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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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Scanning imdb message boards there is no mention of a global warming. So whatever inference of GW there is in the movie no one noticed or seemed to care.
Meanwhile I am pretty sure I am living in yesterday’s tomorrow land everyday.
They hit the “extreme weather” meme right away, then they showed all the “end-of-the-world” scenarios, most of which came right out of “day after tomorrow” or the anti-nuke 80’s agitprop. Then at the end, when they were looking for the “enlightened ones” to rebuild Tomorrowland, the portal opened to a field of bird choppers and showed a bird chopper engineer as one of their first. So while it was not as overt as some alarmist pap that passes for peer reviewed literature, it hit all the themes whenever Clooney was on screen.
Of course the end reveal shows it as all Clooney’s character’s pessimism that he was unable to convince the world of catastrophe and projected it all onto the population via his “predict the end of the world” device. Funny, the timing of everything places the beginning of the downfall right around the time of the bogus, open-window, no AC congressional hearings. Hugh Laurie’s character monologues about how the leaders were presented with the facts and refused to act and thus the world deserved its fate.
Now the problem is whether the ending indicates that the propagandists win the argument or simply that hope wins out over cynicism.
This is the worst movie that ‘Disneybama’ has ever produced. I like science fiction and this certainly fits the billing of fixtion(that is not a typo) they are so fixated on the so called coming apocalypse they forget to get the facts right. I wasted my money,please do not waste yours.
I love disaster movies, and the worse they are, the better. I’ll probably see this one too. Day After Tomorrow was a hoot. No one takes this stuff seriously.
NO, the true believers take it as gospel. To them “Day After Tomorrow” is Heston portraying Moses showing the truth of the faith for all to see.
I have a friend from my college days who thought “Day after Tomorrow” was a precautionary tale of where things are going if we continue our industrial ways. He was a little more liberal than I was in college, but he has gone way off the left edge in his middle years. The problem is he lives in a Baltimore – Washington suburb and is surrounded by people just as loony left as he has become. They all believe this dross without question or the skill to examine it logically. They are almost all liberal arts majors working for government or government contractors.
I see the movie “Idiocracy” being way more prophetic as I look around at today’s society and values.
the true believers are nobodies
“Day After Tomorrow” caused me some concern for about an hour but in the back of my mind or at least the left side of my brain a thought was saying “There’s too much latent energy in seawater to freeze it all the way to the bottom in ten minutes even if its surface was in contact with absolute zero”, it would release an enormous amount of heat.
Another thought was wiggling around in there; “subzero air in the stratosphere is going to be compressed as it comes down to sea level, and as it compresses, it will warm.” So I did some calculations and arrived at a sea level temperature of 70 F; practically perfect in every way.
As for tornadoes in Los Angeles, it is nearly impossible because the heat engine that drives tornadoes requires hot, moist air in contact with cold, dry air and huge masses of air that can be brought into contact. Neither exist at Los Angeles. You have hot dry air. That’s it. Dry lapse rate all the way up.
But as disaster movies go it was pretty good.
No one took the “China Syndrome” seriously???
no, but they did take Three Mile Island seriously.
“no, but they did take Three Mile Island seriously.”
They did indeed. Even though no one died at Three Mile Island, and nuclear power in the west still has the best safety record of any energy source, the over-reaction to Three Mile Island basically put an end to the expansion of nuclear energy in the U.S.
Now, why was there a hysterical over-reaction to Three Mile Island?
BROKEN YOGI and that was a big nothing why pretend this hazard if you claim science to inform yourself
yes obviously there was fear mongering over TMI, and the coincidence of the movie coming out just before it happened added to that, but it wasn’t the movie that did the trick. It was the fact that people were finding out that poorly designed nuclear plants were a reality. They were overreacting to that reality, but it was indeed a reality. Nuclear stuff is very, very scary in most people’s minds, and for good reasons. The nuclear industry lost the trust of the people who pay for it, and once that trust was lost, it’s been very hard to regain. Chernobyl and now Fukushima have multiplied that distrust. The German government is actually trying to close its nuclear plants due to Fukushima, even though no movies have come out on the subject. So, no, these things are not the result of Hollywood disaster movies.
Ah, I’ve seen a trailer. It’s a future where the predominant mode of transportation are rollercoasters I think. I’d kinda like that. Now I don’t wanna see the movie because they will wreck the idea in it.
Hollywood has been “jumping the shark” on CAGW with warp-speed eye-rolling abandon for decades.
Tomorrowland is tanking at the box office, so hopefully Tinsel Town will learn a valuable lesson: moviegoers are sick and tired of paying good money to be be lectured by clueless Hollywood leftist elites with agendas…
If studio executives would take the time to read Gallop polls on CAGW support, they’d understand why Tomorrowland is such a flop– people have stopped drinking the Kool Aid: especially at $25/cup….
“Hopefully Tinsel Town will learn a valuable lesson”
Ain’t gonna happen. If audience apathy towards leftist preaching were going to teach the Hollywood brass a lesson, it would have been learned a long time ago.
The problem is that there are other powerful incentives at work besides the box-office. Think of all those goops at the Academy Awards ostentatiously applauding Al Gore and his dopey movie.
Leftism and environmentalism are now the way that our elites pray in public. The old ideologies of religion and nationalism are passe, so these newer ideologies are the way that the ‘good people’ among us signify that they are “well-intended”, and thus deserving of deference and social respect. Those are powerful motives that will not be disappearing anytime soon.
“Men Who Stare At Goats” was perhaps the only Clooney film I enjoyed. It might also be the only one I’ve seen. I really don’t like Clooney but he was brilliant in “Goats” and it was a pretty good portrayal of military life in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
You mean THIS part of military life, which is probably still in play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
http://gizmodo.com/project-mkultra-one-of-the-most-shocking-cia-programs-1370236359
Speaking of movie reviews.
http://www.steynonline.com/6972/hollywood-hillaryphobia
“OK, some of the science was a bit wonky in Gravity, but it was still in my opinion a very watchable movie.”
A just adequate story line, but awesome in 3D on DVD.
Hollywood culture are the ones feeding- and profiting- from the wolf of hopelessness this confused mish-mash of a movie claims is our problem.
And green extremists like Clooney and his pals are the ones exploiting this fear the most.
For the record, I got a sneak preview and saw the movie for free last Monday.
Well there’s the Matt Damon anti fracking movie (something Global), and the Animated Cars II movie anti Fossil fuel and there have been many many more. The China Syndrome” is why there are no new nuclear power plants in the USA. And everyone thought that Tina Fey was Sarah Palin…”I can see Russia from my house” etc.
fracking is still going huge despite Damon’s movie, and so are fossil fuels in general despite Cars II. New nuclear plants were killed off by Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (and unfairly so), not Jane Fonda. And Sarah Palin lost the election because of her and JM’s incompetency, and resigned to make money off her celebrity, not because of Tina Fey
Our world will not be changed by George Clooney playing a character in Tomorrowland. Our world will not be changed by another actor playing a character in another science fiction movie.
What is currently happening to the sun will change our world.
The fundamental physics related to what is currently happening to the sun (what is currently happening to the sun is directly related to the physics of what happens when very, very large objects collapse, the physics that causes the phenomena associated with quasars, the sun formed about the core of supernova), how the current change in the sun will cause scary, significant global cooling, will lead to real breakthroughs in fundamental physics, breakthroughs that will have practical implications in our lives.
The Trouble with Physics – The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
Lee Smolin
http://www.amazon.com/The-Trouble-With-Physics-Science/dp/061891868X
Regarding Lee Smolin:
“This list is in no way complete but I think it’s sufficient to understand that Lee Smolin is a spherical crackpot – he is a crackpot no matter which way you look at him. What he keeps on writing and saying is wrong at every conceivable level.” [Luboš Motl; March 11, 2015]
http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/03/smolin-denounces-dualities-promotes.html
Lee Smolin’s comments concerning General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and fundamental physics are correct. There has been absolutely no progress in the fundamental physics in the last 30 years.
There has been more 10,000 man years of work on String ‘Theory’ and more than 100,000 string ‘theory’ papers published.
There is at present no string theory and there is no definition as to what strings are. String theory is the production of sciency looking mathematical models. There are more string mathematical models than there are atoms in the universe. The production of sciency string models is a kin to alchemy. That approach will never lead to any scientific result as opposed to a breakthrough.
The fact that we will fund 30 years of purposeless production of sciency looking string models is an indication that fundamental physics is in a crisis and the production of sciency models is madness, not a good idea.
I am not sure why you are quoting Luboš Motl comments. You appear to know nothing about this subject.
Gravity was not a Cloony movie but a Sandra Bullock movie, and she owned it. George was just eye candy in it. She can act and if you’ve any doubts, see her in The Blind Side.
Pointman
Re: Daily beast’s review; I hope no one wonders why political discussions are impossible. After all, your politics are just politics, but theirs are morals.
And I’m a bit of a nerd, but even my friends were surprised at how mad I got at “Day After Tomorrow.” There are people of voting age now who believe that wind can get so cold that helicopters break into pieces.
Oh well add Clooney to the list of actors “work” that I wont be watching.
I understand why you wrote this and your hesitation at seeing the film. However, as was stated above in the comments, the real villain in the film is pessimism. Spoiler alert, the great artists, theoretical scientists, and practical inventors create a perfect world that is bridged to our own across a gateway in dimensions. But then it all falls apart when through quantum physics they see a bad possible future. One of many probable futures. The bad guys end up amplifying this bad signal because they think humans are horrible blah blah blah – one of the bad probable outcomes being AGW. But the villain of the film is one of the founders of Tomorrowland who hates everyone on earth essentially and is amplifying this signal that convinces everyone that the world is about to end. THIS IS THE PERFECT MESSAGE FOR THIS BLOG. The pro AGW crowd believes that the end of the world is nigh. A message which helps no one, and they would do well to consider Tomorrowland’s message which is not Humans are bad. It’s that Humans are wonderfully inventive, are always trying to do better, and actually give a darn about the world around them.
strange I found it quiet the opposite .. it’s about mind control and the forcing of an idea .. in this case global warming ..you get something beamed into your head and you believe it that much it starts to come true ..
take away those that are forcing the idea .. all is good again .. so all you need to o is take away Obama and his minions ..
latest word it it has flopped at the box office!
I saw Tomorrowland Saturday night with a friend, I went not knowing anything about it. I was horrified to find it utterly preachy just about every scene. It’s aimed at a demographic of eight year olds. Awesome CGI and effects but if there was a plot it wasn’t apparent. It’s nothing more than a “save the planet” by having special people, scientists and artists and such, isolate themselves in another dimension in some parody of the future but all it really was is a doomsday propaganda film that justifies the use of force to propagandize people into allowing force to save the planet. It offers zero counter balance or evidence that the planet actually needs saving. It’s just assumed and the usual suspects of co2 doomsday are presented while skipping over the actual problems, people who justify using violence to solve political problems rather than finding voluntary free market peaceful means based in the independently verifiable empirical approach of the scientific method (rather than scare propaganda).
Yuck – sounds like The Daily Beast was being nice about it…
>”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?”
Some on the left have concluded that the reason why so many people don’t fall for the Climate Change hoax is due to an evolutionary flaw in their brains.
“It’s not me, it’s you!”
Unwilling to consider that it was a mistake to fiddle with data and use false propaganda and persecution to advance a scientific theory, they’re now considering stronger methods. Some have openly begin to discuss outright brainwashing of children.
Given their past, and their stated political goals, this was inevitable. I predict a thaw in relations between North Korea and the rest of the world, as future generations outside of that paranoid police state join them in worshipping the state.
Now THIS is news to me! I’m one of the few WUWT loyalists who actually is a sucker for scientist-hero themed pics like The Day After Tommorrow” (as well as the EPIC Sout Park parody, “The Day Before The Day After Tommorrow,” if memory serves).
Thus, I had to look this “Tomorrowland” up, since it sounds more like an old amusement park thrill ride or a rejected Disney project.
Here’s what IMDb.com has:
“Bound by a shared destiny, a teen bursting with scientific curiosity and a former boy-genius inventor embark on a mission to unearth the secrets of a place somewhere in time and space that exists in their collective memory.”
U-huh. “Collective memory?” Is this a Soviet Era sci-fi flick?
I mean, just reading the description makes me sleepy…. Like a bad “Mystery” series, one that has “You Rube” screaming at me!
How can IMDb say “out now” when I’ve never heard of it? Me, a film writer?
visiting metacritic – a web sit that aggregates reviews – I read to the bottom and see this: “a here-and-now caper that will confuse children, bore adults and offend anyone who’s ever taken a science class.” HA! A no-name critic in St. Louis has a brain.
Aparently a lot of reviewers say something like this: “The thing barely makes a lick of sense. Rapturous on a scene-by-scene basis and nearly incoherent when taken as a whole, the movie is idealistic and deranged, inspirational and very, very conflicted.”
It sounds a schizoid as today’s enviro-whacko movement – and here I speak as a trained environmental scientist when I say “enviro-wacko movement.”
Going back to IMDb, I catch this insightful gem: “The narrative features a female lead played by Britt Robertson. And yet, rather than center on the protagonist’s path, the film veers unlinearly back to Clooney constantly. For all that Clooney is worth, he is a complete miscast in this film and his lazy acting is near unbearable.
“…Disney used to be synonymous with magic, and this film has none. What it does have a plenty are action shots complete with spectacular visuals to sate audiences.
Yet “No amount of explosions can compensate for the lack of clarity in a film with no driving force. Worst of all, it has no hope, no innocence, and no excitement. How can a film about the future of tomorrow be missing all that?”
Well, if it’s “all that” and conflicted, I think we can safely miss this mess.
“…the EPIC [South] Park parody…”
It’s “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow”, and yes, it’s one of South Park’s best.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0763053/?ref_=fn_ep_tt_1
“What it does have a plenty are action shots complete with spectacular visuals to sate audiences.”
Oh. Well, I’ve seen THAT movie about a hundred times already. Still can’t remember the “plot”, though. I’m beginning to wonder if it has one…
? WHY DID HE JUMP INTO THE DEEP END
In his review of Tomorrowland, movie critic Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes:
“Disney’s gimmick of naming movies for its theme-park attractions crashes and burns in “Tomorrowland,” a here-and-now caper that will confuse children, bore adults and offend anyone who’s ever taken a science class.”…
“Not even a baby Einstein could follow this nonsensical plot, and even if your kids stay awake, the payoff is paltry. The movie spends a total of about 10 minutes in an idyllic vision of the future; the other two hours are a regurgitation of “Flubber” with a dystopian twist.”
It’ll do to climate science what 1million years BC did to Dinosaur science.
Not a lot.
BUT…. ‘1,000,000 Years BC’ had Raquel Welch in that fur bikini!
That’s ALL that anyone remembers, as far as I can tell!
Hollywood propaganda in movies is acceptable, because we can read the credits and note who’s agenda was being promoted. The problem is when these clowns who have no knowledge or or critical thinking skills promote agendas off screen without disclosing who wrote the script. The voting public unfotunately for a large part cannot discern that these clowns are only capable of emoting other peoples words.
Well I really enjoyed One Fine Day with Michelle Pfeiffer, tho’ maybe the title was a subtle plug for AGW 🙂