The plot has a raggedy quality, often leaning on a squad of "Matrix"-like, passing-for-human assassins and composer Michael Giacchino's "Behold the magic!" score to gin up tension. At its worst, it raises basic creative questions that are a far cry from its philosophical and moral concerns: Is the heroine special because she truly has special qualities, or because the "You are the chosen one" thing lets Bird barrel through two hours without having to give Casey any traits besides spunk? Is it a problem, story-wise and message-wise, that Frank's chief antagonist (Hugh Laurie) makes more sense than the heroes who oppose him? Maybe Bird and company would have been better off heeding Frank's advice to Casey: "Must I explain everything to you? Can't you just be impressed and move on?"
But if you treat "Tomorrowland" mainly as an immense cinematic theme park that unveils a new "ride" every few minutes—just as Bird's last feature, "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" was mainly a series of action scenes—its weaker aspects won't be deal-breakers. In this sense, if in no other, Bird's latest owes more to "Metropolis," "Blade Runner," "Dark City," the first "Tron" and other works of top-shelf eye-candy than to most of the SF-and-fantasy-tinged franchise entries that modern studios churn out.
Bird conceives the entire picture as a series of clockwork suspense sequences involving laserguns, plasma bombs, hidden doors and gates and passageways and tunnels, vertigo-inducing climbs and falls, serpentine hover-trains, machines and structures that fold and unfold and split, and humans that might not be human. With the aid of a time-travel device that looks like a souvenir button, present-day panoramas vanish, disclosing landscapes in a "Jetsons" vein. There are jet packs, monorails, robots that clomp and clank, and zero-gravity swimming pools that are just puck-shaped masses of water hanging in midair. There are moments where people exist simultaneously in two time periods while walking, running, falling or driving, and a scene near the end that's so unabashedly sentimental, yet so emotionally complex and confounding, that I can honestly say I've never seen anything like it.
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