directed by Brad Bird
written by Damon Lindelof, Brad Bird and Jeff Jensen
Once upon a time, animator/storyteller/director Brad Bird could do no wrong in the eyes of film critics. While dis debut animated feature-film back in 1999, The Iron Giant, did not set the box-office on fire (and was, in fact, a bomb), it was quite well-received by film critics, and to date it has a highly enviable 97% "Fresh" score of review aggregator site rottentomatoes.com. When Bird started collaborating with Walt Disney's Pixar Studios, the results were magical: 2004's The Incredibles and 2007's Ratatouille were both critical and commercial successes, and both movies won Brad Bird an Academy Award. They certainly made me a dyed-in-the-wool fan. He then successfully made the transition to live-action filmmaking with 2011's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, the best-reviewed film in the series and one of the highest grossing ones as well.
As a result, when it was announced that Bird was working on a top-secret, live-action project for Walt Disney pictures starring George Clooney, there was quite a bit of excitement generated among fans like myself and the filmgoing community in general.
Tomorrowland is basically the story of a secret community of cutting-edge innovators who live just beyond the fringes of our reality, sort of a secret society of geniuses.
The story begins at the New York World's in 1964, where an 11-year-old boy named Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson), presents his invention a rocket pack that doesn't quite work, to a stern judge named David Nix (Hugh Laurie), in the hope of winning prize money and getting the opportunity to improve his invention further. He is summarily rejected, but not before he has piqued the attention of Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a young child like himself who hands him a pin with a "T" and tells him to secretly follow her and the rest of the judges headed by the unpleasant Nix. Frank complies, and finds himself in a fantastical city in the sky filled with robots and wondrous flying machines. One such robot ends up tweaking his jet pack, and not a moment too soon as Frank falls from one of the sky-high towers and finds himself using the jet pack to save his life, and, with his impressive display, securing his place in Tomorrowland.
Over fifty years later, fifteen-year-old Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), is at the end of her rope; her father (Tim McGraw), an engineer for NASA will soon find himself out of work as the launch platform where he works is set for dismantling for no other cited reason than that "people are running out of ideas," and Casey does everything she can that doesn't involve violence to stave off the dismantling, including sabotaging the heavy equipment. Unfortunately, her activism brings her in trouble with the law, and as she is being released into her father's recognizance she discovers, among her things, a pin very similar to the one given to Frank at the beginning of the film, one that shows her a fantastic place every time she touches it. In her determination to understand what she is seeing, however, Casey finds herself in grave danger, and she'll need the help of Athena, and the now-adult Frank (George Clooney) to get herself out of it. One thing is clear; Casey has to find her way to Tomorrowland, before it's too late.
A little over a week after its worldwide opening, Tomorrowland, has apparently disappointed across the board with underwhelming box-office receipts and lukewarm reviews. Personally, I really enjoyed it, but I think I understand what the problem was.
Tomorrowland is a film fueled by a wonderful sense of nostalgia, and hearkens back to a time when people's image of the future was all about jet packs and space travel. Unfortunately, we're living in an age where moviegoers have been to several other worlds, courtesy of Star Trek, Star Wars and even Avatar, where they've seen wondrous things like dinosaurs brought back to life and finally, they've seen men don suits of armor that can fly and shoot lasers, all of which make Bird's (and co-writer Damon Lindelof's) visions of tomorrow look positively quaint. The truth is, most people have already seen too much, whether on the big screen, the small screen, or even their handheld devices to be impressed by what this film has to offer. Now, I happen to be a fan of the brand of nostalgia that Bird is peddling, but I totally get why not many other people are.
To sort of compensate for the general lack of oomph, Bird and Lindelof wrap the story in layer upon layer of mystery, and to the credit of Disney's marketing crew, they followed suit. The problem was that all of the mystery surrounding the narrative made people wonder just what it was they were going to see, and with that much expectation, especially considering Bird's track record, he was basically setting himself up to disappoint.
I disagree with the notion that people rejected this for being a "message movie" considering that the highest grossing film of all time Avatar, is one of the most hackneyed message movies ever, but I do agree that Bird could have taken a different approach to proselytizing. Avatar may have been preachy, but it gave audiences a heck of a ride while it was doing it. As someone who's given audiences some pretty spectacular action scenes in the past, one would think Bird could have pulled this off with a bit more panache.
So if there was so much wrong with this film, why did I like it? Well it still has quite a bit going for it, like Bird's gift for "retro-futuristic" visual flair, generous helpings of the humor and witty dialogue that made his best films as entertaining as they were, some excellently filmed action scenes apart from the disappointing climax, and some winning performances from his principal actors. The production design is wondrous to behold, though as I said, it really isn't anything new, and neither are the admittedly slick visual effects on display courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic.
Robertson is delightful as the lead; the scenes of her popping in and out of Tomorrowland are the centerpiece of the film's marketing (and of the film, to an extent) and she sells the heck of out of them. Clooney doesn't disappoint as the curmudgeonly version of Frank Walker, but the real surprise is how well Thomas Robinson, who actually resembles Clooney a bit, plays his younger version. Laurie makes the most out of a thankless role, as Nix, delivering the film's central sermon--er, message, at the climax. It's a terrible waste of a great actor, to my mind. For me, the breakthrough performance here was that of Cassidy as the mysterious Athena. It's hard to go into detail about her performance without spoiling a couple of surprises about her role, but suffice it to say that like Robertson, her role required her to do some pretty funny things with a straight face, and she pulled it off quite well.
This film is a bit of a hiccup for Bird, who really was on a roll for many years, though I hardly think it's set him on the same downward spiral that M. Night Shyamalan found himself on ten years ago.
I'm still waiting for him to come up with The Incredibles 2...
7.1/10
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Better the Second Time (Yes, It's Been a Slow Week for Reviewing New Movies...oh and SPOILERS)
Recently, I watched Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron for the second time, because my kids had not yet seen it.
This doesn't happen very often (almost never, in fact), but in spite of all of my issues with the movie the first time around, I found myself enjoying it significantly more than I did the first time I watched it. A lot of that is down to the fact that, unlike my first experience, I dispensed with the utterly s***ty 3-D conversion, which really hampered my first viewing experience, and went with good, old-fashioned 2-D.
I still noted some of the things I had gripes with, like Thor's somewhat disjointed subplot that explained the whole "Infinity Stones" thing and which still felt like a vague plug for his upcoming solo sequel Thor: Ragnarok, and the fact that Tony Stark was an even bigger egotistical prick than before, but I was able to ignore them in favor of what I really enjoyed about this film.
I'm obviously not going to review the film again, but I will highlight a number of things I really enjoyed about the movie, in ascending order.
5. Improved Fighting Skills All Around - In this day and age of blink-and-you'll-miss-it martial arts sequences, it was really gratifying to show that the Avengers' fighting skills, particularly those of Captain America and Thor, have actually improved since the first movie. It was especially cool to see them double-teaming the bad guys with a one-two shield and hammer takedown. This is a team movie, after all, and it's great that it actually feels like it. It never felt right to me in the early MCU days that Black Widow had a monopoly on all of the cool martial arts sequences, something Marvel remedied with the Captain America sequel, and here it was gratifying to see Cap not only kicking gratuitous ass from start to finish, but also punching well above his weight when, he took on, without hesitation, a much more powerful foe in Ultron. The gratifying thing about a lot of the fighting is how grounded and practical it feels; basically it looks like the actors really worked out and actually took part in the meticulously choreographed fighting rather than letting their computer-generated avatars do all the work, something that happened rather frequently in the CGI-infested Hobbit films. The promised Cap/Iron Man throw down in Civil War got a bit of a sneak preview here in act three of this movie, and I have to say I'm really, really excited to see it play out in Cap's movie, which is now being touted as a de facto Avengers sequel of sorts.
4. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch - Last year 20th Century Fox kicked off a bit of a "friendly" rivalry with Marvel Studios when it featured popular "Avenger" Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, in X-Men: Days of Future Past. In that film, Quicksilver had a show-stopping display of his speed in the sequence in which he freed Magneto from his prison under the Pentagon, after which he was somewhat arbitrarily written out of the script, most likely because his further participation in the story would have obviated a lot of the narrative tension that follows, or in short, he could have solved everyone's problems. Well, as impressive (and humorous) as Bryan Singer's take on the character was, Joss Whedon's was superior in a number of ways. His overall look, starting with his costume, hewed much more closely to the comics than his Fox counterpart. His cocky personality and anger issues were a much closer approximation of the comic-book Quicksilver than the laid-back juvenile delinquent in Singer's film. Finally, MCU's Quicksilver was ultimately more heroic, saving dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of lives in Korea and later in Sokovia (and in the process, showing everyone what a dick Superman was in Man of Steel), and ultimately sacrificing his life to save Hawkeye's. Also, while he didn't have a protracted, money-shot of a sequence, his display of power was ultimately more impressive, and not only that, but his participation in the movie, from start to finish, makes more narrative sense.
The Scarlet Witch, who will be sticking around a lot longer (barring a Phil Coulson-like character resurrection for Pietro) was not quite as flashy, but she had some of the film's very best moments, such as her utterly creepy mind-control sequences, her primal scream of grief when she senses the death of her brother, and the utterly satisfying scene in which she rips out Ultron's "heart." It was great to know that she'll be part of Captain America: Civil War, which is actually a notable innovation from the original comic book series (from which Wanda was notably absent), and I can't help but feel, and hope, that the filmmakers there will play up her rage at Tony Stark, which has to have somehow been exacerbated by the fact that her brother was killed by Stark's creation.
3. Hawkeye's Turn to Shine - I was one with Jeremy Renner in feeling that Hawkeye, easily one of the most beloved Avengers from the comics, got the short end of the character development stick in the first Avengers film. While this was inevitable given how many characters Whedon had to juggle in what was then the most ambitious-ensemble themed big-budget movie ever, it still felt like a distinct disservice to such an important staple of the team. Well, Whedon made it up to Clint Barton, Renner and all of us fans in the best possible way, by giving him a healthy dose of back story, a wife (girlfriend?), kids and a lovely farm in the middle of nowhere, where the entire team spends some much needed down-time after a rather harrowing sequence of events. On top of that, he gets a lot of really juicy character moments in this movie, and even a not-so-subtle jab at the fact that his character spent the majority of the last movie mind-controlled. Renner has real affection for this character, and it shows. My favorite bit took place in the climax, where he basically talks Scarlet Witch into becoming an Avenger. Wonderful stuff.
2. Location, Location, Location - The last time I really enjoyed a superhero film's location shooting was when Batman climbed out of Christopher Nolan's version of the Lazarus Pit in The Dark Knight Rises and emerged in an incredibly exotic, ancient-looking city which, as it turned out, was somewhere in India. It gets tiresome seeing action movies set in America, which is what makes films like the Bourne series, with their varied locations, such a treat to watch. Well, it was nice to see Marvel finally getting in on the globetrotting action, with as many as four different locations for the movie, and with a significant part of the action taking place in a very old looking part of Italy that, amusingly enough, doubled for the fictional Eastern European republic of Sokovia. I say amusing because, back in Marvel's two-penny, half-penny days, the direct-to-video adaptation of Captain America was filmed in the genuinely Eastern European republic of Croatia, which doubled for all of the film's locations, including the United States. Well, here it's obvious that Marvel wasn't just after tax breaks or cheap labor; Whedon makes extensive use of what looks like a medieval fort for the staging of the action in Italy, and considering that huge chunks of the action also take place in Seoul, South Korea and Johannesburg, South Africa (more on that next), this film is ultimately much more global in scope than any Marvel movie that has come before it. The Johannesburg sequence, in particular, was a real doozy...
1. Hulkbusting Glory - When I reviewed this film, for all of my nitpicking, it was without reservation that I heaped praise on the Hulk/Iron Man fight in Johannesburg, going as far as to call it "iconic" and I totally stand by that pronouncement. Watching it again, without the piss-poor 3-D conversion was pure, unadulterated joy. In a film full of excellently-staged action sequences, this truly stands out. Whedon expertly dances along the line between fast-paced and coherent action, which says a lot considering that this fight could easily have degenerated into a Bay-tastic blur of flying fists and shredding metal, and it's gratifying to see that at all times during the battle, civilians' lives matter. No matter how hard it is, Tony Stark (but obviously not the mind-f****d Banner) does everything he can to make sure people are safe. The interaction of so many elements in this sequence, including real backdrops and actual extras, really sold this sequence for me and, I suspect, a lot of other people. This is the sort of sequence comic-book fans have been salivating for since "The Avengers" was first made into a movie, as evidenced by the fact that it was the single most prominent part of the film's marketing campaign, and to my mind it has completely and comprehensively lived up to the hype. There is nothing in any other action film (yes, I am being all encompassing here) that even comes close to measuring up to this battle. If there was any justice in the world, this sequence alone should win Industrial Light and Magic their nth Academy Award for visual effects, but even if it doesn't, to my mind, this is one of their greatest achievements as a visual effects house so far.
While it looks as though the new adventures of Mad Max are getting raves from critics, limited funds means I have to choose which movies I can watch, so I'm saving up for Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, his first new film in four years and his first original property in eight. It looks like an incredibly ambitious piece of science fiction, and its release (for me) cannot come soon enough.
For now, though, I was more than happy to take one more joy ride with Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
This doesn't happen very often (almost never, in fact), but in spite of all of my issues with the movie the first time around, I found myself enjoying it significantly more than I did the first time I watched it. A lot of that is down to the fact that, unlike my first experience, I dispensed with the utterly s***ty 3-D conversion, which really hampered my first viewing experience, and went with good, old-fashioned 2-D.
I still noted some of the things I had gripes with, like Thor's somewhat disjointed subplot that explained the whole "Infinity Stones" thing and which still felt like a vague plug for his upcoming solo sequel Thor: Ragnarok, and the fact that Tony Stark was an even bigger egotistical prick than before, but I was able to ignore them in favor of what I really enjoyed about this film.
I'm obviously not going to review the film again, but I will highlight a number of things I really enjoyed about the movie, in ascending order.
5. Improved Fighting Skills All Around - In this day and age of blink-and-you'll-miss-it martial arts sequences, it was really gratifying to show that the Avengers' fighting skills, particularly those of Captain America and Thor, have actually improved since the first movie. It was especially cool to see them double-teaming the bad guys with a one-two shield and hammer takedown. This is a team movie, after all, and it's great that it actually feels like it. It never felt right to me in the early MCU days that Black Widow had a monopoly on all of the cool martial arts sequences, something Marvel remedied with the Captain America sequel, and here it was gratifying to see Cap not only kicking gratuitous ass from start to finish, but also punching well above his weight when, he took on, without hesitation, a much more powerful foe in Ultron. The gratifying thing about a lot of the fighting is how grounded and practical it feels; basically it looks like the actors really worked out and actually took part in the meticulously choreographed fighting rather than letting their computer-generated avatars do all the work, something that happened rather frequently in the CGI-infested Hobbit films. The promised Cap/Iron Man throw down in Civil War got a bit of a sneak preview here in act three of this movie, and I have to say I'm really, really excited to see it play out in Cap's movie, which is now being touted as a de facto Avengers sequel of sorts.
4. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch - Last year 20th Century Fox kicked off a bit of a "friendly" rivalry with Marvel Studios when it featured popular "Avenger" Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, in X-Men: Days of Future Past. In that film, Quicksilver had a show-stopping display of his speed in the sequence in which he freed Magneto from his prison under the Pentagon, after which he was somewhat arbitrarily written out of the script, most likely because his further participation in the story would have obviated a lot of the narrative tension that follows, or in short, he could have solved everyone's problems. Well, as impressive (and humorous) as Bryan Singer's take on the character was, Joss Whedon's was superior in a number of ways. His overall look, starting with his costume, hewed much more closely to the comics than his Fox counterpart. His cocky personality and anger issues were a much closer approximation of the comic-book Quicksilver than the laid-back juvenile delinquent in Singer's film. Finally, MCU's Quicksilver was ultimately more heroic, saving dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of lives in Korea and later in Sokovia (and in the process, showing everyone what a dick Superman was in Man of Steel), and ultimately sacrificing his life to save Hawkeye's. Also, while he didn't have a protracted, money-shot of a sequence, his display of power was ultimately more impressive, and not only that, but his participation in the movie, from start to finish, makes more narrative sense.
The Scarlet Witch, who will be sticking around a lot longer (barring a Phil Coulson-like character resurrection for Pietro) was not quite as flashy, but she had some of the film's very best moments, such as her utterly creepy mind-control sequences, her primal scream of grief when she senses the death of her brother, and the utterly satisfying scene in which she rips out Ultron's "heart." It was great to know that she'll be part of Captain America: Civil War, which is actually a notable innovation from the original comic book series (from which Wanda was notably absent), and I can't help but feel, and hope, that the filmmakers there will play up her rage at Tony Stark, which has to have somehow been exacerbated by the fact that her brother was killed by Stark's creation.
3. Hawkeye's Turn to Shine - I was one with Jeremy Renner in feeling that Hawkeye, easily one of the most beloved Avengers from the comics, got the short end of the character development stick in the first Avengers film. While this was inevitable given how many characters Whedon had to juggle in what was then the most ambitious-ensemble themed big-budget movie ever, it still felt like a distinct disservice to such an important staple of the team. Well, Whedon made it up to Clint Barton, Renner and all of us fans in the best possible way, by giving him a healthy dose of back story, a wife (girlfriend?), kids and a lovely farm in the middle of nowhere, where the entire team spends some much needed down-time after a rather harrowing sequence of events. On top of that, he gets a lot of really juicy character moments in this movie, and even a not-so-subtle jab at the fact that his character spent the majority of the last movie mind-controlled. Renner has real affection for this character, and it shows. My favorite bit took place in the climax, where he basically talks Scarlet Witch into becoming an Avenger. Wonderful stuff.
2. Location, Location, Location - The last time I really enjoyed a superhero film's location shooting was when Batman climbed out of Christopher Nolan's version of the Lazarus Pit in The Dark Knight Rises and emerged in an incredibly exotic, ancient-looking city which, as it turned out, was somewhere in India. It gets tiresome seeing action movies set in America, which is what makes films like the Bourne series, with their varied locations, such a treat to watch. Well, it was nice to see Marvel finally getting in on the globetrotting action, with as many as four different locations for the movie, and with a significant part of the action taking place in a very old looking part of Italy that, amusingly enough, doubled for the fictional Eastern European republic of Sokovia. I say amusing because, back in Marvel's two-penny, half-penny days, the direct-to-video adaptation of Captain America was filmed in the genuinely Eastern European republic of Croatia, which doubled for all of the film's locations, including the United States. Well, here it's obvious that Marvel wasn't just after tax breaks or cheap labor; Whedon makes extensive use of what looks like a medieval fort for the staging of the action in Italy, and considering that huge chunks of the action also take place in Seoul, South Korea and Johannesburg, South Africa (more on that next), this film is ultimately much more global in scope than any Marvel movie that has come before it. The Johannesburg sequence, in particular, was a real doozy...
1. Hulkbusting Glory - When I reviewed this film, for all of my nitpicking, it was without reservation that I heaped praise on the Hulk/Iron Man fight in Johannesburg, going as far as to call it "iconic" and I totally stand by that pronouncement. Watching it again, without the piss-poor 3-D conversion was pure, unadulterated joy. In a film full of excellently-staged action sequences, this truly stands out. Whedon expertly dances along the line between fast-paced and coherent action, which says a lot considering that this fight could easily have degenerated into a Bay-tastic blur of flying fists and shredding metal, and it's gratifying to see that at all times during the battle, civilians' lives matter. No matter how hard it is, Tony Stark (but obviously not the mind-f****d Banner) does everything he can to make sure people are safe. The interaction of so many elements in this sequence, including real backdrops and actual extras, really sold this sequence for me and, I suspect, a lot of other people. This is the sort of sequence comic-book fans have been salivating for since "The Avengers" was first made into a movie, as evidenced by the fact that it was the single most prominent part of the film's marketing campaign, and to my mind it has completely and comprehensively lived up to the hype. There is nothing in any other action film (yes, I am being all encompassing here) that even comes close to measuring up to this battle. If there was any justice in the world, this sequence alone should win Industrial Light and Magic their nth Academy Award for visual effects, but even if it doesn't, to my mind, this is one of their greatest achievements as a visual effects house so far.
While it looks as though the new adventures of Mad Max are getting raves from critics, limited funds means I have to choose which movies I can watch, so I'm saving up for Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, his first new film in four years and his first original property in eight. It looks like an incredibly ambitious piece of science fiction, and its release (for me) cannot come soon enough.
For now, though, I was more than happy to take one more joy ride with Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
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