Tomorrowland

Hopelessly undersold as a mad inventor film, with George Clooney standing in for Jerry Lewis, director Brad Bird's Tomorrowland actually roams around in deeper, snappier waters. In their ad campaign, Disney emphasised twee. They proposed an absent-minded boffin tumbling around a house bristling with escape routes lifted from Nick Park's The Wrong Trousers. Clooney playing something magical and childish. His Frank Walker is actually neither. Walker is an aged baby boomer, retreated and reeling from the sneering fascism he encountered in Utopia. Bird and co-screenwriter Damon Lindelof might take a grandstanding stance against the dreadful futures of teen-lit cinema but they also torpedo the Ayn Rand exceptionalism of gleaming cities built on clouds. Bird's film rails against consensus; various monuments to the American mono-culture are positioned as dangerous here. As with The Incredibles, the enemy is the willing abdication of personal will as an act of appeasement. Both film's bad guys want everybody to agree with them, after all. 

What's the alternative then? Well, you stick to your guns! Surrounding yourself with the people you judge to be worth arguing with. Walker and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson)'s relationship then is deliberately based on this kind of antagonism. He's bitter, she's electric. Their partnership - the regime that will carry Tomorrowland forward - is a constant state of disagreement built on a bedrock of respect. They are colleagues then. Bird and Lindelof are focused on the process of collaboration as the real Utopian ideal, their film demonstrating that diverse personality types knuckling down together to solve a problem beat golden spires every time. Raygun civics aside, Tomorrowland's ace is Raffey Cassidy's Athena, a diminutive seeker who looks like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy but behaves like a mix of Schwarzenegger's T-800 and, well, Astro Boy. In action, Bird shoots Cassidy and her digital doubles as compact combat platforms, hurling themselves around a series of clumsy, ineffectual giants. Even in the film's brief brace of action, Bird leaves the likes of Terminator Genisys in the dust by keeping physical movement and their bone-crunching results in the same shot.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol understands that easy breezy accomplishment can never register the same level of excitement as a dangerous fluke. Seeing Tom Cruise slip effortlessly between steel ventilation teeth absolutely raises a smile but it's nothing compared to a clammy leer at the actor struggling up the side of the world's tallest building, lumbered with a pair of malfunctioning Spider-Man gloves. As a director, Bird has the ability to conjure up a vivid sense of bullet-sweating anxiety whilst still working within a broad, blockbuster framework. The action is his films does not feel handed off or impersonal and is, therefore, the opposite of punctuation. These characters are baptised by motion. Stuck in increasingly implausible situations, they have to think their way around the problem and stress their bodies to accomplish their tasks.

Bird and screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec know that it's a lot easier to put yourself in the place of a man cooking inside a computer than it is to connect yourself with an invulnerable, psychically domineering gunfighter. Ghost Protocol is the first Mission: Impossible then, since Brian De Palma's opening salvo, that really revels in the actual process and planning required to place these spies in dangerous situations. Since Ethan Hunt and his crew are super duper disavowed for this instalment they're saddled with finite, malfunctioning equipment that forces them (not to mention the film itself) to construct intrigue around the bullishness inherent to genuine skill rather than an expensive or fantastical prop. Since there is no end to his talents, Bird also helps Cruise rejuvenate his star persona in a way that accounts for all of his perceived, sofa-stomping craziness. This Hunt is brilliant but unhinged, an intense and lofty presence with suicidal programming.

Disaster Year 2004: The Incredibles

Bob Parr is a former superhero slumming it in the suburbs thanks to an ungrateful public. Every day he squeezes himself into a satirically small vehicle and commutes to and from an awful cubicle farm. His evenings are spent gazing into the middle distance, ignoring his family, and dreaming of the past. His only remaining connection to a hero identity is the odd night spent listening to a Police scanner with a former super-colleague.

Parr yearns for his past life, although not as an alternative to his new role as a provider. He loves his family, and delights in his children's fledgling abilities. His wife Helen, formerly Elastigirl, has adapted well to normal life, causing Parr to further subsume and conceal his discomfort. Rather than a middle-aged virility tantrum, Parr's longing is more about the knowledge that he has a very special gift but is unable to use it. In his current position he is completely unable to help people. It torments him.

The first act of The Incredibles is suffused with an almost overpowering sense of sadness. The denial is destroying Parr. His hair is lank, his eyes pitted, and gut hanging. In the absence of heroics, Parr has taken a position at an insurance company, a body ostensibly tasked with comfort. Instead it is ruled by a vicious grey lump who worries about his shareholders' margins, and slanders Parr for his instinct to help.

Salvation eventually arrives not in escape, but sharing his dreams and aspirations with his family. They become a unit, each member's skill-set complimenting the other. The Incredibles is the most emotionally sincere examination of costumed adventuring in a functional human context. Writer / Director Brad Bird is able to compliment the usual Pixar wonder with a craft honed after years of service on heyday The Simpsons. The Parrs are much more than zippy cartoon facsimiles, like their Springfield set antecedents, they're a rounded, believable group of people.

One Million Horse-Power?

Latest dreary hawk for Imagi's upcoming Astro Boy. Look out for blink-brief cameos by a rather young looking Osamu Tezuka; and Grant Morrison's Tyrant Sun Solaris, from DC One Million and All-Star Superman, who looks to be pitching in on jobbing heavy duty. If Atom really must be awkwardly transplanted into a Western centric animation adventure, why couldn't Pixar have come sniffing for the rights? I know they're not usually hip to adaptation, but this is Osamu Tezuka for God's sake. At the very least John Lasseter could have conspired with a cackling Hayao Miyazaki to bring some maximum density to the fondest creation of the limited animation mindset originator. That'd be a victory for their way of life. In my head cinema I'm imagining Brad Bird directing a take on The Greatest Robot on Earth episode: a young person-bot struggling to understand the true implications of his power, whilst battling a serial-killer robot. David Fincher could shoot some live action Pluto inserts on gloomy weekends, and there you have it: something perfect.