Tomorrowland Revisited

Disney's Tomorrowland is just about 1 year old. It was almost certainly my favorite film of 2015. My son and I saw it in the theater 3 times. It was very polarizing (with exactly half of reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes giving it a thumbs up).

That 50% rating is misleading though. It doesn't mean most people found the movie to be 50% enjoyable. For quite awhile, I obsessively tracked people's reactions to the film, and it's clear to me that, while most people didn't bother to watch it, the ones who did either loved or hated it.

People's reactions to #Tomorrowland are as fascinating as the movie itself. Hats off to @BradBirdA113 for creating something so provocative.

— Lawrence Eng (@Lawmune) May 28, 2015

My first tweet about the film was this:

What many critics miss about #Tomorrowland: it's less about nostalgia for old visions of the future, and more about a revival of the spirit.

— Lawrence Eng (@Lawmune) May 24, 2015

A few weeks ago, Sean Wilson on Flickering Myth wrote the following article:

Tomorrowland: or The Curse of the Standalone Blockbuster 

Sean Wilson re-evaluates the unfairly maligned Disney movie, and why its failure is an unfortunate reflection of the modern-day cinema industry…

There's a lot in that article I don't agree with, but it was a good read nonetheless. On Tomorrowland Times (see below), I posted the following reaction:

I finally got around to reading this. My brief thoughts:

Even for those of us who liked the movie, it's so hard to get agreement on what the movie was about. Perhaps it's due to the faulty expectations created by the confusing marketing campaign. I *still* don't really know how the film should have been marketed.

Anyhow, my perspective is that Tomorrowland is not about nostalgia or even utopianism; it's about progressivism 

The movie is not so much optimistic (as a whole) as it is *about* optimism--how it is lost, and why we need to work hard regain it instead of giving up.

Tomorrowland has spawned a small cult fandom. "Tomorrowland Times" (on Facebook and Twitter) is the place to go if you want to be part of it.