Tag Archives: Tomorrowland (2015)

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Tomorrowland (2015) a (mildly) belated double-header review

What do The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (MFU from now on) and Tomorrowland have in common other than the fact they were both released last year?

For one, they were both directed and co-written by well known and accomplished men in this field with several hits to their names.  In the case of MFU, you had Guy Richie (Snatch, the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes) and for Tomorrowland you had Brad Bird (Iron Giant, Incredibles, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol).  Both films were also given large budgets by their respective studios and featured big name actors.

And in both cases, the films weren’t box office hits.

MFU had a budget of $75 million according to IMDB but made only $45.5 in the American box office.  Tomorrowland, again according to IMDB, had a budget of $190 million and made back approximately $93.5 of this in American markets.

Despite their weak box office, both films had at least decent critical ratings.  MFU, according to rottentomatoes.com, scored a healthy 68% positive among critics and a 74% positive among audiences.  Tomorrowland, on the other hand, scored a mediocre 50% with both audiences and critics though it did better, overall, at the box office.

I saw both films over the past couple of days and found them to be enjoyable enough to recommend but, on the other hand, I could see (with that wonderful 20/20 rearview vision) why both films failed to connect with audiences.

TMU is based on the 1960’s TV series of the same name.  In that series which aired during the heights of the first wave of James Bondian hysteria, you had an American and Soviet agent played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum work together for global peace, something rather forward thinking considering we were at the heights of the cold war.  An interesting bit of trivia, the premiere season of the show, presented in 1964 featured an episode wherein the future Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, would act together on screen as guest stars for the very first time and two years before reuniting for Star Trek

Anyway, Guy Richie’s goal, it appeared, in making MFU was to create a modernisic take on the supersaturated, supercolorful spy films of the 1960’s.  His direction, editing, and dialogue were, to those familiar with these particular films, spot on.  Though the film was clearly a modern artifact, there is love for the genre in almost every frame of the film, as can be seen in its trailer…

However for whatever reason Mr. Richie decided to subvert his action scenes and this, IMHO, was one of the film’s greatest sins for spy films, if anything, should be exciting.  Other than the opening act, the action sequences in MFU are generally played for laughs (witness in particular the sequence involving a boat chase in a closed off harbor…we witness most of the “action” in the in the background while in the foreground and front and center we watch as one of our protagonists eats a sandwich and drinks wine!).

Worse, the villain of the piece is stated to be a “fanatic” and a very ingenious and dangerous woman.  However, as presented you don’t feel she’s either particularly smart or dangerous.  When she eventually meets her just desserts, there’s no “oh yeah!” excitement to her comeuppance.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A good action film needs not just a good hero to root for, but a good villain to root against and in MFU’s case such a character was simply never there.

Incredibly, this same problem (one of the movie’s problems, anyways) can be found in the ambitious Tomorrowland.  Based on the Disney theme park’s futuristic section, Tomorrowland opens at the 1964 World’s Fair.  It was in this fair, in real life, the “It’s a Small World” ride was introduced to the world.  In the movie, a young boy named Frank Walker (in this section played by Thomas Robinson and later played by George Clooney as an adult) brings his experimental jetpack to be judged in a scientific competition.  The jetpack is judged by the stern Nix (Hugh Laurie).  While Nix is unimpressed with the young kid’s work, a young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) is impressed by this invention and she gives him a pin and tells him to, from a distance, follow their group on to the “It’s A Small World” ride.

The pin is scanned by a computer while in the ride and Frank Walker is diverted and winds up in the magical Tomorrowland, a futuristic alternate world and all appears great…

We fast forward to the present and are introduced to Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) a young child prodigy who “knows how things work”.  We find that Athena is around and she hasn’t aged at all since 1964.  Athena manages to place one of those pins upon Casey without her knowing and, after she’s sent to jail for trespassing on NASA property she realizes she has it.  When Casey touches the pin, she has visions of Tomorrowland and wants to get there.

Eventually we find that things aren’t quite as bright as we thought and when Casey meets the elderly Frank Walker, he realizes she might be Earth’s only hope for survival.

When the first Tomorrowland trailers appeared I was struck by how difficult it was to get a handle on the film’s plot from them.

I suspected -and the suspicion was confirmed when the movie was released and the reviews came out- that the film featured an elaborate, perhaps too elaborate, plot that defied easy explanation.

This is true, even as the movie’s first half simply involves explaining to us what Tomorrowland is, setting up the characters, and giving us an extended “chase” sequence.  When the action moves to Tomorrowland itself in the later half, unfortunately, the film goes south.  We are too quickly shown and expected to accept Nix as “evil” and the solution to world wide catastrophe -a complicated series of events, one would think!- winds up being to simply blow something up real good…a rather sad -and ironically way too primitive!- solution presented in a movie that allegedly celebrates creativity, ingenuity, and intellect.

And yet, like MFU, the film has its charms and isn’t “bad” by any stretch of the (ahem) imagination.  The leads are charismatic and interesting even if the ending resorted to more standard movie tropes.

So there you have it, two flawed films from directors who took a chance and tried to do something outside their wheelhouses and, in both cases, delivered good if not great entertainment.  I can see why both films didn’t quite light the box-office on fire but I’ll be damned if these two individuals shouldn’t be congratulated for at least trying to give moviegoers something different.