If I were to boil down Tomorrowland to a
single phrase, it would be “Meet the Robinsons’ dumb younger
cousin”. I’ve long found Meet the Robinsons to be a solid
movie, and an underrated entry in the Disney canon, but it took Tomorrowland for
me to appreciate how the former does the concept of “optimism-powered, look how
awesome the future is!” right. Spoilers ahead, although I’ll specifically mark
big ones.
I think the biggest problem is that Tomorrowland is
very self-assured that what it’s saying is intelligent without being able to
back it up, instead offering up references to smarter things or pining for
better times or attacking strawmen or just straight up not doing anything to
cover up its problems. For instance, there’s a character named Hugo Gernsback (played
by the extremely underutilized Keegan-Michael Key*). Like many things in Tomorrowland,
I at first smiled when I discovered that the owner of the science fiction
memorabilia store was named “Hugo”; it’s a cute little throwaway gag. Then it
goes deeper and reveals that his last name is Gernsback, immediately becoming
straight-up cheesy (and as if daring the audience to pick up on its
reference-“are you one of the smart ones who will catch
this?”). And then, it reveals that it really doesn’t have anything for Hugo to
do, and he becomes a plot device before exiting the movie for good, no real
impact on the story so to speak of.
*Also
underutilized is his partner Ursula, played by Kathryn Hahn. Based on the rest
of the movie, I'm assuming they just didn't have the space to drop that her
character's last name was "Le Guin".