tomorrowland movie review

Tomorrowland

Early in Brad Bird’s science fiction adventure “Tomorrowland,” there’s a flashback to one of the film’s heroes visiting the 1964 World’s Fair as a child and sampling Walt Disney’s “It’s a Small World” ride, with its invasively cheerful music and shimmying puppets; suddenly it whisks the park visitor, a boy who came there with a homemade jet pack hoping to win an inventor’s contest, into a utopian future full of Art Deco skyscrapers and monorails, and watches him fall and rise through soupy clouds, courtesy of his flame-spitting invention.

Thus does an actual theme park ride become a high-tech cinematic version of a theme park ride. The first ride is gentle, nostalgic and charming. The second is dazzling and intense—a masterpiece of choreography, editing, design, sound effects and music, plus a bit of chill-inducing dream logic: at one point, the boy falls while his jet pack plummets a few meters to his left, and to reach it, he kicks his arms and legs like a swimmer chasing a life preserver. “Tomorrowland” has many uncanny dream-logic moments like that one. They make the film worth seeing, even though it’s better as an experience than as a story or a message, yet wants to be all three at once.

There’s a plot of sorts, something about a teenage girl (Britt Robertson’s Casey) seeking out a greying scientist (George Clooney’s Frank Walker) who knows how to access the aforementioned future, where brilliant scientists and other special individuals have created a pristine new world in advance of this one’s death. The boy in the World’s Fair sequence, young Frank Walker ( Thomas Robinson ), is befriended by a freckle-faced young English girl named Athena ( Raffey Cassidy ) who has a secret that I won’t reveal here, except to say that it helps the others wriggle free of seemingly inescapable jams.

There are fuzzy or stilted warnings, courtesy of co-writers Bird and Damon Lindelof (“ Star Trek Into Darkness “), about the plight of extraordinary individuals in an ordinary world, and the price we’ll eventually pay for despoiling the environment and demonizing science. Bird has been criticized for infusing “ The Incredibles ” and “ Ratatouille ” with simplistic and sometimes elitist-sounding statements about the privileges that should accrue to gifted people. He’ll get raked over the coals again here, thanks to the future’s “ Atlas Shrugged “-style origin story: the world’s great scientific minds decided they’d had enough of ignorance and apathy and made their own world that’s part Shangri-La and part Emerald City of Oz, but functionally Noah’s Ark.

The plot has a raggedy quality, often leaning on a squad of “Matrix”-like, passing-for-human assassins and composer Michael Giacchino’s “Behold the magic!” score to gin up tension. At its worst, it raises basic creative questions that are a far cry from its philosophical and moral concerns:  Is the heroine special because she truly has special qualities, or because the “You are the chosen one” thing lets Bird barrel through two hours without having to give Casey any traits besides spunk? Is it a problem, story-wise and message-wise, that Frank’s chief antagonist ( Hugh Laurie ) makes more sense than the heroes who oppose him? Maybe Bird and company would have been better off heeding Frank’s advice to Casey: “Must I explain everything to you? Can’t you just be impressed and move on?”

But if you treat “Tomorrowland” mainly as an immense cinematic theme park that unveils a new “ride” every few minutes—just as Bird’s last feature, “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” was mainly a series of action scenes—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.

Bird conceives the entire picture as a series of clockwork suspense sequences involving laserguns, plasma bombs, hidden doors and gates and passageways and tunnels, vertigo-inducing climbs and falls, serpentine hover-trains, machines and structures that fold and unfold and split, and humans that might not be human. With the aid of a time-travel device that looks like a souvenir button, present-day panoramas vanish, disclosing landscapes in a “Jetsons” vein. There are jet packs, monorails, robots that clomp and clank, and zero-gravity swimming pools that are just puck-shaped masses of water hanging in midair.  There are moments where people exist simultaneously in two time periods while walking, running, falling or driving, and a scene near the end that’s so unabashedly sentimental, yet so emotionally complex and confounding, that I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like it. 

The film is a personal work of art that seems born of stubborn passion. It’s definitely not an assembly-line product, despite the way that some sequences evoke (deliberately, would seem) actual assembly lines. If it’s a bit irritating or dull at times, it’s because it seems clear that Bird knows why he’s showing us these things, and what he hoped to achieve by visualizing them in this manner, but he and his co-writers (including co-scenarist Jeff Jensen ) can’t find a graceful way to communicate it.

No matter. The “message” of “Metropolis”—a parable of labor and capital which concludes that society needs the heart to mediate between the head and the hands—was a mess, too. Today it seems at once reductive and overreaching, basically Marxism Lite. But if you had to make a list of reasons why that film is still remembered, discussed, and raided for inspiration by films like Bird’s, “message” wouldn’t be on it. “Metropolis” is remembered because watching it is as close as many of us will get to being able to have another person’s dream.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Kathryn Hahn as Ursula
• George Clooney as Frank Walker
• Raffey Cassidy as Athena
• Thomas Robinson as Franck Walker jeune
• Britt Robertson as Casey Newton
• Hugh Laurie as David Nix
• Damon Lindelof

Original Music Composer

• Michael Giacchino

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User reviews

Tomorrowland

• atlihafsteinsson
• Jun 7, 2015

surprisingly good.

• Dec 8, 2015

Why do people hate this movie?

• sheldonchorta
• Jul 2, 2015

I can't believe I've never seen this film in the cinema, , what a good film.

• kathyclark-24984
• Aug 25, 2017

I liked Disney's Tomorrowland enough for what it is...

• May 26, 2015

Okay, let me explain.

• Jul 29, 2015

Fun kid safe sci fi movie that looks great

• Sep 24, 2015

To put it optimistically...

• StevePulaski
• May 23, 2015

Captivating film

• adewhitaker-81691
• Jan 4, 2017

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

• morrison-dylan-fan
• Sep 28, 2020

The Future Has Arrived

• ThomasDrufke
• May 21, 2015

Visually stunning retro sci-fi

• freemantle_uk
• Mar 24, 2017

A Decent Disney Movie

• neyony345-33-475119
• Jul 23, 2015

You'll feel cheated, much like you would if you thought optimism will solve the world's problems.

• May 20, 2015

There's a message here, if we just observe our world going downhill but do nothing about it, we are just passengers.

• Dec 11, 2015

Some intelligence required

• May 24, 2015

A fun ride into a fantastical world!

• scottshak_111
• May 25, 2015

Ahead of its time?

• Jun 10, 2015

There are two wolves inside each of us - Despair and Darkness, Light and Hope. Which will you feed?

• May 22, 2015

A fantastic sci-fi experience

• niall-roche
• Sep 18, 2015

Could've been a 9/10. But then there was endless preaching.

• steeplechase
• Mar 29, 2018

Look Who's Preaching

• cultfilmfreaksdotcom

A really excellent movie

• Dec 23, 2016

An experience worth giving a try.

• Jun 27, 2015

Bizarre sci-fi roller coaster is really a broad Disney metaphor

• MovieCriticDave

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‘tomorrowland’: film review.

Brad Bird delivers his long-awaited futuristic fantasy starring George Clooney and Britt Robertson

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Tomorrowland - H 2015

So it has come to this: A big-budget, futuristic, effects-heavy, star-driven, fantasy-oriented, audience-friendly, beautifully made, would-be summer tentpole looks something like a freak, not to mention a semi-risky proposition, because it is not part of a franchise.

So it has come to this: A big-budget, futuristic, effects-heavy, star-driven, fantasy-oriented, audience-friendly, beautifully made, would-be summer tentpole looks something like a freak, not to mention a semi-risky proposition, because it is not part of a franchise. But that’s how it is in the summer of 2015 for Tomorrowland , a sparkling work of speculative fiction (and wishful thinking) that could not be more “Disney” in the old-fashioned sense, but is dominated by its philosophical thrust against social pessimism and disenchantment. Theoretically, the required ingredients for a big summer hit are mostly present and accounted for, but the considerable question remains as to whether the mass audience of the moment is ready to embrace an inventive but less overwhelmingly Marvelous adventure fantasy than is the current norm.

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In his own way, director Brad Bird , who wrote the script with Damon Lindelof from a story they cooked up with Jeff Jensen , has made a counter-present culture work that amplifies and synthesizes impulses that have driven at least some of his previous films. In Iron Giant and The Incredibles , he explicitly used his fondness for post-World War II sci-fi and fantasy as a motivating point for his massively entertaining but also thoughtful appreciation of the positive, can-do ethos of the period. The evil came from the forces that would thwart the sky’s-the-limit achievement of the world’s best, brightest and right-minded, and frustration with those who would impede excellence and forward-thinking on all fronts is the sentiment that grumbles and groans beneath the shiny surfaces of Tomorrowland .

Read more New ‘ Tomorrowland ‘ Trailer Delivers Ray Gun-Wielding Robots (Finally)

The film takes its title from the future-focused section of Disneyland inaugurated in 1955, and is dramatically rooted in the Disney-designed elements at the 1964 New York World’s Fair — including the “It’s A Small World” ride, which promoted images of a pristine future marked by soaring buildings, sweeping highways, immaculate mass transit and perfectly functioning clean technology. Not a slum, traffic jam or pollution-belching factory was to be seen.

Tomorrowland opens with grizzled George Clooney as Frank Walker telling us, “When I was a kid, the future was different,” whereupon we see his young self (the ideally cast Thomas Robinson ) enthusiastically toting his homemade “jet pack” invention (actually a modified Electrolux vacuum cleaner) to the World’s Fair. His creation needs more time in the lab, but while there he encounters an immoderately self-possessed, British-accented girl about his own age named Athena ( Raffey Cassidy ), who will shortly usher him into a very privileged realm.

Forty-five years later, a slightly older teenager, Casey Newton ( Britt Robertson ), also harbors fantasies about flying and the future, but they are seemingly dashed dreams; she’s obsessed with a Texas NASA rocket launch site that is now being demolished, a place where her unemployed father ( Tim McGraw ) was once an engineer. Her toy drone isn’t going to take her anywhere, but she mysteriously obtains something else that does: a small pin with a big “T” emblazoned on it that, when touched, instantly transports her to a beautiful wheat field from which she can glimpse, very much as Dorothy and her companions did when they arrived in the poppy field, an extraordinary city looming in the distance.

In this instance, however, what lies before the dazzled Casey is the future — be it an alternate one, an upcoming one or, possibly, a version that’s already passed. But real it is; she can walk around the spotlessly modernistic buildings (to an extent those of the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, designed by Santiago Calatrava ), take the nifty conveyance that loops and swoops around them, observe the impeccably groomed and civilized people that inhabit the place and marvel at a world with no visible impediments to living a pure life of the mind and achievement.

Unfortunately, Casey doesn’t understand how to control her access in and out of this wonder world, so she’s bounced back to Houston, where the film bogs down in some soft and belabored peril involving, first, some suspicious vintage toyshop owners ( Kathryn Hahn and Keegan-Michael Key ), and then some Matrix-like robot police goons who come after Casey as well as Clooney’s Frank; the latter re-enters the action nearly an hour in to voice his disillusionment with what the world has come to be since he dropped out, explain things to the unquenchably curious Casey and, inevitably, enable her ultimate access to the heart of Tomorrowland and its mysteries.

A hermit and all-round malcontent, Frank was the instigating genius and visionary behind one of humanity’s great leaps forward. At first he tells Casey to forget all about it, angrily assuring her that she has been manipulated: “What you saw is gone,” he says. But he ultimately can’t help but see his younger self in her, as his optimistic side is re-animated by this kid’s excitement over what the future still could become.

One of the film’s most spectacularly fanciful conceits is to stage the launch of a rocket that’s somehow hidden in the middle of the Eiffel Tower, an event that doesn’t take place until Frank shows Casey the private office of the monument’s designer Gustave Eiffel — where he supposedly created the utopian secret society “Plus Ultra” with special guests Jules Verne, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla (with full acknowledgement that the latter two hated each other).

How many sci-fi /fantasy films of recent years have climaxed with anything other than massive conflict and conflagration? Whatever the number, Tomorrowland is one of the few to place far more emphasis on talk than action, which is what will probably contribute to what, for some, will make for a softer experience than the genre norm. The film’s general coolness and vision of a potentially serene future reminds more of Spike Jonze’s Her than of anything in the Marvel, George Lucas or James Cameron-derived worlds, not to mention other far more violent ones. As thoughtful and sympathetic as the intentions are here, perhaps it all goes back to the point often made about Dante: What do people read and remember?  Paradiso , Purgatorio or Inferno ?

Another issue that might serve to hold the film back with teenage audiences (it shouldn’t bother younger ones) is that the key reference points are saturated with a nostalgia — both specific in terms of Disneyland and the World’s Fair, and philosophically — that will mean far more to older viewers than it will to them.

All hands on both sides of the camera do outstanding work. Clooney seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly as the old grump whose creative flame hasn’t been entirely extinguished, but it falls more to Robertson to carry the film, which she does with great energy and appeal. Cassidy has an eerie presence that adds mystery to an already mysterious role, while Hugh Laurie makes a decided impression as an old cohort of Frank’s.

The film’s immaculate, exceedingly clean look owes much to cinematographer Claudio Miranda , production designer Scott Chambliss and the usual parade of technical wizards who know how to conceal every seam in the modern filmmaking process. Michael Giacchino ’s score energetically pushes things along but can’t disguise the film’s moderate over-length.

Production: A113 Productions Cast: George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Tim McGraw, Kathryn Hahn, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Robinson, Pierce Gagnon, Chris Bauer Director: Brad Bird Screenwriters: Damon Lindelof, Brad Bird, story by Damon Lindelof, Brad Bird, Jeff Jensen Producers: Damon Lindelof, Brad Bird, Jeffrey Chernov Executive producers: John Walker, Bernard Bellew, Jeff Jensen, Brigham Taylor Director of photography: Claudio Miranda Production designer: Scott Chambliss Costume designer: Jeffrey Kurland Editors: Walter Murch, Craig Wood Music: Michael Giacchino Casting: April Webster, Alyssa Weisberg

PG rating, 130 minutes  

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Tomorrowland Reviews

Thinly veiled beneath the powerhouse studio running the show, Disney's "Tomorrowland" is your new lightning rod between poignant and preachy. It is, with absolute certainty, an enormous message movie hiding behind a summer blockbuster.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 4, 2023

A movie about ideas and inventions that has too much of both...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 24, 2022

The story is simply too inconsistent, too uneven, and too flat.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 27, 2022

It's all very well-meaning, but the plot remains contrived because the filmmakers are more interested in delivering a message than a smartly crafted adventure.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 21, 2022

Outside of Bird's direction, his and Lindelof's screenplay and the acting, Michael Giacchino turns in yet another peppy, premiere score with heavy sci-fi influence and DP Claudio Miranda gives the film a robust look.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2022

The ultimately simple charms of the film are more impressive and memorable than its more state-of-the-art trappings.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 8, 2021

Tomorrowland falls flat in promising what it's advertising, feeling more like concept art before a final film. Overflowing with optimism, it fails to feel genuine.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2021

Tomorrowland wins my vote - a smarter than average science fiction thriller that poses metaphysical questions and wins.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2021

The much-hyped film itself feels overwhelmingly bland... I hope there are some young girls out there will take heart in seeing a heroic, science-loving teen girl onscreen. For everyone else, can I recommend staying home and reading Ursula Le Guin instead?

Full Review | Jan 28, 2021

The plot continues to scurry down the proverbial rabbit hole with greater and greater sci-fi strangeness - without an end in sight.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Dec 4, 2020

Raffey Cassidy is also quite the small wonder here.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 26, 2020

The aim of Tomorrowland is admirable, we can all use a more optimistic outlook, but the execution comes across like an unfocused, ham-handed, self-congratulatory editorial.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jul 5, 2020

'Tomorrowland' is a very enjoyable Disney adventure that, unfortunately, fails to have the necessary strength during its disappointing outcome. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 14, 2020

It manages to surprise us, move us, keep us tense and leave us wanting to travel again to such a wonderful adventure. [Full Review in Spanish]

And then it becomes WALL-E and turns into an agenda movie... It takes a hard left turn.

Full Review | Apr 28, 2020

I think this might be more preachy than WALL-E.

The suspense and action scenes were fun and gripping.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2020

It's a structurally muddled mess that manages to make flying around with a jetpack feel boring.

Full Review | Jan 10, 2020

A technical achievement, a visionary dream come true.

Full Review | Dec 8, 2019

Unfortunately, Tomorrowland goes nowhere, spoon-feeding us the same pile of moralizing crap that Disney has been peddling for decades and filling us with ennui while doing so.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.75/5 | Dec 3, 2019

Tomorrowland

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

No cynicism, no snark. What! In box-office terms, that usually translates into no chance. Yet Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland , a noble failure about trying to succeed, is written and directed with such open-hearted optimism that you cheer it on even as it stumbles.

Bird has kept a tight lid on plot details. And rightfully so. Discovering Tomorrowland fresh is integral to its purpose. But let’s say this much. George Clooney plays Frank Walker, a scruffy, grumpy inventor who has closed himself off from the world on his New York farm. But when we first meet Frank, played as a kid by Thomas Robinson, he’s on a visit to the 1964 World’s Fair and bursting with fun and ideas. He tries to sell scientist David Nix (Hugh Laurie) on a primitive jet pack he devised out of his best dreams. Nix shuts him down. Clooney is so skilled an actor that we never lose sight of young Frank in his performance. His childlike awe of the future is always detectable under his hard shell.

The same could be said of Bird in his animated classics ( The Iron Giant, The Incredibles , Ratatouille ) and of his co-screenwriter, Damon Lindelof, who helped create the mysteries of Lost . For them, wonder keeps defeatism at bay.

Where did things go wrong for Frank and for the world he shares with us? That’s the film’s abiding theme. And Tomorrowland, the beautifully rendered symbol of a utopia where the best minds gather to plan that future, drives all the characters.

Long ago, Frank had met a girl, Athena (the amazing Raffey Cassidy), who gifted him with a magic pin that zapped him into Tomorrowland. With Frank expelled for his sins (I’ll never tell), Athena gives her last pin to Casey (a lively Britt Robertson), the daughter of a NASA engineer (Tim McGraw). Her dreams of being an astronaut died with the space program.

For Bird, Tomorrowland is a concept corrupted, not just by evil robots who smile like Tom Cruise, but by our own casual acceptance of a coming doomsday. In The Incredibles, heroes are forced to suppress their powers. In Tomorrowland, scientists are asked to profit from a sick world, not to save it. Bird calls bullshit on that. Naive? Maybe. But even as Tomorrowland sinks into sermonizing (show is always better than tell), Bird flies in the face of PG family fun by asking audiences of all ages to actually think.

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Review: ‘Tomorrowland,’ Brad Bird’s Lesson in Optimism

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Tomorrowland’

Brad bird narrates a sequence from “tomorrowland.”.

By A.O. Scott

• May 21, 2015

My son briefly had a youth baseball coach whose way of inspiring his demoralized players was to stand at the dugout entrance screaming at them to have fun. “ Tomorrowland ,” Brad Bird’s energetic new film, a shiny live-action spectacle from Disney, reminds me of that guy. There is nothing casual or whimsical about this movie’s celebration of imagination, optimism and joy. On the contrary: It’s a determined and didactic argument in favor of all those things, and an angry indictment of everyone who opposes them.

Just who that might be is an interesting question. The answers proposed by Mr. Bird and Damon Lindelof, his screenwriting collaborator, run the usual gamut: politics, bureaucracy, greed, bad teachers, dumb parents, a villain with a long black coat and a British accent. Mostly, though, the fault lies with humanity itself. We are wonderful creatures, capable of dazzling feats of invention and problem-solving, but we have a damnable tendency to get in our own way, to sell out and sell ourselves short.

In the past 50 years or so, according to the “Tomorrowland” timeline, we’ve succumbed to pessimism. Where we used to look to the future with hope and excitement, we now embrace decline and futility. Everything’s falling apart, and instead of making it better, most of us just wallow in gloom, especially when it comes to entertainment. A billboard advertises something called “ToxiCosmos 3,” and to those of us who groove on such visions of apocalypse and catastrophe, Mr. Bird has a message: Cut it out! To those of us who can conceive something better, the message is: Wake up and start dreaming!

There are some logical — and, I dare say, some ideological — contradictions here, and a more serious problem of tone. The filmmakers want to dazzle you, but they also want to teach you a lesson. In 1965, young Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson, who will grow up to be George Clooney) arrives at the New York World’s Fair with a big grin and a cool invention. It’s a jetpack made out of an old vacuum cleaner, and while it doesn’t quite fly, Frank figures that his hard work and can-do spirit will impress the dour judge (Hugh Laurie, earmarked for his subsequent bad-guy role) in the inventors’ pavilion. Asked what the use of his contraption is, Frank replies that it’s for fun, which is its own kind of utility. If people see that such a thing can exist, they’ll be inspired. They’ll believe in their own capacities, and in the general possibility of good stuff.

Movie Review: ‘Tomorrowland’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “tomorrowland.”.

That’s an excellent defense of creativity, and of the value of art, but it’s a defense that is advanced so bluntly and insistently that it gets in the way of the actual art. At the World’s Fair, Frank develops a crush on Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a girl, gray-eyed like her namesake goddess, who is (to keep the comparisons within the boundaries of the Disney universe) a perfect blend of Mary Poppins and Tinker Bell. Athena hands Frank a pin that is his ticket to Tomorrowland, a place founded by some of history’s greatest geniuses as a combination Utopian community, R&D lab and “ Atlas Shrugged ” theme park.

Later, in our own time, a similar pin will come into the possession of Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a teenager whose irrepressible gumption is expressed through acts of sabotage at the NASA launch platform near her home in Cape Canaveral, Fla. She is motivated not by hostility to the space program — which used to employ her dad (Tim McGraw) as an engineer — but rather by rage that celestial exploration is being abandoned. She wants to halt the dismantling of the facility, a wonderfully futile gesture that marks her as a potential savior of Tomorrowland and a new recruit for Plus Ultra, the secret club of artists and smarties who populate it. She, too, meets Athena, and they fight off some nasty robots on the way to find Frank, now exiled from Tomorrowland and living out his days as a grizzled crank (i.e., as George Clooney) in a ramshackle house equipped with amazing gizmos.

I was tempted to affix a little trademark sign to the word “amazing” there. The effects in “Tomorrowland” fall short of that standard, but part of Casey’s job is to serve as a kind of on-screen shill, cuing the desired audience response by exclaiming “Whoa, that’s amazing!” or “Wow, incredible!” at regular intervals. And while some of the images are interesting, even startling — a visit to the Eiffel Tower, for instance — the action is more frantic than thrilling and the sense of wonder rarely materializes.

It gives me no pleasure at all to report this. I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Bird’s animated Pixar features — “ The Incredibles ” and especially “ Ratatouille ,” for my money one of the finest movies ever made about the pursuit of artistic excellence. And it’s important to note that “Tomorrowland” is not disappointing in the usual way. It’s not another glib, phoned-in piece of franchise mediocrity but rather a work of evident passion and conviction.

What it isn’t is in any way convincing or enchanting. Mr. Clooney is wry and gruff, and then earnest and amiable, in a role that dozens of actors could have played. Ms. Robertson is perky and panicky in the same way. Among the characters only Athena has any real distinction, and Ms. Cassidy is an intriguing performer, funny and a little scary in her composure. Everyone else, Mr. Laurie included (and Kathryn Hahn and Keegan-Michael Key partly excepted), would be better as a cartoon.

To some extent, that goes for the whole movie. Its enormous lapses in narrative and conceptual coherence — its blithe disregard for basic principles of science-fiction credibility — would be less irksome in the fantastical cosmos of animation. And it would look better, too. Tomorrowland looks less like a magical city of the future, or even the Disney environment it’s meant to evoke, than like an unusually clean and efficient airport, or the shopping mall beyond the multiplex where you’re seeing the movie.

Perhaps “Tomorrowland” should not be blamed for succumbing to the poverty of vision it works so hard to attack. Maybe the forces of negativity are just too strong. But it’s also possible that the movie is confused about how to imagine and oppose those forces. False cheer can be just as insidious as easy despair. And the world hardly suffers from a shortage of empty encouragement, of sponsored inducements to emulate various dreamers and disrupters, of bland universal appeals to the power of individuality. “Tomorrowland” works entirely at that level, which is to say in the vocabulary of advertisement. Its idea of the future is abstract, theoretical and empty, and it can only fill in the blank space with exhortations to believe and to hope. But belief without content, without a critical picture of the world as it is, is really just propaganda. “Tomorrowland,” searching for incitements to dream, finds slogans and mistakes them for poetry.

“Tomorrowland” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Have fun, kids!

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