Tomorrowland is one of those films that looks like it should have worked. I mean, it’s named after an attraction at Disneyland, and it worked with Pirates of the Caribbean, but not with The Haunted Mansion. The previews made it look like it would be filled with imagination, and that part didn’t lie. Hey, you know what they didn’t show on the preview? What the movie was about.

This is because I honestly don’t think the movie knew what its story was about. I watched this film and thought it was one of those science fiction films like Oblivion where the plot isn’t really revealed toward the end of the film. I find these difficult to watch because I always feel like I missed a scene or the DVD skipped or something.

In these times, I usually read the Wikipedia summary. This was no help. I then watched the Cinema Sins on this, and this source also didn’t have a clue. I would say that I would be willing to pay $5 to have someone explain the plot of this film to me, but I’m worried someone might take me up on that…and then I’d have to figure out how to pay them.

This film started out with promise. It shows a young boy coming to the 1964 World’s Fair, meeting with some guy who Hugh Laurie plays. He has invented a jet pack that has the power to drag you across the ground like you are Bill Campbell at the beginning of The Rocketeer. Dr. House rejects him, but this girl tells him to go on the It’s A Small World ride (yeah, Disney plugged it here). This leads him to this thing that looks like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, which leads him into a really cool future city.

It then cuts to this girl named Casey, who is attempting to stop NASA from taking down their rockets by sabotaging their deconstruction efforts. Does that sound confusing? Oh, you have not even begun to be confused until you watch this film.

Anyway, Casey is arrested because she gets caught, and when they give her back her stuff like what happens in every movie, she finds a special pin. This pin transports her into this Tomorrowland, but she still bumps into the walls of her house. It’s actually pretty cool how they do this.

In fact, I’ll pause so I can say something good about this film. Tomorrowland looks cool. It is difficult in science-fiction to do something that hasn’t been done on Star Trek or Star Wars, but Tomorrowland looks pretty cool and the effects of it also look good. The issue is I can only speculate what it is about.

Okay, I’m going to try in some order. Apparently, these great thinkers like Edison, Tesla, and some other cool guys decided that they were going to build some advanced city. Somehow they made it in another dimension. The only way to get there was some rocket in the Eiffel Tower, and…hmm. Anyway, the girl that I mentioned before was some kind of recruiter to get people to go to Tomorrowland.

This girl, who, by the way, is a robot, finds Frank Walker, the boy with the jetpack. He grows up to played by George Clooney, and in Tomorrowland, he invents a machine that can see the future. In the process, he sees that the world will come to an end. Now, once he sees this, Walker gets depressed and is exiled. From there, Walker gives up on trying to save the future, but Casey might actually be able to do it.

Casey gets put on an adventure where she meets robots that try and stop her for some reason. At any given time, any person would be asking “what is going on”, and I honestly don’t think she asks this or anyone gives her a clear answer. From there, it is like trip to here, and trip to there. I actually thought that Tomorrowland was the future and not in some other dimension, but I was wrong.

What is really interesting about this film is that I believe it has a lot to say. There is a great scene where Casey is told in all of her classes that planet Earth is in trouble. She raises her hand and is never called on, and asks: “What are we doing about it”. There is a later scene where Hugh Laurie talks about how people are just obsessed with the end of the world, and he is right. He is right about this, and there was something about this monologue that just nearly brought me to tears.

I think the saddest part about this film is that Brad Bird directed it. This is the man who gave us The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. I believe that these films show the optimistic view of the picture, but crosses it with the pessimism of the other side.

I’m not going to give Tomorrowland a bad review. There is something about this film that I believe works, and it is quite possible that Brad Bird is trying to tell a story and a message that is too big for one film. This could have been the problem, as a lot of films require a lot of thinking and re-watchings before they are understood. I think this film is one of them.