Most contemporary Hollywood film companies can replace each other. When a movie changes its title, the audience will not feel any problem, because the house style inherited from the classical period is long gone, but Disney may be the only minor exception. Since the 1920s, this film company has been persistently providing entertainment products suitable for the whole family to millions of viewers. Its family model has been passed down from generation to generation, initially limited to cartoons, and later included some live-action movies, making many Disney works relatively recognizable.
Tomorrow's World is a science fiction film. Accurately speaking, it involves two basic plots in science fiction movies, one is utopia in the future and the other is time travel. I was very interested in these two plots, so I expected this movie at first, but when I watched it, I found that Tomorrow World almost failed most of my expectations. I think it's because those specific expectations didn't meet Disney's requirements, or at least because the film director didn't handle Disney well.
In this film, Frank and Cathy played by George Clooney witnessed the future world, but the real world is about to be destroyed. They want to return to the future world in order to save the earth and change the fate of mankind. Does this sound like a hardcore science fiction movie? This is far from the truth.
When the "future world" really appeared on the screen, the rich theme park design style made me immediately realize that it was paving the way for future derivative amusement projects. In fact, the title "Tomorrow's World" has already explained this point. It was originally the official name of Disney's future theme park, and now it is directly used as the title of the film. With this preconceived idea, when I saw the future traffic and urban architecture shown in the film, I felt that it was a play, and I always felt that I was playing house in the playground.
Disney is mainly reflected in its classification (PG) and the positioning of family movies, which leads to the highlights and selling points that this kind of science fiction film should have. For example, Frank and Cathy, the heroes and heroines, jump back and forth in the past, present and future. Most normal sci-fi films will set up some small narrative obstacles in these places, which will bring the audience the pleasure of crossing the obstacles. On the contrary, this film may be afraid that some viewers will look down on their age and don't understand it, so it will be repeatedly reminded at some nodes, so it is particularly boring to the discerning. Every shuttle has almost no sense of time span, which makes people feel that they have just moved from one place to another. This way of stealing time jump by jumping in place may also be for younger people to consider.
Why the earth is about to die, the key issue of this film is weakening. It turns out that only Frank and Cathy need to blow up a device to save the earth, and this device affects the fate of the earth because it will change people's confidence in the future. In other words, as long as people have determination and confidence, the earth can exist. If there is no hope, there is no future. This chicken soup belief that where there is a will, there is a way, has been instilled in the film, but it is euphemistically called "future optimism." There is no doubt that almost all Disney films must be optimistic, which is the gene of the company, but the utopian films in the future should be the least optimistic ones. There is no hope in the future, technology is abused, and human beings suffer greatly. Even if the protagonist finally completes the task, it is a disastrous situation. However, in tomorrow's world, we hardly realize what makes people feel pessimistic. Cathy was chosen because she never gave up. Another problem brought by this spiritual victory method is that the task itself is extremely simple, without process, design and wisdom. It can only be done by simply playing with the villain, resulting in almost no place to seduce the audience.
Tomorrow's World is not so much a science fiction film as a magic film that Disney is good at. The film lacks a unified concept of science and technology as the basis. Everything in the future is a natural existence. Those robots and flying machines have whatever they want, and they can be made up like plasticine according to the needs of the plot. For example, Frank just needs to get a remote transmitter out, and they can go wherever they want anyway.
Since this is a Disney movie, it is not surprising that the protagonist is naive. The three main characters are a girl, a young girl and an uncle. It is a little strange that the uncle and the girl finally talked vaguely about love (of course, there is no age difference in the plot, because one of them is a robot who doesn't know the geometry of age at all), and this pedophilia treatment is the only place in the film that is not "Disney-like". Then there was almost no bloody scene. There are a few violent scenes in the film, but because the object of violence is robots, violence against robots can of course be handled in a humorous way, so there is no feeling of terror and tension.
Disney is an important reason for the success of many Disney films. In this regard, history is its own evidence. However, Tomorrow's World is too Disney-like, which weakens the original charm of such films and makes people feel boring. Perhaps it is also because successful Disney movies will make us ignore the existence of "Disney". It is precisely because this film is not ideal that the poor handling of "Disney" reminds us of its existence everywhere.