Bioshock is a video game franchise that is know for its science fiction stories and mediocre gameplay. In the first game you find yourself stranded in a futuristic city that is under water. They collected the best and brightest to build a perfect society. Sadly when you get there it is destroyed. The other games are similar, you get a brief glimpse of what could have been before being shown the truth. Tomorrowland starts out in a very similar way. I spent the first 20 minutes or so just thinking about how much like Bioshock it really was. I loved that aspect of it, I just wish they had kept the story dark in tone.
The movie starts with young Frank Walker trying to win 50$ with his almost functioning jet pack. He is turned away but he makes a good impression on a young girl named Athena and she gives him a pin and some very specific instructions. As he follows her and some other individuals onto the "It's a Small World" ride the pin is scanned and his boat is detoured underground to dark room with only a booth in it. The booth transports him into the future, or another world entirely and we are given our first look at this utopia that the best have created. This whole sequence was really the best part of the film for me. It was serious, but still fun. And everything about it felt familiar in a good way. The rest of the film takes place in our time and deals primarily with Casey Newton played by Britt Robertson.
Newton is a optimist, it is her defining characteristic. She is caught breaking into a NASA facility and is tossed in jail. Her father bails her out, and in her belongings is a pin. She does not know how it got there, and when she goes to touch it, she is transported to a field she does not recognize. This is where the main story kicks off. We find out her position in the real world is relative to the other world she is visiting. It was actually kind of neat seeing her maneuvering around the current world and then popping back and forth to see where she was in the other. It was a small attention to detail I really appreciated, until a few minutes later when they decided to drop it to make things easier. The actual story is her trying to figure out how to get to that world. In that quest she makes contact with a now older Frank Walker played by George Clooney. My wife swears he has never done a bad film, she also refuses to watch Return of the Killer Tomatoes with me. Walker has some sort of countdown going on, and refuses to talk about it. It is easy to see where this is going, and they of course have to stop it.
The movie had a very interesting story, I really liked the idea of it. The reveal at the end was well played to, however it was a Disney film and as such it was never able to fully explore the dark subject matter it was trying to utilize. It didn't come off as so much a missed opportunity, as it still did very well with what it had. But it just made me think about the Bioshock games and how great they did with the same story and set up. If you don't have anything else to compare it to, you would probably enjoy what they were serving you.
The effects were good, the future sequences made great use of this. Everything from the robots, to the rockets, the towers, they all looked fantastic. Yes they had the same issue the hobbit films had when they animated people, where they made them to cartoonish in their movements. There are multiple jet pack portions which looked awful because of this as well as a few scenes with the Athena character. However overall, I was very happy with how the movie looked and felt. The actual "Tomorrowland" was well done to. We got a version of it thought up as how they pictured it would look as well as the actual cookie cutter future we have come to expect. I thought it was a nice touch that they included the first version as it is what the theme park attraction is all about. While that is where the similarities end, seeing them incorporate the Disney stuff was kind of neat.
The ending was nice, I liked what they were trying to do with it. And it fit the overall theme of the movie which was never give up and believe that anything is possible. It was also the weakest part of the film because of this. It was to convenient and really never went into how it all worked. I wanted to see more of what the big event was, and how everything ended up working out how it did. It seemed like they gave us a cool start to a story, then showed the middle part. Then left the ending out, and instead simply gave us the last few pages to read and try to piece together.
The movie focused on the story of Newton and not Walker. But all the details we were given about Walker made me feel like that would have been the stronger experience. Without going into spoilers, we are given a very bare bones version of his story, and it plays heavily into Newton's. But his seems more compelling, and given the extra details I think the ending would have worked better. Walker has far more info then the viewer does and his story would have answered the questions I still had after the credits rolled. That is not to say this is a bad movie, but it was not the movie I wanted it to be. I mentioned the starting segment was my favorite part, I just wish they would have continued from there.
Good effects, a entertaining story, George Clooney and Hugh Laurie. Yes I had some issues with it, but I still enjoyed it. A good rental, but I would not buy it.
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