The Space Between Us (2017)

04 Sunday Feb 2018

Tags

Asa Butterfield, Britt Robertson, Carla Gugino, Catch Up movie, Drama, Gary Oldman, Mars, Peter Chelsom, Review, Romance, Sci-fi

D: Peter Chelsom / 121m

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino, Britt Robertson, BD Wong, Janet Montgomery, Gil Birmingham, Colin Egglesfield

In a strange version of the future that appears to be happening today, space exploration bigwig Nathaniel Shepherd (Oldman) announces the latest mission to Mars, and the crew that are going there to continue the Red Planet’s colonisation. But in one of those “What if?” scenarios that jump start way too many movies, the lone female astronaut, Sarah Elliot (Montgomery), proves to be pregnant. She gives birth to a son on Mars, and promptly dies from eclampsia. And from that moment on, The Space Between Us throws all sense and logic out of the window, and gallops headlong towards absurdity with all the gusto of a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s unsurprising to learn that the movie has been in development in one form or another since 1999, when it was titled Mainland and its central protagonist was a boy born on the Moon. Put in turnaround until it was picked up again in 2014, the basic idea has remained the same – boy born in space wants to visit Earth – but the idea that his physiology would be compromised, perhaps fatally, has also remained. Tough break for the kid, huh? Just don’t think it about it too much, though – no, really, don’t.

The Space Between Us is a movie that wants to tell its cute romantic story against a backdrop of new-fangled technological advancement and old school moral dilemmas. It’s a movie that bounces from scene to scene with no clear through line, and which lets its lovers on the run scenario get sillier and sillier as Gardner and his only friend on Earth, Tulsa (Robertson), avoid capture by stealing cars at every turn staying one step ahead of a pursuing Shepherd and astronaut-nominally-playing-stepmother-to-Gardner Kendra (Gugino) (with all the technology at Shepherd’s disposal you wonder how he’s so bad at catching up to them). Gardner’s mission on Earth is to find his father, something that should be easy enough as he has a photo of the man with his mother, but the script throws huge curve balls in the way of this, including a detour to a shaman (Birmingham), and a sidetrip to an ER where Gardner’s bone implants (don’t ask) barely register as a concern. And along the way, Gardner gets a crash course in human relationships including how not to sound weird, and losing your virginity (not to be funny, but does anyone remember that Eighties movie, Earth Girls Are Easy?).

There are far too many moments and scenes where the average viewer will be asking themselves, Really? Most of them involve Oldman, whose performance can best be described as desperately seeking relevance. Stuck with some of the movie’s worst dialogue, the more than capable Oldman has no redress against the inanities of both the script and his character. It’s a similar situation for Butterfield, playing a role that requires him to be a science whizz on the one hand but one who’s learned absolutely zero social skills while growing up on Mars (yes, he’s smart and dumb at the same time). Gugino and Robertson have interchangeable roles once you take out the sex, and everyone else has no option but to go along with it all and hope for the best. In the director’s chair, Chelsom keeps things moving in the haphazard way the script (by Allan Loeb) dictates, but he appears to lose interest early on, while Barry Peterson’s sharp and detailed cinematography proves to be one of the movie’s few blessings. At several points, Gardner asks people, What’s your favourite thing about Earth? One answer seems obvious: being able to avoid seeing this inane, stupid movie.

Rating: 3/10 – with its tortured science (just think about the environment Gardner has been living in since birth and ask yourself, would he really suffer on Earth?), and equally tortured YA theatrics, The Space Between Us is a movie that trips over itself continually in its efforts to tell a coherent, relatable story; a waste of everybody’s time and effort, the hint should have been taken back in 1999 when rewrites on the original Mainland script proved unworkable.

A Dog’s Purpose (2017)

01 Monday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Bailey, Britt Robertson, Comedy, Dennis Quaid, Drama, Josh Gad, K.J. Apa, Lasse Hallström, Reincarnation, Review

D: Lasse Hallström / 100m

Cast: Josh Gad, Bryce Gheisar, Juliet Rylance, Luke Kirby, K.J. Apa, Britt Robertson, John Ortiz, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Dennis Quaid, Peggy Lipton

A Dog’s Purpose tells the five lives of one canine soul (related in voice over by Gad), who initially lives a very short life as a feral puppy called Toby before finding a “forever home” in his second incarnation as a Golden Retriever. It’s 1961, and Toby is rescued from a locked car by a young boy, Ethan (Gheisar), and his mother (Rylance). Toby is renamed Bailey (or to his ears, Bailey Bailey Bailey Bailey) and he becomes a part of the family. Ethan’s mother is very supportive, but his father (Kirby) can be aloof, and prone to mood swings. When a dinner party for his boss goes awry thanks to Bailey’s fun-seeking nature, seeds are sown in relation to Ethan’s father and the work he does, seeds that will have serious repercussions later on.

As a teenager, Ethan is on course to earn himself a football scholarship, and he has a bright, vivacious girlfriend, Hannah (Robertson). Bailey goes wherever Ethan goes, and life for Ethan is pretty good, but his father pushes his mother to the ground while he’s drunk and Ethan tells him to go for good. Following that incident, one of his “friends” puts a lit firecracker through their letterbox, and the house catches fire. Ethan and his mother only get out thanks to Bailey’s quick response, but in jumping to safety from an upstairs window, Ethan fractures his leg. His dream of playing professional football now in ruins, Ethan becomes embittered and ends his relationship with Hannah, and leaves for agricultural college.

Bailey lives out the rest of his life with Ethan’s mother and her parents, and eventually dies of old age. His next life sees him reincarnated into the body of a German Shepherd K-9 called Ellie. With her police partner, Carlos, Ellie chases criminals and helps Carlos overcome his feelings of loneliness follwing the break-up of his marriage. Ellie has all of Bailey’s memories (and attitude), and misses all the fun and games she had previously with Ethan. In his fourth life, Bailey is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi called Tino who is rescued from an animal shelter by shy college student Maya (Howell-Baptiste). Tino and Maya are together for a long time before his next life comes along. Now a Bernese Mountain Dog, and called Waffles, he’s abandoned by his owner’s abusive boyfriend but is found by someone whose smell he recognises, someone he hasn’t seen since his time with Ethan…

An unashamedly feelgood movie, A Dog’s Purpose has had a surprising amount of negative publicity forced upon it in the last few months, so much so that advance screenings (and its Los Angeles premiere) have been cancelled, supporters of the movie have done their best to distance themselves from it, and Hallström has received numerous hate messages. The reason? Back in January 2017, footage appeared that seemed to show a German Shepherd called Hercules being forcibly dropped into and dragged through rushing water, and with no regard for his safety or if he was distressed. But the footage had been edited to give a false impression of the dog’s “distress” and in February this was confirmed by the American Humane Association.

All of which was very dramatic – way more dramatic than anything that happens in A Dog’s Purpose, and despite the movie killing off its central character four times. Based on the novel of the same name by W. Bruce Cameron, the movie retains the novel’s portmanteau structure, and unsurprisingly, some of Bailey’s incarnations are more effective than others. His time with Ethan gets the most screen time, and their scenes together paint an affecting portrait of mutual respect and understanding. But though the emotional bond between Bailey and Ethan is established very early on, it’s the closer bond between Ethan and his father that matters more, and the inevitable disintegration of their relationship. While the movie puts warm and fuzzy in the foreground, it has the sense to keep dark and upsetting sequestered in the background, and waiting to come out when needed.

The same occurs when Bailey becomes Ellie. Ortiz’s melancholy police officer lacks the connection that Ethan had with Bailey, and though the mechanics of the overall storyline dictate that each incarnation has its fair share of problems, Ellie’s life is the toughest, and the complete opposite of Bailey’s. This is reflected in the manner in which Ellie becomes Tino, but even though it should be heartbreaking, the knowledge that “Bailey will return” negates any inherent drama. Thanks to Cameron’s spin on canine reincarnation, there’s no sense that there’s anything at stake here, and even though it’s fairly obvious where all these different lives are heading, there are few lessons learnt along the way, and Carlos’ and Maya’s stories end up feeling incidental to the main focus, which is when will Bailey and Ethan be reunited?

What helps and hinders the movie in equal measure is the voice over provided by Gad. As a way of (literally) getting inside Bailey’s head during each incarnation, it’s an idea that gives the movie the opportunity to see things from the dog’s point of view, and to do so in a way that avoids the usual kind of anthropomorphism so often seen in movies where animals feature as central characters. There’s no sappy, snappy banter a la Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), just Gad relaying the joy of being a dog, and in such an infectious, humorous manner that you can believe that this is how all happy dogs think and behave. But there’s a serious side to it all as well, as Bailey takes time out every now and again to ponder on the bigger questions, such as why cats want to be dogs deep down and can’t admit it, why some owners don’t want to play Fetch, and more importantly, what is Bailey’s purpose in coming back so often.

While the answer may sound a little cheesy, and not quite as profound as Hallström and Cameron (plus his four co-screenwriters) would have liked, it does serve to give the movie more meaning than usual, and the material overall is in Hallström’s very safe hands. The director of My Life As a Dog (1985) and Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009) maintains his unique ability to craft emotionally resonant movies out of stories involving our canine friends, and though in many ways this is a movie that offers little in the way of anything new or original, it succeeds by telling Bailey’s story simply and directly. With a superb canine cast that easily puts its human counterparts in the shade, the movie also has a sentimental, decorative score from Rachel Portman, and vibrant, energetic cinematography from Terry Stacey that complements Bailey’s joie de vivre.

Rating: 7/10 – infectiously enjoyable, and a movie to warm the hearts of dog lovers everywhere, A Dog’s Purpose is at its best when showing the depth of the bond between a dog and its owner; less successful in terms of its structure, and perhaps showing one life too many, the movie also suffers from too many perfunctory performances (the script’s fault, not the cast’s), and a saccharine quality in places that’s completely unnecessary.

Mr. Church (2016)

05 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Breast cancer, Britt Robertson, Bruce Beresford, Cooking, Drama, Eddie Murphy, Natascha McElhone, Pregnancy, Relationships, Review, Tearjerker

D: Bruce Beresford / 104m

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Britt Robertson, Natascha McElhone, Xavier Samuel, Lucy Fry, Christian Madsen, Mckenna Grace, Natalie Coughlin, Madison Wolfe, Lincoln Melcher

In 1971, something unusual happens to single mother Marie Brooks (McElhone) and her ten year old daughter Charlotte (known as Charlie) (Coughlin): they find they have a cook. His name is Henry Joseph Church (Murphy), and he is effectively a legacy from the man who was Charlie’s father. Employed to look after Marie and Charlie after her father’s death, Mr. Church – as he likes to be called – has been paid to look after them for the next six months. The timescale is important because Marie has breast cancer and has been given that amount of time to live, though she hasn’t told Charlie any of this.

At first, Charlie doesn’t want Mr. Church in their home. But once she tastes his cooking, she slowly comes around to the idea that having him there during the day is a good idea. He brings books into the home that Charlie begins to read, and he makes things easier for Marie. But after six months, Marie is still alive, and is still alive again in six years’ time, though much sicker by now. When Charlie (Robertson) is asked to the prom by the boy she likes, Owen (Samuel), she doesn’t want to accept because she’s afraid Marie won’t be alive by then, but Marie confounds expectations and even helps her decide on a dress. Throughout all this time, Mr. Church has been the rock that both women have relied on; the only thing that bothers Charlie is that after six years, she still doesn’t know anything about him.

But one night she sees him going into an infamous club called Jelly’s. She doesn’t say anything, and soon after she goes off to Boston University, helped in part by savings Mr. Church has put aside for her. There she meets new people, works hard, and winds up pregnant. Unsure of what to do, she returns home, and with her mother no longer alive, she goes to Mr. Church’s home. He lets her stay on the condition that she continues to respect his privacy. She agrees, but later on, the temptation to find out more about him, leads her to break that one rule and in doing so, bring an end to their relationship.

Putting aside the Beverly Hills Cop retread that was made for TV in 2013, Eddie Murphy hasn’t appeared in a movie since A Thousand Words (2012). In fact, since he made the execrable Norbit (2007) his career has consisted of four theatrical releases, and five outings as Donkey (from Shrek) on both the big and the small screen. Once upon a time, Murphy was the world’s biggest movie star. Now he’s rarely seen at all, and when he is, there’s precious little fanfare. Mr. Church is a movie that has slipped under most people’s radar, and it’s indicative of both Murphy’s place in the acting firmament, and it’s likely reception, that this movie isn’t being promoted more heavily. It’s a small movie, to be sure, but one that has a lot more going for it than might be readily expected.

For starters, there’s Murphy’s portrayal of Henry Joseph Church. Henry is a quiet, proud man, though he has his demons (as Charlie discovers when she stays with him). Murphy focuses on the man’s quiet demeanour, his initially reserved, almost calculating approach to being Marie and Charlie’s “cook” (he becomes so much more to both of them), and the way in which his relationships with them give his life a greater meaning. And even when he’s dealing with his inner demons, what is more impressive in terms of the character is the alacrity with which he can forget about those demons and continue to be supportive of Charlie and Marie. Murphy doesn’t strike a false note throughout (though an angry outburst nearly takes the shine off, coming across as an awkward line reading of an equally awkward piece of dialogue). Like a lot of comedians, Murphy is a fine, dramatic actor, and here he judges the character and the emotional links to the narrative with quiet aplomb, grounding a movie that at times can strike the viewer as being cloyingly sentimental.

But Murphy is the antidote to that feeling, even when he’s involved in some of that overly sentimental material. Mr. Church is a guardian angel, someone who knows exactly what to do in any given situation, and the former star of movies such as The Golden Child (1986) and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), effortlessly redeems himself for some of the dreadful movies he’s made in the last twenty, thirty years. Using a neutral expression for the most part, Murphy still manages to evoke feelings and responses in the viewer that a lot of actors would struggle to achieve across a movie lasting five times as long. And in conjunction with Britt Robertson, he’s found someone who can match him in terms of displaying their character’s emotional stance without resorting to an exaggerated acting style. Mr. Church is a tearjerker, and one that works best because of the understated way in which its characters are played.

That’s not to say that the movie is entirely successful, though. Given the era it all takes place in, you could be forgiven for thinking that at some point, racism will rear its ugly head, but there’s not one scene that addresses the issue directly. This makes it seem as if the story is taking place in an historical vacuum, an idea that is further compounded by the realisation that Mr. Church doesn’t have a family of his own, or even friends, and his emotional well-being is entirely dependent on the white family he works for. There are moments where this is highlighted, and awkwardly, leaving the viewer with the suspicion that any such notions were ignored or removed during the movie’s production. But equally, it’s a measure of the movie that as race isn’t an issue for Marie and Charlie, then their acceptance of Mr. Church is a valuable lesson in how to make a movie about just the characters and their relationships, and not about any extraneous issues such as race or creed.

Some may find that the movie is overly and severely sentimental, but this, for once, isn’t a bad thing. There are several moments where the emotional message behind the movie is turned on like Xmas lights, and while these moments do stick out from the rest of the material, it’s a tribute to veteran director Bruce Beresford (and his cast) that they don’t overwhelm the episodic storyline, or prove too off-putting. There are also times when the characters avoid talking to each other, and almost in deference to Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men (1992) when he tells Tom Cruise’s character that he “can’t handle the truth”. These moments can be frustrating, but by the time you’ve registered the frustration, the story has moved on and the “danger” has passed.

Having previously directed the likes of Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and A Good Man in Africa (1994), Beresford is a good choice for the director’s chair, adding layers of subtlety when required, and allowing emotional outbursts to happen without their feeling staged, or pulling the viewer out of the narrative. He keeps things very simple throughout, and doesn’t allow the various “tragedies” that occur during the narrative to define the characters, leaving them free to grow in their own way. Even secondary characters such as Madsen’s Army vet with a drink problem are allowed to shine at various points in the movie, and while some of them may feel extraneous to things, they all have their place in driving the story forward. It all helps Mr. Church to become more than just a deft “feel-good Samaritan movie”, and more of an ode to (mostly) uncomplicated, mutually dependent and rewarding relationships.

Rating: 7/10 – with its simple message, and even simpler approach to the material, Mr. Church might seem, at first, to be lacking in depth, but thanks to good performances from Murphy and Robertson, and pertinent direction from Beresford, the movie has more to offer than meets the eye; easy to watch and even easier to admire for what it gets right, Murphy’s latest outing won’t win many awards or attract great swarms of viewers, but it is worth seeing as a reminder that he’s still a very talented actor indeed.

Ask Me Anything (2014)

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Allison Burnett, Blogging, Britt Robertson, Christian Slater, Drama, Gap year, Justin Long, Literary adaptation, Martin Sheen, Relationships, Review, Robert Patrick, Romance, Sex, Undiscovered Gyrl

D: Allison Burnett / 99m

Cast: Britt Robertson, Christian Slater, Molly Hagan, Justin Long, Robert Patrick, Martin Sheen, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Andy Buckley, Max Carver, Zuleikha Robinson, Sharon Omi, Gina Mantegna, Max Hoffman

When Katie Kampenfelt (Robertson) decides to take a gap year before attending college, her high school careers advisor (Omi) suggests she starts to keep a diary or a blog. Katie chooses to write a blog detailing her life and sexual experiences, but more importantly, to tell the truth (though in order to do this she changes her name and the names and places of everyone and everywhere else that she describes). In it she talks about her life, and in particular her relationship with an older man, Dan Gallo (Long). She sees Dan as often as she can but no one knows about him, not her mother, Caroline (Hagan), stepfather Mark (Buckley), or her father Doug (Patrick), and especially not her boyfriend Rory (Carver) (or Dan’s girlfriend, Martine).

But when Dan moves nearer to his work it makes it more difficult for them to see each other, and their relationship begins to unravel. Katie finds a job in a bookstore run by Glen Warburg (Sheen) and continues to try and contact Dan, but to no avail. She spends time with her best friend, Jade (Mantegna), and finds her blog is developing a loyal following. But just as things seem to be going well – Dan’s reticence aside – Mark reveals that Glen has an unsavoury past, and Katie is forced to quit her job. A week or so later, though, she receives a call from Paul Spooner (Slater), a local hedge fund manager looking for a nanny for his newborn son. Katie meets his wife, Maggie (Williams-Paisley), and is hired on the spot.

Soon after, Katie manages to contact Dan and persuades him to see her. She meets him at his new home, but her happiness at seeing him again is ruined by her realising that their in Martine’s home, and Dan has moved in with her; he also tells her that he and Martine are engaged. Furious, she leaves. When she gets home, Rory is there wanting to know where she’s been. He’s angry with her and challenges her assertion she was at the cinema, and when she tells him she was with Dan, Rory assaults her before being thrown out. With Rory out of the picture, she begins to develop an attraction for Paul, and they end up having sex. But like Dan he has no intention of making their affair more permanent, and Katie begins to face the probability that she will always be let down by the men she’s attracted to. And then she finds out she’s pregnant…

On the surface, Ask Me Anything is yet another coming-of-age teen drama that sees its central character encounter all sorts of emotional and social obstacles on the way to becoming a more grounded (and rounded) individual. It’s a scenario we’ve seen countless times before, and while this movie steers close to many of the genre’s staple ingredients, there’s a subtler, more mysterious thread running beneath Katie’s exploits that creates a completely different vibe than is present in other, similar movies.

In adapting his novel Undiscovered Gyrl, Burnett has fashioned an unexpectedly compelling tale that begins as brightly and humorously as you’d expect, but as the narrative progresses, it takes on a darker hue, and cracks begin to appear, and not just in Katie’s various romantic relationships, but in her story as well. Central to this is her relationship with her father, and the way in which she chooses older men for sexual partners as a way of pleasing an idea of him that she’s had since childhood. Once a sports writer but now an angry alcoholic – he refers to Caroline as “the witch” – Doug reminds Katie at one point that he was her hero when she was younger. Tellingly, Katie doesn’t remember this, and can’t work out why. Astute viewers at this point will be thinking that Katie was abused by her father (she has flashbacks to her childhood, but only when she’s on the point of orgasm), but Burnett is canny enough to sow seeds of doubt, and the viewer is never quite sure until late on what really happened.

Katie has only one positive relationship with a male in the movie, and it’s with manic depressive Joel Seidler (Hoffman), who she knew in school and who contacts her out of the blue. Joel becomes her confidant, but because he’s near to her own age, she feels safe with him, and while he offers her good advice throughout, Katie continues to continue down the self-destructive path she’s chosen for herself. As her problems increase and she finds herself struggling to cope, Burnett has Katie floundering so much that the viewer can see just how easy it’s been for her to end up like this, but at the same time he restricts the amount of sympathy the audience can feel for her: like many teens who think they have a handle on the world, Katie’s problems are a result of Katie’s ill-informed choices and decisions.

With so much that’s hidden from plain view, the audience is taken on a journey where what they learn about Katie and her life increasingly comes to be tainted by a sense that all is not what it seems. It’s a very clever trick by Burnett, and the movie’s coda serves as a beautiful payoff of what’s gone before (there’s a big clue near the beginning, but you’ll need to be sharp to spot it). And it’s here that the movie’s true message comes through, with an indelible flourish that is as audacious as it is sincere.

Burnett is blessed with a cast that ably skewers the conventions of the genre while maintaining them at the same time. Robertson confirms the promise shown in The Family Tree (2011) and in TV’s Under the Dome, and provides a confident performance that easily encompasses Katie’s contradictions and insecurities. As the men in Katie’s sex life, Long and Carver are given interesting character arcs, but Slater is hamstrung by Paul’s being a stereotypical middle-aged seducer. Hagan and Patrick are solid in support, while Sheen is the kindly grandfather figure who’s straight out of wish fulfilment central.

Rating: 8/10 – deceptive and quietly affecting, Ask Me Anything steals up on its unsuspecting audience and delivers one hell of a sucker punch at the end, but it’s one that will have you saying “Bravo!” rather than “What the hell?”; clever, intelligent, and rewarding, Burnett’s movie is an underrated gem that deserves a wider audience.

Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (2015)

23 Saturday May 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1964 World's Fair, Brad Bird, Britt Robertson, Drama, End of the world, Fantasy, George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Jet pack, Pin, Raffey Cassidy, Review, Sci-fi, Tomorrowland

aka Tomorrowland

D: Brad Bird / 130m

Cast: George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Tim McGraw, Kathryn Hahn, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Robinson, Pierce Gagnon, Matthew MacCaull

At the 1964 World’s Fair, a boy named Frank Walker (Robinson) takes his latest invention, a jet pack, to the science tent in the hopes of winning a $50 prize. But as his jet pack doesn’t actually work properly, the presiding judge, David Nix (Laurie), tells him to come back when it does. As he leaves he’s approached by a young girl called Athena (Cassidy), who gives him a pin with a bright blue T on it, and tells him to follow her when she gets on one of the rides. When he does he finds himself transported to a strange futuristic world where there are tall, shining buildings, trains and vehicles that travel on air, and a launch site for spaceships. There, his jet pack is adjusted to work properly and he’s accepted as a member of Tomorrowland, a world where the brightest and the best – the geniuses of Earth – have gone to create a utopian world devoid of war, social inequality, famine, natural disasters and greed.

Fifty years later, teenager Casey Newton (Robertson) lives near Cape Canaveral with her dad, Eddie (McGraw), and younger brother Nate (Gagnon). Eddie is an engineer working for NASA, and helping to dismantle the nearby Apollo launch site. Casey “knows how things work”, but is using her skills to delay the site’s demolition. When she’s caught and arrested, she finds a pin with a bright blue T on it in amongst her belongings when she’s released. She touches it and is immediately transported to a wheat field where, in the distance, is a city of tall gleaming spires. She drops the pin and is back in her own world. Unable to convince her father that the pin is special, she looks for information about it online, and learns that there is a store in Texas that will buy them.

She travels there but the store owners, Ursula (Hahn) and Hugo (Key), try to take the pin from her by force. Casey is rescued by Athena, who doesn’t look a day older than when she met Frank. Athena explains a little about Tomorrowland but not enough to fully satisfy Casey’s questions. They travel to a remote farmhouse where Casey is left to meet the owner, a now older Frank Walker (Clooney). When agents from Tomorrowland arrive and try to abduct Casey, Frank and Casey manage to escape, and both are reunited with Athena. From there they head for Paris and the Eiffel Tower, which, aside from being a national monument, is also the launch site for a hidden rocket ship. The ship takes them to Tomorrowland, but when they arrive, the trio find it in ruins, and Nix in charge of everything. And it becomes very clear that our world is on the brink of complete destruction, unless Casey can “fix” it, something that Nix doesn’t want her to do…

The movie that Bird passed on directing Star Wars Episode VII for, Tomorrowland: A World Beyond arrives with no small amount of hype attached to it, and an appropriately high level of anticipation. And up until we meet Casey it’s exactly the movie we’ve been expecting: a richly detailed, nostalgic look back at a time when the future seemed brighter than ever, and technological miracles were being produced that were poised to make our lives all the better. There’s a wistfulness about these early scenes, and a joy in the discovery of Tomorrowland that is infectious and intoxicating, and Bird and his co-writer Damon Lindelof give us an unforgettable introduction to the unforgettable world they’ve created.

And then it all goes horribly wrong. In placing our world in peril, but with the solution located in Tomorrowland, Bird and Lindelof have managed to come up with one of the murkiest, most unconvincing – or clearly explained – storylines in recent years. So much happens that doesn’t make sense, and so much happens that isn’t followed through, that the movie becomes unwieldy and bogged down by too many scenes that fail to advance the plot or deepen the characters. It’s like being given a box of assorted chocolates, only to find that they all have the same centre. For a movie that touches on so many different aspects and themes – nostalgia, individualism, collectivism, fate, unfulfilled love, the benefits of technology, looking to the future, nihilism, hope, manifest destiny – it develops not into a thrilling adventure that matches the joie de vivre of its opening section, but a tired, downbeat, dystopian odyssey that squeezes the life out of its characters and its plot.

What this leads to is an impending worldwide catastrophe that you just can’t care about, and if filmmakers of the calibre of Bird and Clooney can’t make an audience care about the end of the world then there’s definitely something wrong (although, ironically, the idea fits neatly with Nix’s disparaging remarks about everyone else on Earth). It’s as if the initial idea was settled on, but fleshing it out proved too difficult, so any way the story could be continued was seized upon and no further development took place. There’s no tension, an abstract sense of impending doom, and too much reliance on Athena to bail out Frank and Casey when they get in trouble.

The cast struggle gamely with characters who lack shading and depth, though Cassidy is a minor revelation as Athena, her poise and command of her dialogue helping her performance immeasurably (and showing the others how it should be done). Hahn and Key provide some much needed respite (though too early on) from the drudgery, and Robinson is so cute he shouldn’t be allowed. But it’s still not enough to offset the awkward miscalculations made by Messrs. Bird and Lindelof, and the strangely disaffected tone the movie adopts when it returns to Tomorrowland. However, the movie does have a wonderful sheen to it, Claudio Miranda’s cinematography proving an exquisite treat, his mix of light and colour at the World’s Fair being particularly gratifying. If only as much attention had gone into the script.

Rating: 5/10 – with just enough on display to keep it from being a complete disappointment, Tomorrowland: A World Beyond starts out fresh and engaging and ends like a lame athlete finally crossing the finishing line; Bird directs as if he were absent from the set, and it all has the air of a movie that “will just do for now”.