Tomorrowland Blu-ray Review

By: Lynn Barker

If you feel that the future looks pretty grim, you need a boost of dreaming, hope and imagination! One teen girl gets just that in Tomorrowland. Can she save our doomed planet?

Casey shows her pin to adult FrankCourtesy of Disney

Casey Vs. the Dim Future

In present-day Florida, smart, tech-savvy teen Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) lives with her almost out of work NASA engineer dad (Tim McGraw) and desperately wants to keep a NASA launch site from shutting down. Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a mysterious young girl, secretly slips Casey a strange pin that, only when Casey touches it, reveals a glimpse of Tomorrowland, a futuristic city in another dimension.

Casey in TomorrowlandCourtesy of Disney

Blast to the Past

In a flashback to the 1964 World’s Fair, the same Athena meets very-smart boy inventor, Frank Walker who has created a flying jet pack that doesn’t quite work. She sees his potential and she recruits him to live and invent in Tomorrowland. We see that young Frank is really attracted to her. She’s nice but kind of cold.

Young Frank meets AthenaCourtesy of Disney

Back to the Present

Athena makes sure Casey finds the secretive, now fifty-something Frank (George Clooney), who is monitoring transmissions from Tomorrowland that predict that our world will end soon due to greed, war and environmental chaos. It seems that Casey, with her smarts and optimism for the future, is just what Tomorrowland needs to save our planet. Disillusioned, Frank would rather not help her but when evil robot androids attack Frank’s home, he has no choice.

Adult Frank and Casey are escape attacking robotsCourtesy of Disney

Rebuilding Tomorrow?

Frank, Casey and Athena work together to escape the evil robots who don’t want Earth to survive. The trio manages to make it to a rocket cleverly hidden long ago under the Eiffel Tower in Paris to blast into space and finally get back to the Tomorrowland dimension where they confront the human leader of the bad guy robots Governor Nix (Hugh Laurie) and work and make sacrifices to save the Earth. Casey and Frank then hope to rebuild our tomorrow. 

Young Frank on his jet-packCourtesy of Disney

Tomorrowland Trailer

Special Extra Features

• In Remembering the future: A Personal Journey Through Tomorrowland with Brad Bird, the director celebrates and remembers how people wanted to create a great, optimistic future when he was a kid. The whole crew stops work to watch the last space shuttle carried by giant NASA plane to a museum. The end of an era. We see some of the building of Tomorrowland at Disneyland and see early programs about space exploration hosted by Walt Disney and the cast and crew watches a real rocket launch at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Really kind of cool.
• Casting Tomorrowland focuses on getting George Clooney for the role of adult Frank and goes on set with Britt Robertson and Raffey Cassidy who get stunt-woman tough for their roles. Cool!

Athena prepares to go back to TomorrowlandCourtesy of Disney

• A Great Big Beautiful Scoring Session- celebrates the music for the film which was inspired by early Disney musicians The Sherman Brothers who wrote music for Mary Poppins, the 1964 World’s Fair and lots of other Disney hits. Richard Sherman attends a scoring session with the orchestra and composer for the film and everybody is thrilled. The music is hopeful.
• The World of Tomorrow Science Hour is a send-up of the science shows for kids that were popular in the 1960’s (think “Mr. Wizard”). Actor Hugh Laurie who plays the misguided Dr. Nix in the movie, hosts, talks about upcoming inventions like, uh, cell phone towers that didn’t exist yet and gets really frustrated with the kids in the show. Pretty funny.
• Animated Short: The Origins of Plus Ultra – is pretending to be the film shown to invited visitors who first got the pins that introduced Tomorrowland. Like a commercial, it shows why Tomorrowland was needed and how famous scientists Edison, Tesla and architect Eiffel and sci-fi writer Jules Verne were involved in creating it. This short fills in some blanks in the story so good to watch.
• Brad Bird Production Diaries contains a cool on set view of recreating of the World’s Fair in 1964 where young Frank took his jetpack invention. Neat to see.  The second diary is just the same as an earlier extra about NASA… so not needed.

In TomorrowlandCourtesy of Disney

• Blast From the Past Commercial is a short but funny commercial for the space memorabilia store where Casey goes to find out more about her pin. Funny. 
• Deleted Scenes with Filmmaker Intros is actually really interesting. There is a younger version of Casey with her science fair invention and a whole section of scenes in which there were more members of Casey’s family that were cut.
• It’s interesting to see that, at first, Casey was meant to be a pessimistic, bitter and disillusioned teen and scenes where shot to show that. When it was decided she would be the opposite, hopefully and optimistic, those scenes were all re-shot.
• Another cut scene explains more about what happened when Tomorrowland is “wrecked”.
• Another deleted scene really helps explain what Tomorrowland is and why it was created. This is long but should really be watched to better “get” the movie.
• As usual a funny gag and blooper reel would have been fun but isn’t here.

Casey at a police stationCourtesy of Disney

Wrapping Up

On this Tomorrowland Blu-ray set, all the extras aren’t amazing but many of them really do help explain why Tomorrowland exists and make things that weren’t all that clear in the film, more understandable.

Overall,Tomorrowland is certainly entertaining but the film could have used more Guardians of the Galaxy-style humor among the lead characters. The subject matter (Earth having a very short time to “live”) is mega-serious so lightening up more would have benefitted the movie. It’s kind of a bummer that not enough time is actually spent in Tomorrowland which has the amazing production and artistic design we expect from Disney.

Adult Frank back in TomorrowlandCourtesy of Disney

It’s refreshing to see a film that presents a hopeful future world rather than the more negative, post-apocalypse scenarios we see in The Hunger Games and Divergent but the film is teachy/preachy with the message that humans are their own worst enemy and we need to get it together soon before we destroy ourselves. This idea certainly isn’t new to films but at least it is really laid down here with style and amazing special visual effects.

Athena holds a bombCourtesy of Disney

In these scary times, with terrorist groups swearing to wipe out most of the world to set up their sick idea of tomorrow, it’s nice to see a film that still believes there are enough of us creative dreamers left on the planet to band together and create a better future but Tomorrowland falls a little short of painting a perfectly entertaining picture of how we accomplish this.

Young Frank builds his jet-packCourtesy of Disney

The extras on the set are mostly both entertaining and informative so we go 4 stars on this Blu-ray.

Tomorrowland Blu-ray Rating:

Tomorrowland Blu-ray CoverCourtesy of Disney

Tomorrowland is now available on Blu-ray + DVD!

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