Author Topic: What Are You Watching? (DVD's & Blu-ray's)  (Read 25896 times)

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Neumatic

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Re: What Are You Watching? (DVD's & Blu-ray's)
« Reply #3645 on: November 18, 2017, 11:01:44 pm »
Tomorrowland

You know I fancy myself as a bit of a futurist, I love the future, the possibilities of tech and how we can change our society... so it's a strange oversight that I hadn't seen Tomorrowland.  I hadn't heard great things about it so I wasn't dying to see it, but then this scene appeared on TV the other day and needless to say, it caught my attention.


That's pretty awesome, right?

I see that, and I want to go there.  I want to know more about that world, I want an adventure there.  I appreciate that they can't show a LOT of that, realistically (and financially), so I know we'll only spend a little time there.  But it'll be worth it, right?

No, not really.  You know what happens when they get there?  Over an hour and change into the movie?

It's empty.

Well, not "empty."  Hugh Laurie, who's criminally underused, and two guards are running the show and do... not much... show us a machine that shows the Earth is going to end.  And there's a fight scene and an explosion and that's kind of it.

And you know what sucks, especially about them turning it into a dystopia?  The movie rails against dystopias earlier, and Britt Robertson has an entire monologue where she complains about how you can't promise something shiny and awesome and not deliver, basically repeating my rant about the movie IN THE MOVIE!

There are SO MANY POSSIBLE IDEAS left on the floor that it's frustrating as all get out.  This is straight up what I call a parts movie, little moments I like, lots of ideas coming to my mind, but a movie I will probably never see again (and thus take twice as long to watch it in order to strip it bare for parts).

The premise is that all the smart people decided to go to another dimension and really explore their futuristic ideas and see if they could really save the world.  It's a bit Bioshock, but whatever.  The premise of the movie is that Jules Verne, Thomas Edison and Tesla were some of the first members of the society (and built a pretty sweet brass rocket to go there), and then at the 1960s World Fair, they recruited a bunch of inventors and forward thinking people and brought them over to Tomorrowland to build and design it.

Either of those ideas sound like an AMAZING movie!  You would watch either of those, right?  60s free-thinkers hanging out with old steampunky inventors debating about what the "future" is?  Or present day dreamers visiting a functioning Jetsons future and figuring out how to save our world?  Or you could explore the idea that utopias and futurism has always had a white ethno-centric bias and foreign cultural voices and ideas need to be explored and brought in (I will give the movie credit for suggesting that in the denouement).

What's really galling about that is that it's Brad Bird directing and co-writing, and Pixar is one of the most enviable think-tanks of the 20th century.  If anyone is qualified to tell a story like that, it's someone who worked in that environment and they barely even TRY.  Just lip service.

You could also have a whole thing about private vs public ownership.  This movie was made in 2015, privatization of space and all these other arenas was definitely happening, there's something in that you could make a movie about!  BTW, Britt Robertson's dad in the movie is an unemployed NASA engineer, who has to be really bad at job hunting because Elon Musk or someone should be able to use those talents.  Heck, I kept thinking "how would Elon Musk fit into the world?"

Also, there's this cool little girl robot with a weird British accent named Athena, I liked her.

George Clooney was good, but he doesn't show up until an hour into the movie.  I forgot he was in the movie until he showed up again.

You know what I want, right?  Something I thought for sure would have been made by now... something I'm trying to write (and to take a line from the movie, "I'm tired of waiting for someone else to make it for me")... remember 2015 from Back To The Future II?  That's what I want.  Just a whole movie, in a place like that.  Not a dystopia, not an action movie, just... I wanna hang out in the future for a while.  Flying cars, robots, hanging gardens, weird clothes etc.
« Last Edit: November 18, 2017, 11:26:04 pm by Neumatic »

 

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