Molasar - Running III

Transformers vs GI Joe #10 by Tom Scioli

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.

Le Matos - No Tomorrow (feat. PAWWS)

Notorious BIG - Dead Wrong (WoodysProduce Remix)