Empire UK

122 NEW RELEASES

Tomorrowland:

A World Beyond

★★★
FROM OCTOBER 5 / CERT. PG

BACK TO THE FUTURE

jet-pack-designing kid is recruited by

girl-shaped animatronic Athena (Raff ey

Cassidy) for a trip to Tomorrowland —

an Eden he is cast out of to become

paranoid genius tinkerer Frank Walker

(George Clooney). In the present

gamine Casey Newton (Britt Robertson)

is given a vintage Tomorrowland pin-

badge which transports part of her to th

lost future though she has trouble not

walking into here-and-now walls. Then

she’s on a runabout with the girlbot who

rescues her from wicked droids who run

a space-age nostalgia shop and leads her

to Frank’s bunker hours ahead of

grinning well-dressed Terminators

modelled on The Dave Clark Five. Casey’s

optimism allows for a fl icker of the

possibility that we’re not all doomed

and Frank takes her to the alternative

dimension — via an astonishing

AVING SCORED A

franchise with the

Pirates Of The

Caribbean fi lms (and

a footnote with The

Haunted Mansion)

Disney spins off

another theme-park attraction into this

extremely odd would-be blockbuster.

It has more ideas than it can contain

courtesy of director Brad Bird and

co-writer Damon Lindelof but is

decidedly hit-and-miss as a fun movie

let alone as a treatise on the uses of the

utopian impulse.

It’s very Disney — to the extent

it’s odd that Uncle Walt himself isn’t

namechecked (along with Verne Tesla

Edison etc.) as one of the Plus Ultra

secret visionaries at the heart of the plot.

In 1964 at the New York World’s Fair a

Above: High anxiety.

Below: How she

wished she had

a hoverboard.