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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Daily Beast reports that George Clooney has done the green thing – starred in a new big budget Summer eco-disaster film, which aims to make us feel bad about warm weather.
According to The Daily Beast;
… When was the last time Transformers made you think about your carbon footprint?
Cinematic ambition has long defined the summer movie season. That typically refers to how many different, new, and spectacular ways studios can blow up things, transport us to other dimensions, and delight us with whizbangs and kabooms.
Tomorrowland, as visually stunning of a blockbuster as we’ve ever seen, certainly boasts all that technical ambition. But what sets it apart from what we’re used to is a little bit of moral aspiration, too.
…
The ideas of Tomorrowland, if occasionally heavy-handed, are admirably resonant. How do you wake people up out of their somnambulant compliance and get them not just optimistic about the future, but engaged in charting the direction of it?
In fact, a lot of the scoffing at the film’s Big Idea ambition speaks to the jadedness and state of culture that Tomorrowland actually seeks to expose and confront. Given the rolled-eye reaction to a lot of it, perhaps the challenge is greater than even the film estimates. …
I’m an unashamed Clooney fan – movies like Three Kings, Gravity, Syriana, Clooney has starred in a lot of interesting, thought provoking movies. OK, some of the science was a bit wonky in Gravity, but it was still in my opinion a very watchable movie. The fact someone who normally demonstrates good taste, with his choice of which movie roles he accepts, has gotten mixed up in what looks like a heavy handed, preachy global warming flick – what a shame.
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best clooney role ever
http://southpark.cc.com/clips/155203/the-perfect-storm-of-self-satisfaction
Clones equals Clooless
So it’s more like “The Day After Tomorrowland?” Bummer.
So, which is worse? Tomorrowland or Batman and Robin? And if you don’t remember how bad Batman and Robin was, these two videos will jog your memory.
https://youtu.be/FCS_kif7qfk
https://youtu.be/3M8FC7uZj3M
I didn’t mind Batman and Robin. I’ve never been a fan of Batman, but what got me was the scientific illiteracy. They need to use sunlight to heat Gatham up because Mr Freeze has frozen it, but there is a problem, it is night in Gotham, but not everywhere in the world, so The Boy Wonder gets the idea to reflect sunlight “from the other side of the equator.” No, that won’t work, it is summer in Gotham, the problem isn’t seasons, and anyway it is winter in the Southern Hemisphere, the problem is just that it is nighttime in Gotham , now if Robin had said “the other side of the world” I could go for it.
Well i have seen the film , pure entertainment , its just a story guys , see it , it is wonderful , made me cry at the end , see it big screen , it is really awesome !!!!
Oh, and another thing… my theater is the second one past the bank on First Street (the only one playing “Tomorrowland” in town). Tuesday nights is free popcorn night. — A. Holmes. 😉
I never saw Clooney staring at goats and maybe I missed some laughs, because Hogan’s Curators was a little dull.
In fact, the real message of “Tomorrowland” is that believing in a flawed computer model can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom, whereas enough skepticism to imagine that scientific advance can improve the future may be enough to create that better future.
Also: don’t trust mad scientists with British accents . . . but we already knew that, right?
I went to see it yesterday. Effects are amazing in IMAX. The story is rather garbled, leaving a lot of holes for us to ponder, but that’s writer Damon Lindelof’s specialty. I agree with vounaki that the message is a sound one–optimism, creativity and especially engineering will solve whatever problems we confront. The change from (perhaps naive) optimism about the future illustrated by the 1964 World’s Fair to today’s constant drumbeat of doom, gloom, cynicism and dystopia will ultimately wreck the future. I didn’t take it as particularly AGW-focused. The nature of the impending doom was never explicit and seemed to include many scenarios including nuclear war.
Perhaps my favorite scenes showed optimistic high-schooler Casey Newton (played by the delightful Britt Robertson) attempting to interrupt her doom and gloom teachers as they droned on about a hopeless future of death and destruction. This resonates with one of my pet peeves–the indoctrination of school kids into cynical beliefs. We should be working to educate kids to be optimistic problem solvers (which is how Casey, and the young George Clooney are portrayed).
I found the movie’s message to be a strongly optimistic and in favor of technological solutions–quite different from the typical message of the AGW crowd that preaches a fear of technology.
Oh, and the performance by 12-year old Raffey Cassidy as Athena, the recruiter from Tomorrowland is astonishing–worth the price of admission.
I saw the movie this afternoon.
GeneDoc, as far as I am concerned, your comments are ‘Spot On’.
The message I came away with was how much better it would be to encourage optimism rather than doom-and-gloom.
————-
This made me remember watching the Apollo landings.
Was a great thing!
And then, in the next minute, the TV News cut to a bunch of blame-Whitey propagandists, crying “If we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we end poverty?”
The answer is, of course, that the people who put those guys on the moon WORKED HARD to do it, and they were SMART!
Not everyone is willing to work hard, not everyone is smart, and not everyone is a decent, moral person.
But the TV news people lapped up the woe-is-me moaning act.
Perhaps much of the problem stems from the entertainment/news ‘industry’ (and I use the term loosely).
The future is shown by the ‘Post Apocalyptic’ genre of movies.
The ‘anti-hero’ is portrayed as the good guy.
The decent person who works hard is shown to be actually either a fool, a chump, or a monster in disguise.
Hitler’s been dead too long, old and boring. Can’t criticize the communists, the middle-east terrorists, or the criminals.
No, for the last what- 10, 15, 20 years, American businessmen are the bad guys of choice.
You feed a person a steady diet of poison, after a while that person gets sick.
You feed a society -American society- a steady diet of poison through TV and media for 30, 40, 50 years, that society gets sick.
Hmmmmm….
Any thoughts?
“Tomorrowland”, “Progressiveland”, “Liberalland”, bear a remarkable resemblance to “Yesterdayland”, “Todayland”, and “Foreverland”, yet notably selective (e.g. pro-choice). Moral philosophy, whether it is religion or law, is fungible. The separation of Church (i.e. organized moral/behavioral consensus) and State is a narrative told in “Fantasyland”.
Burn Before Reading.
[The movie was actually titled, Burn After Reading.]
Ha ha
It takes a village in Tomorrowland…
Tomorrowland”. “The Day After Tomorrow”. “Free Crabs Tomorrow!”. (Sorry.8-)
Don’t they know that “tomorrow” never comes? But they still want us to pay for it today.
I have my own rating system – how many cigarettes I go outside to smoke during the movie. Mad Max: Fury Road was none – Tomorrowland was two (it would have been more except I had my electronic cigarette with me). Even my wife, who is politically polar opposite of myself (but has become somewhat skeptical regarding AGW) was disappointed with Tomorrowland, and agreed this would be one movie that will not grace our video library.
“Even my wife, who is politically polar opposite of myself”
So you have a Hegelian marriage.
One hopes that the thesis and antithesis lead to a synthesis.
Hey, we’ve got a remake of “Mad Max” (1979) coming up. Isn’t that the same meme? How about “Water World” (1995), the ice all melted – and so did the film.
The old Mad Max movies had fantastic stunts. The new one will be digital – and the previews look about as real as “San Andreas”. Some kids playing with their new software. Thing is, most folks under 30 will see it as realistic because they see this on their monitors every day … But then, this IS a Disney movie.
I’m trying to pretend the Mad Max remake doesn’t exist – a bit like “Alien 4” :-).
When the makers of the original Mad Max looked for a film location with the right atmosphere of urban decay and dystopian failure, they picked my old home town. Thats my daddy’s refinery in the background of one of the shots…
Daddy’s refinery = where he used to work.
So you are in the pay of Big Oil!
Ha ha
My, how politically correct and sensitive you are.
There were only one or two, easily ignore-able global warming references.
Waterworld anyone?
Even a bad, cringe worthy, regret it next year movie, is all a piece of the “Push to Paris”.
I wouldn’t put it past PBS to rerun “After the Warming” in July.
Well I was thinking of seeing that movie but I won’t now, as I prefer not to throw up at the cinema.
I feel the same about ‘The Sniper’
The message that I took from Tomorrowland was pro-technology and anti-hysteria. I see it as a refutation of the AGW Alarmists’ agenda, not an apology for it. The threatened disaster was a self-fulfilling prophesy–the world was going to end because people had been brainwashed into thinking that the world was going to end. The heroine of the film rejected the authorities and their computer models that predicted disaster. Like GeneDoc I felt that the most powerful scenes were those where the heroine spoke out against her teachers preaching disaster.
Satire and sense of humour – While I was reading, a “Simpson’s” episode came on TV that caught my attention. It made fun of Elon Musk – and was shocked to see that Elon Musk played “himself” in the cartoon. It takes a good man to admit that he is “just” a marketing genius.
I am unlikely to ever own and electric vehicle since I live 50 km from anywhere but I respect the fact that he participated in the show.
Probably time better spent than watching Tomorrowland 😉
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/26/media/elon-musk-simpsons/index.html
Clooney has that stench of a second term president who’s managed to do not a lot in years but has now moved on to teeing up his “legacy”. Next stop sixty and he’s never turned in an acting performance that was nothing more than cleft-chinned pretty boy, to the ooh and aghs of an adoring knicker-flinging fan club.
Pointman
For a SciFy person, why would anyone want to see that ridiculous story. Vote by not going to the show!!
… and BTW, I think the title of this piece is suffering from emminitis.
Pointman
I’ve seen the movie. Climate change was not the villian, pessimism was. I liked the movie, very good special affects. The power of positive thinking.
Lol climate change is never the actual villain. White American men are. It’s a repeat.