Tomorrowland

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Tomorrowland

Post by Ben » April 5th, 2015, 5:14 am

So it seems we don't actually have a thread for this!?

Watching the new trailer, I just had a thought - and it's something I hope the filmmakers have thought out...

In a previous clip, the girl Casey is seen in her Dad's car touching the pin that instantly transports her to Tomorrowland...but the implication from her Dad's reaction is that she doesn't disappear from our reality, merely that she alone can now see the alternate reality.

This is also the implication in the police station when she first touches the pin, as no-one else there freaks out at a disappearing, reappearing girl.

Obviously later in the film, Casey goes to Tomorrowland itself with George Clooney in his magical bath, so this would get around things, but I hope the filmmakers have not overlooked the fact that "we" can still see Casey when she's "in" Tomorrowland, or at least acknowledge this in a comedy moment where she's all wrapped up in the alternate reality and it cuts back to show her running around and acting crazy in our reality.

This all also opens up questions about land levels and what happens if she goes up a hill, or up or down stairs, etc... Probably best not to really think about all that stuff...!

Anyway, check out the cool new Japanese trailer on the front page...although Tomorrowland is coming over less mysterious and more of a straight adventure movie now, I'm still tickled to see it.

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by ShyViolet » April 5th, 2015, 12:00 pm

Looked awesome! There were spoilers all right but oh well, I still want to see it. The only thing that kind of bothered me was the small resemblance to the much-maligned Last Action Hero. (Magic ticket, etc...) But it still looks very cool and intelligent as well. Definitely going on the watch list. :)
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by EricJ » April 5th, 2015, 2:06 pm

Ben wrote:although Tomorrowland is coming over less mysterious and more of a straight adventure movie now, I'm still tickled to see it.
I'm assuming once they get past Bird and Lasseter's classic-Disney awe and iconography, we'll get as much of the chase/conspiracy plot the producers could salvage from the original goofy-adventure script they originally wrote for Dwayne Johnson.
(Yes, that was not a Bambi joke. ;) )

And again, for those who want to spoil themselves rotten about the new Disney-awe reboot of Tomorrowland in the movie, Disney's online web-universe Optimist game pretty much gave all the goods away to players in a special 1964 "present" to players from a mysterious source, assuming they were Disney-savvy enough to know what to do with it:

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by Vernadyn » April 6th, 2015, 5:54 pm

I love Brad Bird's films; there's something about them that I just connect to. (Ghost Protocol wasn't quite as sublime as his other work, though--indeed, he didn't write it.) For me, the summer is all about this, Inside Out, and Avengers. The last US trailer already had me salivating, but maybe I won't watch the Japanese trailer if it's so spoiler-y.

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by ShyViolet » April 29th, 2015, 4:35 pm

Great Brad Bird interview; talks about many subjects as well as working on the Simpsons.

http://www.indiewire.com/article/tribec ... d-20150428

Ahhhh scary pic from Pinnochio!

:shock:
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by EricJ » April 30th, 2015, 12:52 am

ShyViolet wrote:Great Brad Bird interview; talks about many subjects
For one:
He wants to bring back World's Fairs.
"Where have World's Fairs gone? They were, in a way, an olympics for ideas of the future…I love the fact that the internet makes those things available to us, but it also makes a lot of garbage available to us too, and you have to go through and pick and choose. Whereas the World's Fairs generally were a place where ideas swam upstream, and you got to see glimpses of the future that were positive.
"
Was just wondering that myself, having been to the '86 Vancouver in its day--Ironically, in trying to be them, Epcot seems to have finished them off for good.
The last World's Fairs were in the 80's, back before the Disney (Parks) Decade revitalized the theme park industry in the early 90's, so there was less of a need to build an entire theme park and tear it down a year later, especially now that there was a permanent one standing.
Most of the World's Fairs in history, like '62 Seattle, '67 Montreal, '82 Knoxville, '84 New Orleans and the aforementioned Vancouver were essentially Chamber of Commerce stunts from overlooked emerging cities trying to buy world recognition and identity (Dubai, predictably, is trying to get dibs on a new one), but nowadays all they have to do is host an Olympics. At least you don't have to tear down as much when it's over.

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by Randall » April 30th, 2015, 1:39 am

Actually, the world's fairs have stayed in operation, you and Bird just haven't noticed. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world's_fairs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_expositions

I actually performed with my high school band at Expo 86, BTW. It was a fantastic trip!

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by EricJ » April 30th, 2015, 2:56 am

Randall wrote:Actually, the world's fairs have stayed in operation, you and Bird just haven't noticed. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world's_fairs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_expositions
(Oh, well, I knew the '05 Aichi one with the Totoro house, I just wasn't aware of the others.) :)
I actually performed with my high school band at Expo 86, BTW. It was a fantastic trip!
I went to '86 just a couple of years before my first trip to old-school Epcot, and I still can't remember which had which attraction--Let's see, Epcot had Captain Eo and Expo'86 had Rainbow Wars?...Or was it the other way around?
I remember sitting in a preshow audience answering button-poll questions about the future, and can't remember whether that was the Canada Pavilion or Horizons. (The Canada preshow with the strangely hot Canada-goose dancer, that I remember.)

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by Ben » April 30th, 2015, 7:49 am

Of course it may have also been at the Expo as a one-off attraction, but I have a launch poster for EO from 1986 that clearly states EPCOT (though at Future World, not Horizons, which I thought was an attraction itself, now Mission: Space). I never made it there to see it at that time, but have seen EO since.

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by Ben » May 17th, 2015, 6:38 pm


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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by Vernadyn » May 22nd, 2015, 12:36 am

Bit of a shame that it's been getting mixed reviews, though most of them come across as disappointed rather than truly negative. I'm probably one of Brad Bird's biggest admirers, though, so I'm still looking forward to it.

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by Vernadyn » May 22nd, 2015, 6:54 pm

I hate to say this, but this is the first Brad Bird film that I didn't find absolutely, well, incredible. Sure, it's a superior summer blockbuster, with lots of themes going on under the surface. However, when watching every other Bird film, I feel a sense of deliriously giddy excitement during pretty much every scene of the movie--even when it's not an action scene. There are moments in Tomorrowland like that, but they're "only" moments. (To be fair, most movies would be fortunate to have even ONE of these moments.)

A lot of this probably has to do with expectations. (This isn't really a spoiler, but I'm hiding it just in case.)
The vast majority of the film actually doesn't take place in Tomorrowland at all. And the "touching the pin to get to Tomorrowland" thing isn't what you'd expect.
Clooney was fine, though grumpy for most of the film. Laurie got to chew some scenery and Britt Robertson was OK as well. Raffey Cassidy (hardly seen in the trailers) actually plays a pivotal role throughout the whole film. She was fine, though I couldn't help thinking that Chloe Moretz would have absolutely nailed the part had this film been made a few years ago. But the characters didn't have the clarity and inner complexity typical of a Bird film. (OK, the characters in Mission: Impossible weren't very complex, but they were clear.)

Giacchino wrote a great, optimistic theme for the film and some intriguing textural atmospheres that I don't usually associate with the composer. The score really picks up during the last act of the film; the marriage between film and score during the final scene gave me goosebumps. He even makes a cameo (and a spoken line) as a Small World ride operator, and there are other clever Disney and sci-fi references scattered throughout.

Overall, Tomorrowland feels like Bird was a little fettered. It would be easy to point to Lindelof for the blame, and indeed, the film does have some stilted thematic contortions in the final act. It does come across as a film that Lindelof wrote and Bird revised afterward. After I first saw Iron Giant, Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Mission: Impossible 4, I would (figuratively) shout to the rooftops about how these films were must-sees. With Tomorrowland, I'm a little more hesitant. It's still a good film worth seeing, and certainly not deserving of a "rotten" status on Rotten Tomatoes. But it unfortunately doesn't come together as well as Bird's previous films. Having said that, I still look forward to Incredibles 2 and anything else he'll do with enthusiasm.

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by Ben » May 23rd, 2015, 6:15 am

So Clooney's basically doing a grumpy, classically Disney adult bit (see Eddie Albert in Witch Mountain), the rest of the performers were all good, and it's got a terrific score? Sounds pretty great to me!

I didn't read the spoilery bit (for once) because I'm actually quite excited for this and it's a rare film that I want to delay the mystery elements on. I'm suspecting you mention something about the story there, which will be what it will be, but I'd rather experience the movie first (next Tuesday).

As for me, I love Bird's films, but he's not an auteur. He's a brilliant, brilliant screenwriter, that's for sure, but as a director it's really Tomorrowland that will prove it either way to me, as his first real solo credit.

Animation films take an entire collaborative process (a great shot in Iron Giant, for instance, may have actually been suggested by a storyboard artist and just okay'd by the director) to pull together, and anyone basically could have helmed Mission 4 (indeed, exhilarating as that movie is, I kept looking for signs that Bird had directed it and found none: there's no actual "visual trademark" that says it's his film). Those kind of films are made by committee anyway (a friend just came off Mission 5 with some, um, "interesting" stories), and it's more the ideas that the directors get to put forward on those kinds of things.

Ironically, don't forget that, for something that comes "across as a film Lindelof wrote and Bird revised afterward", the same was true of Ratatouille, when Bird brilliantly picked up someone else's sreenplay and made it his own. Again I say that he's a brilliant screenwriter, and I'm hoping Tomorrowland also finally proves the visual clues to suggest he's not just a competent director with something to say, but an actual great director with his own visual touch.

:)

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by EricJ » May 23rd, 2015, 11:49 am

Ben wrote:As for me, I love Bird's films, but he's not an auteur. He's a brilliant, brilliant screenwriter, that's for sure, but as a director it's really Tomorrowland that will prove it either way to me, as his first real solo credit.
He's got the John Lasseter touch of having true warm-hearted personal geek feelings for whatever he works on, which makes him tailor-made for Disney/Pixar, and while he's good, he's not the Midas golden-touch boy that over-nostalgic Incredibles and Iron Giant fans make him out to be out of their own personal love for what we associated with those two movies in the 90's/00's.
(Although if he could make MI4 entertaining, just because Paramount wanted to catch "the Incredibles director" like a leprechaun by the heel, that is the touch of a miracle worker.)

The movie is sort of Lasster-izing (is that a new word for "Rebooting new Disney-fan loyalty on a previously disastrous or studio-concocted project", like Bolt, The Muppets or Tron Legacy?) a completely different action-comedy chase plot, so there'll be a little bit of fish-or-fowl in trying to give new characters a new earnest, sentimental reason for doing what the old script characters were doing.
I liked Incredibles and while I liked Iron Giant, I don't consider it a "holy martyr" of 90's Warner films, so I'll give Bird the same benefit of the doubt that I'd give any Joe Johnston film, and for the same reason. :)

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Re: Tomorrowland

Post by Ben » May 23rd, 2015, 2:14 pm

Although, as if just to prove a point, he wasn't just served up Mission 4 on a plate: Bird was unproven as a live-action director and had to take a *lot* of meetings in order to get that gig. Far from Paramount wanting to get into business with The Incredibles' director, he had to convince *them*, JJ and Cruise that he was up to the task. He was under a lot of pressure on that picture.

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