Tomorrowland (2015) * *

Directed by:  Brad Bird

Starring:  George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie, Raffey Cassidy

Tomorrowland begins with an idealistic young woman named Casey (Robertson) who picks up a special pin and is transported into a futuristic utopia called Tomorrowland.     We assume it is a utopia of the future, but whether it's here on Earth remains to be seen.      It has the feel of a futuristic amusement park Walt Disney could have dreamed up (and probably did), but the future as dreamed up back in the 1960s.     Tomorrowland, the vision, seems futuristic yet nostalgic all at the same time.     My interest was piqued, but not for much longer.     Once Casey begins the search for the source of the pin, then Tomorrowland becomes mundane.     

Casey hooks up with an alien being named Athena and then a gruff older man named Frank Walker, who knows plenty about Tomorrowland in theory and experience.      The trio finds themselves on the run from bad guy aliens whose reasons for chasing them are confusing.      I will not spoil anything for you, mostly because I am not entirely certain what the bad aliens want to do.      I think they want to take over the planet once civilization destroys itself.      Or maybe not.

Tomorrowland falls back on car chases, fistfights, and things blowing up.     It is odd that the same movie shows us Tomorrowland and then George Clooney duking it out with an alien.     Could the fate of life on Earth truly come down to who wins a fistfight?     The park, or vision, or whatever it may be is cool, but it seems to be an oasis in the middle of a gigantic cornfield.     I thought I was watching outtakes of Interstellar.     Tomorrowland could be a futuristic Disney World in the middle of nowhere.     At least it didn't place its park in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle like Jurassic World.  

The actors are game for the material, but it is weak material.    Robertson must have at least four scenes in which she enters a room or sees a neat-o device and looks astonished.     Being transported through other dimensions to wind up on a rocket that launches from the Eiffel Tower is more worthy of astonishment than wax figures of Thomas Edison, Jules Verne, and Nikola Tesla, but her reaction is the same for both.     Clooney is introduced as a jaded person who was "expelled" from Tomorrowland back in the day, or is it in the future?     The movie doesn't make it clear whether Tomorrowland ever existed in the past or even as a vision.     There are plenty of explanations and secrets revealed, but they don't add up to anything sensible.   

The movie begins with a premise that at least earns enough interest to keep us hooked, but once it became clear that Clooney and company had to outwit and outduel the bad guys then I was disappointed.     The scene in which Casey enters a nostalgia store and is threatened to be vaporized by aliens disguised as shop owners, I could not help but think this was something out of Men In Black.