In Brad Bird’s film Tommorrowland, a former boy genius (George Clooney) teams up with a gifted teen (Britt Robertson) to unearth the secrets of “Tomorrowland,” a mysterious place caught between time and space. It sounds like an interesting premise. And it has a pro director/writer behind it in Bird, who’s best known for his animated work — The Simpsons, The Incredibles, Ratatouille. Most critics aren’t impressed with Bird’s work with humans.
A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote: “What Tomorrowland isn’t is in any way convincing or enchanting.” He added, “Its enormous lapses in narrative and conceptual coherence — its blithe disregard for basic principles of science-fiction credibility — would be less irksome in the fantastical cosmos of animation. And it would look better, too.” Ouch. Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com agreed to the awkward narrative but liked the aesthetics: “Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland articulates its messages rather awkwardly, but the filmmaking is superb, and it doesn’t feel like anything else.”
