Why Tomorrowland and The Intern are the same movie
Nancy Meyers and Brad Bird must belong to the same country club, because I swear that Bird’s Tomorrowland and Meyers’s The Intern are literally the same movie with some minor changes in window dressing. Let’s dig in, shall we? Spoilers for both movies abound.
A headlining male actor whose character is depressed
Although technically from different generations, George Clooney and Robert De Niro are the old-line Hollywood actors that Hollywood doesn’t churn out anymore. Can you ever imagine Benedict Cumberbatch or Shia Labeouf taking a chance on a risky project like The Big Wedding like De Niro did?
In TL, Clooney plays a bitter cynic who has given up changing the world, whereas in TI, De Niro plays a sad widower looking for meaning because his kids won’t let him visit his grandkids that often. But then both men are given second chances by…
A female lead who everyone says is great at things
“Show don’t tell” is the generic-but-useful writing advice given to beginners, but both Bird and Meyer unfortunately ignored this maxim. In TL, Britt Robertson’s Casey Newton is a plucky rebel whose sole act of onscreen ingenuity is breaking into an abandoned NASA launch pad using a drone that can hack into security cameras somehow and shorting out some batteries. She is also really smart because she scored really high on some standardized testing. Nice product placement, College Board! In TI, Anne Hathaway’s Jules Ostin is a visionary Internet fashion icon who created a website that sells clothing and everyone thinks she is great because while the website is crashing, she sends De Niro and a bunch of employees to break into her mom’s house to delete a mistakenly-sent email.
They are both supported by…
A younger female lead who is forced to carry the movie
You may be forgiven for not realizing that Raffey Cassidy is even in Tomorrowland (or even knowing who she is), because Disney decided to omit her from all trailers, commercials, and marketing materials, but she saves the movie from being a hokey two-hour infomercial hosted by Al Gore. Unfortunately, JoJo Kushner, the six year-old who plays Anne Hathway’s daughter in TI, does not have the acting chops to pull of some realistic crying because she’s, well, six.
TL lost its way by not focusing on the relationship between Cassidy and Clooney, which yes, would have been creepy, because Cassidy is 13. But Raffey has an older sister in her 20’s who is also an actress and maybe could have played an older version of the character that Clooney could have realistically flirted with?
Anyway, Raffey and JoJo are both driven around so as to showcase some…
Blatant product placement
GM forked over a ton of money to not only have all the characters in TL driven around in Chevy trucks from various eras, but to also have the Chevy Volt engineer be chosen as one of the “dreamers” that gets to live in Tomorrowland. Because the futuristic city where people use jet packs definitely needs the genius of a mid-level car designer at a company that went bankrupt for paying too much in retirement benefits. So visionary! And why is GM promoting the gas-electric hybrid when they have a 100% electric vehicle confusingly called the Chevy Bolt coming out at the end of 2016?
In TI, the characters are driven all around the magical wonderland known as Brooklyn, which must have waived all local taxes to get the movie filmed there. From the phone book factory re-purposed as a cool startup office to the beautiful multi-story brownstones furnished completely with items from flea markets, TI is a love letter to the borough that does not get enough love.
These driving scenes showcase the main thrust of both movies, which is…
The longing for a mythical place
In TL, the mythical place is of course Tomorrowland, which House has turned into a rundown sh*thole completely deficient of jetpacks because he was jealous of George Clooney’s ability to fall in love with a robot. Luckily, he gets crushed to death by a big ball of metal, which allows Clooney and Robertson to go out and recruit the Chevy Volt engineer to make the People Mover into a gasoline-electric hybrid.
In TI, the mythical place is, apparently, the world where women can have it all, because Meyers does not like Anne Hathaway and so she decides to have Hathaway’s husband cheat on her with one of the moms at their daughter’s school because otherwise there would literally be no conflict in the movie. At work, Hathaway gets criticized for caring too much about her family, so she has to go through the humiliating task of interviewing someone to take over for her as CEO. Luckily, Hathaway changes her mind about the outside CEO and then immediately accepts her husband’s sheepish apologies, proving that she really can have it all!
Conclusion
Hollywood too often is afraid to take risks with original properties, so it is refreshing to see Meyers and Bird work together to come up with an original story told in two separate genres. I’m eagerly looking forward to the combined director’s cut coming out in a few weeks.
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