Tomorrowland: Nostalgia of Hope

Sometimes a movie comes along and the premise alone gets me excited. Usually, this will have something to do with time travel, but more broadly, if it's about the future, I'll have some interest, at least initially. I grew up going to Disney at least once a year and Tomorrowland was always my favorite place, until EPCOT (yes, the all caps version is different than what we have now) came along. Getting that glimpse of what was to come at the end of Carousel of Progress, seeing the animatronic dioramas while exiting Space Mountain, Horizons, World of Motion, Spaceship Earth, etc, were like seeing Star Trek in real life. So when Tomorrowland, the movie was announced and I finally saw the trailer, I was all in. Especially since it was Brad Bird directing. The fact that Shayera was excited to see it too, all on her own, since she saw the trailer without me, was an added bonus. 

Where's my jumpsuit?

So what did I think of the movie? I'm honestly not sure yet. I wouldn't say I was disappointed, but it was not exactly what I expected. It's most certainly worth watching and I would highly recommend having kids of all ages watch it since the ultimate message is the most important thing they could hear right now. And that's what confuses me. I don't normally like anything that comes across as preachy but I'm so much on board with the message of this movie that I might be overlooking whether or not it actually was preachy. I don't think it was, since the action was intense enough to have Shayera crying and begging to leave at one point (we need to work on that), but I may not be the best judge of that.  I think also that because of this, I'm more willing to forgive and overlook the fact that the villain's plot, when finally revealed, seems to contradict the whole point of what he was about. But then again, it's his James Bond villain style explanation that results in the most in your face delivery of the film's message and it's a moment that really resonated with me. 

What kid didn't dream of this?

Ultimately, the movie is about having the determination to change the path we're on. It's a type of future, a type of science fiction, that's been sorely missing from our popular culture for some time. The thing is, I also like dark, dystopian, apocalyptic movies. Planet of the Apes is my favorite thing after Star Trek, although, maybe in my mind, an ape takeover may not necessarily be dystopian. But I have noticed a difference in dystopian movies lately. I've always responded to the horror of the genre, and while Mad Max: Fury Road certainly captures that, I get the sense that a lot of the YA style, Hunger Games and company type movies are more about individuals starting over in a way that might be glamorizing the apocalypse or at least making it more acceptable. It's extreme, but compare that to something like The Road, which is as dark a vision of the future as I've ever seen. Nobody watches The Road and comes away acting out scenes from it, dreaming of being Viggo Mortensen, the way they do with Hunger Games. 

This is not glamorous.

And there's certainly an overall anti-scientific bent to most dystopian fiction, but more so lately, I think. Increasingly we see the message that science itself is bad. That technology is soulless, as if anyone were claiming otherwise, and that the answers to all our questions lie inside us or in some other mystical, invisible force. We see stories about science running amok and the answer is that science as a concept must be stopped and this both influences and reflects our social discourse. Dystopian fiction is supposed to be our check and balance, not our shutdown switch. 

I want to go to there.

So when Tomorrowland gives us a glimpse of this magical world, based on science, it's like seeing those rides and dreams I loved as a kid brought to life. And by the way, I'm positive that some of the scenes are directly from some of those rides, in a nod to the Disney/EPCOT nerds. They are scenes of what is possible and the power of the imagination to stimulate creativity through science and technology for the betterment of mankind. It's about looking at technology not as a commodity but as a means to end. This is the opposite of the elite future that we get from Apple now. This is basically the Gene Roddenberry future many of us have dreamt about our whole lives. And while we currently have technology that comes right out of Star Trek, it's certainly not as a means to an end. We live in a world of science consumerism. It's technology porn that we all crave: the latest phone or tablet, the newest TV, the fastest gaming system. But we hardly, if ever, hear talk about what we can actually do with these things. I don't mean what apps it runs, but what it can DO in a real sense, to make our lives better.  Not more convenient, but BETTER. And I'm not even saying that they don't. They might. But we don't hear about it and maybe that should be the focus.

I waited for this day.

I wouldn't go so far as to think Tomorrowland will somehow change all this, but damn if it's not a start to a conversation. At one point early on, Casey (Britt Robertson), our heroine (yet another great thing about this movie), while in school, faced with courses in which teachers are all talking about how bad things are right now, asks one simple question: "Can we fix it?" And while that's certainly somewhat naive, maybe that naivety is a good thing. Maybe a little naive curiosity is what we need to combat our rampant cynicism that leads people to give up. Another word for that is hope.

Books - I Heart the Apocalypse

I don't know why it is, but I love stories about the end of civilization. The more grim, the better. It's why I love The Walking Dead. I recently read a couple of novels in this genre, one new, one not so new.

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus is a surreal take on the apocalypse. In this book, a disease spread through language has made it nearly impossible for adults to communicate while children are immune. This has the feel of a bizarre David Cronenberg film. In the world of this book, Jews worship in secret in hidden huts in the forest. These huts cover a hole in the ground that connects to a strangely bio-electronic network radio system. It's very odd and also brought to mind elements of Jeff Noon's Vurt books. Overall, what resonated with me from this book was that sense of hopelessness that apocalyptic literature should have. In this case, the narrator is helpless to do anything for his wife, while his own daughter is basically killing them both with her language. By the end of the book, I'm not entirely sure the story holds together in a satisfying way. I can live with unanswered questions, but here, I think maybe some of the more bizarre elements needed a bit more clarity. Still, it was an entertaining read.

Last year, I saw the movie version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and found it was almost too much to bare. The sense of hopelessness in that movie is kind of overwhelming. Having read the book, now I think the movie pretty much nailed it. There's a dark side to parenting: that side where you consciously or unconsciously imagine the worst scenarios your child could end up in and what you would do to protect them. As a parent, you know you'd kill for your child. You know you'd give up your own life to save that of your child. But what if death was a certainty? What if there really was nothing left and the most humane thing you could do was to take your own child's life? That's the sense of impending doom that drives this story. The apocalypse in this scenario is not important, except to know that it happened and it wasn't pretty. What's left is even worse, as what remains of humanity, if you can even call it that anymore, has been reduced to horrific acts that go beyond mere survival. We follow a man and his son, traveling across what's left of the United States, trying to survive. There are moments in this book that are pure poetry. The structure, particularly the first half, is mainly imagistic vignettes, in short paragraphs. Some of them are not even events, but all of them convey the dread of this world. The language in this is amazing, with sentences that read like doom haikus. Overall, as grim as this story gets, and it gets about as grim as anything I've ever read, there is a small hope, tiny, really and nearly futile. Getting to that hope, though, is not easy. There were many passages in this book that had me near tears. This book will stay with me for a long time.