“Tomorrowland” may be the first Disney film that’s difficult to encapsulate. I didn’t understand its premise until thirty minutes in, and I’m still not sure I totally get it. The irony is that it boasts the best trailer I’ve seen in years: As George Clooney rasps, “What if there’s a secret place where nothing is impossible?” a girl in a gray, industrial room picks up a button, instantly transports into a golden world of shimmering wheat fields and spiraling glass buildings, and then transports back without the slightest explanation. But while I wish all this intrigue led somewhere fantastic, as Gertrude Stein was wont to say, “There’s no there.”

In this era in which doom and gloom rule the box office, applause is still in order for the very existence of a utopian film – which, make no mistake, “Tomorrowland” is. It opens as scientist Frank Walker (Clooney) argues with an off-screen Casey (the girl in the trailer, played by Britt Robertson). “This is a story about the future, and the future can be scary,” he is intoning when she suggests he try a more upbeat approach. Cut to Frank as a kid (Thomas Robertson, whose resemblance to a young Clooney is uncanny) at 1964’s New York World’s Fair, where he is trying to make his fuel-powered jetpack work. Though he doesn’t pull that off, Athena, a freckle-faced, bright-eyed girl his age, slips him a pin that briefly sends him to that mysterious world of glass, wheat, and apparently gluten-tolerant denizens. It’s a glimpse that Frank, now a curmudgeonly hermit who is “100 percent positive” the world is ending within months, claims destroyed his life since it gave him false hope. Imagine a “Wizard of Oz” in which Dorothy is unceremoniously shuttled back to Kansas within the first five minutes, and you see where he’s coming from. Continue Reading →