Tomorrowland

Tomorrowland.

This is a movie about jetpacks.

I almost did not go to see this film because a film reviewer I trusted panned it, criticized it, said it was a mess. But since I have been burned by reviewers I trusted before, I trusted my instinct, and let my daughter take me as a Father’s Day gift.

Never trust reviewers. Never. This movie made me feel like flying.

This was the best movie of the decade, or, at least, the best for me and my particular tastes. Even from the first dialog of the film, the movie is about science fiction, that is, it is about the face the future shows us. The choice is simple and stark: one either fears the future or one is filled with that hope that tomorrow can be built — built, not given — built to be as we have dreamed it should be. The film opens with an argument about how to tell the story in the film, and the argument, naturally, is between a pessimistic voice and an optimistic.

This is the movie that I wanted the Star Wars prequels to be, namely, the film that would make me feel like a ten year old kid again, or, rather, the ten year old kid I should have been, if I were then as filled with hope and courage as I am now: a kid who thought the future would be a golden age.

Therefore let me gust with the enthusiasm of a ten year old:

BEST! MOVIE!! EVER!!!

The premise is this:

The plot revolves around young Miss Newton (great name for a science lass) trying to find the secret behind the Tomorrow that pin lets her see.

It seems there is a mysterious council of geniuses, called Ultra, a council that Jules Verne, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and Gustave Eiffel founded. It turns out that the Eiffel Tower is secretly an antenna for receiving signals from … somewhere else…

But Tomorrow has its enemies. Who are the odd folk running an antique Space Age memorabilia shop in Texas? Who is the ten year old English girl as strong as an ox and able to drive a car? Why does the daughter of an NASA scientist — now out of a job since NASA has been Obama’d into insignificance — break into the facility every night, and perform acts of sabotage? And who is the eccentric old inventor living in rural New York with a rocket-powered bathtub? Who is sending the smiling robots, disguised as humans, to kill policemen and disintegrate the evidence? And why are eco-disaster movies and dystopia books so danged popular these days?

You, dear reader, might not like this movie as much as I do, because this movie was made for me. This movie is about the very thing to which my whole career is devoted.

The movie asks the question whether those who dream about the future (that is, people like science fiction writers) are willing to let the dream die? It asks whether the dream of the future should be nothing but George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, SOYLENT GREEN and HUNGER GAMES. Or is there also room for Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov? Is there room for superversive literature, pro-human dreams?

Is the future truly and truly only to be filled with the wailing in the outer darkness and the gnashing of teeth? Or is there a bright land of golden fields and shining towers of silver, reaching to a sky filled with air cars and moonrockets?

This film was made for me. One of the antigravity swimming pools seem briefly in the background shop of the Tomorrow city is precisely what I described in ‘Plural of Helen of Troy.’

The set design was perfect. I felt as if the Imagineers from Disney Land had been set free, to show me yet another world’s fair of what American science and know-how might accomplish. The theme, as I said, was about hope, disillusionment, despair, and hope reborn, and the choice one has either to accept what seems inevitable, or dream of what seems impossible.

The acting from the heroine was entirely convincing: whenever Newton looked amazed or thrilled at a rocket launch, I was amazed and thrilled.

When she was scared at a severed robot hand clutching her, I was, uh, entertained. Because she was wearing a NASA cap, darn it, and I am a fan of NASA.

The scientist hero played by George Clooney was less convincing, because Mr Clooney is a wooden actor. Indeed, he is the weakest link in the film, and the only thing I thought less than stellar.

One reviewer complained the plot was a complex mess. Bah! Let him never read one of my books.The plot was a science fiction mystery, and in a science fiction mystery, a heroine has to figure out what is going on … while being chased by evil robots.

The film had a plot twist or three, but it was just as coherent and clear as the plot of, say, THE INCREDIBLES, which had a similar look and feel to it, a similar vibe about the power of superscience and its abuses.

Let me explain that the six-book trilogy I have just completed last week was on the theme of a young boy who regrets that the future predicted in his youthful comics, the future of jetpacks and soaring superscrapers, never arrived, and so he finds a way to try to fix it, along with a special science council called the Hermeticists. Well, in my book, the science council is not quite as scientific and conciliatory as one might hope, and…

In the opening sequence, we seen young science lass Newton at school, while three neurotic looking teachers all give droning despairing lectures on how bad the future will be, and how the world is coming to an end, and the bright-faced Newton has her hand eagerly raised. No teacher calls on her. She is the only one with her hand up, burning with impatience. She asks how it can be fixed. The teacher is dumbfounded and aghast.

The film is about Yankee can-do roll-up-your-sleeves Grade A American know how. It is as obvious a slap in the face to the whining liberal elite and their doom-loving sneering tech-hating doom-topias as anything I have ever seen.

I do not want to give away any spoilers, but below the white space I discuss some. You have been warned.

S

p

o

i

l

e

r

!

W

a

r

n

i

n

g

!!

My conservative allies who panned this film got the whole point entirely backward. This film is not about waiting for some elite of smart, special people to fix the world and its problems and save us from Global Warming. This film is about not waiting for some elite of smart, special people, because the so called special people give up hope, grow corrupt, and they are the bad guys.

My conservative allies seem to think this movie says that global warming and overpopulation and nuclear war, and all the liberal scaremongering boogie-stories are real. Nope. In the movie is a tachyonic prediction machine that can scan the future, and, lo and behold, the world is about to be destroyed. That is the McGuffin of the film, the plot driver.

But each time the main character heroine says she does not believe the machine, and will fight to save the future from dystopia and disaster, the predictions gets thrown off, and another future becomes more likely. At first, only by one tenth of one percent ….

And the doomsaying and scaremongering is not only a hoax, it is literally the projection of the psychology of the snobbish elitist badguy (named, aptly enough, Dr. Nix) onto the world, creating the very problems he falsely claims cannot be solved, and whose insolubility he blames, not on himself, but on the world!

(The irony of that none-too-subtle message will not be lost on anyone who has listened to Leftists and seen their solutions to problems fail and fail again over the last century.)

This movie does not actually say that Global Warming is a hoax concocted by scaremongers who sneer down their snobbish noses at ordinary people, but the only character who speaks of these catastrophes as if they are real and really insoluble is the villain in his scenery-chewing monologue, who uses them as an excuse to justify his indifference and hatred of mankind.

(That irony of that, likewise, is lost on none who has been exposed to the intellectual hard vacuum of the hard left for long).

I am amazed this movie ever got past the liberal elite of Hollywood. It is the most obviously anti-leftwing movie I have seen since, since, well, since Brad Bird’s last triumph, THE INCREDIBLES, with its message of individualism.

The movie says the exact opposite of all leftwing doomsayers. The people afraid of the future are the bad guys in this film, and, worse, the surprise twist at the ending shows that it is the arrogance of the bad guys which is actually causing the evils they fear to become more likely.

This is a movie about jetpacks.

And when anyone dares ask, the Year 2000 has come and gone! where is my jetpack? This movie answers: go build one.

Dream, but don’t just dream. Figure out how things work, and do not give up.