First Hit: Interesting scope, parts that excelled, but overall this movie fails to deliver an engaging film from beginning to end.
The film’s early opening scenes included Casey, a truly curious smart girl (Britt Robertson), trying to hamper a rocket’s launch thereby keeping her engineer father employed. It also included Frank Walker (Young Frank played by Thomas Robinson and older Frank played by George Clooney) telling the story through two sets of eyes, the young curious smart boy and the wise old man who’s given up hope.
These three characters are pulled together by Athena (Raffey Cassidy); a robot created from the future whose mission is to find hope in the human race and give them the clue to the possibilities by giving out Tomorrowland pins.
The point of the film finally comes towards the end, when Nix (Hugh Laurie) gives a speech about how humans don’t care enough to fix the problems they are facing. The lavish way this film is presented is wonderful and engaging. The movie felt long which isn’t good and at 130 minutes, it was long.
Robertson was good and I felt that she did a great job of embodying her role. Robinson was cute and his early scenes were wonderful to watch. Clooney was good but there was something missing that kept me thinking “Clooney” and not about the role he was playing, Frank Walker. Cassidy was fantastic. I was fully engaged when she was on the screen, her way of being this robot was amazing. Laurie was a wonderful antagonist and his colloquy on the future was on target. Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird wrote a lengthy screenplay which is a commentary on how we are mortgaging our future and not paying attention to our self-created predicament. Bird did a great job of creating wonderful pictures of the now and the future, but it dragged on and could have used some snipping to tighten it up.
Overall: A bit overblown, visually nice, but in the end not a very good film.