out, we say. It's fun, fast, eye-popping to gaze at and far more worthy of your time than Disney landfill like "Cruella" and the atrocious "Lion King" CGI remake. 3 & 1/2 stars (***/12)
No comments:
Post a Comment