Brad Bird (2015)
The title of this sci-fi fantasy is appealing enough. (At least, the US one is: in Britain, its official and unwieldy title is Disney Tomorrowland: A World Beyond.) And George Clooney stars, which is why we went to see it, although he doesn’t appear much during the first forty minutes and that was as much as either of us could take. Clooney plays Frank Walker, ‘a grizzled inventor who was exiled from Tomorrowland’ (Wikipedia). This may or may not be why Frank, at the start of the film, is not only grizzled but also grumpy. A po-faced George Clooney is normally a waste of his talents and the audience’s time (see note on The American) but his grouchiness seems felt and is amusing and your hopes are raised – for a few moments. You miss Clooney as soon as he’s replaced, in a flashback to 1964, by the boy playing Frank Walker as an eight-year-old. Much worse is to come. Thomas Robinson as the child Frank is overeager – too aware of himself and the camera – but he’s greatly preferable to the knowing Raffey Cassidy, playing a girl called Athena who spots young Frank’s potential as an inventor when she first meets him at New York’s World Fair. And Cassidy’s twinkling self-possession isn’t as hard to take as Britt Robertson as science aficionada Casey Newton (who, when the action leaps forward some years, is breaking into the NASA launch site at Cape Canaveral – I didn’t get why). Robertson, in her mid-twenties, acts out wide-eyed excitement at the special visual effects that keep coming and coming. She does so in a way that’s not just phony but makes her seem infantile. A skim read of the lengthy plot synopsis on Wikipedia suggests that Frank Walker may have cause to look happier by the end of the story but the first third of Tomorrowland proves only that George Clooney in a bad mood is better than younger actors clumsily feigning enthusiasm.
27 May 2015
