Space-Age Wonder Through the Retro Futuristic Lens of ‘Tomorrowland’
“Tomorrowland” is built on that nostalgic feeling of wonder.
The action-adventure sci-fi time-traveling period piece plays as a history lesson into the wide-eyed optimism of the Space Age. The “We have the Right Stuff” 50s and 60s. At the same time, the film guides viewers along a comfortably familiar Disney thrill ride at the heart of a big-budget blockbuster.
“Tomorrowland” yearns to recapture that excited feeling of possibility for a modern audience. So as any true Disney movie should, it tugs at all the heartstrings.
The opening scene jumps right into the bright, overly colorized bustle of the 1964 World’s Fair. A little boy genius lugs his homemade jet pack made of a re-engineered Electrolux vacuum through the crowd and up to the judge’s table. Director Brad Bird’s work in live action (“Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol”) was plenty evident throughout the film. Yet in those scenes where a young boy wanders through the World’s Fair with a beaming smile, only to find himself transported to a gleaming utopian cityscape, it’s Bird’s Pixar gene — that look of childlike awe born of creating animated worlds like “The Iron Giant” and “Up” — that shines through.
Bird’s animation-tinged freedom is particularly evident when exploring the immersive retro futuristic world he’s created through the eyes of “Tomorrowland’s” NASA hat-sporting teenage protagonist Casey (Britt Robertson.) Bird’s camera whirrs around Tomorrowland’s spiraling whitewashed architecture, suspended pools baked in light and gliding loops of monorail tracks like a curious kid whose eyes dart after the next shiny thing they spot. The film is about blending past, present and future in a way that shows America why we still need organizations like NASA to explore the collective unknown.
“Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof co-wrote “Tomorrowland” with Bird and “Entertainment Weekly” Senior Writer Jeff Jensen, and the film’s retro futuristic roots date all the way back to a box unearthed in the Disney Studios archive labeled “1952.” Inside were all sorts of models, designs and photos sketching out Walt Disney’s plans for the “Tomorrowland” addition to Disneyland opened in 1955 and Disney’s rides created for the World’s Fair.
Fun Nerd Fact: Disney’s EPCOT theme park actually stands for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.” Before he died, Disney originally intended the park to be a “an ongoing experiment in urban development and organization; it was to be a real Tomorrowland where technology wed urban planning to create an optimal living environment,” according to the film’s production notes.
“Walt Disney was a futurist in that real mid-century modernist sense,” said Lindelof in the production notes.
Lindelof, Bird and Jensen weaved the film’s mythology around the box, devising a history dating all the way back *MILD SPOILERS* to the late 19th century. In “Tomorrowland’s” world, Eiffel Tower engineer Gustave Eiffel, along with Thomas Edison, Jules Verne and Nikola Tesla formed a secret society of the world’s most elite thinkers called “Plus Ultra” that ultimately recruited Disney for their proactive city of the future located in another dimension. The backstory spelled out may sound overly convoluted, but the film pulls it off with typical Disney aplomb.
“There was this feeling that the future was something that could be built, that we could make things better, technologically, politically and socially; we could make a better world,” Jensen said, explaining the film’s mythology in the production notes. “‘Plus ultra’ is Latin for ‘further beyond’; it was the mantra of Spanish explorers. Eiffel and his colleagues thought of themselves as explorers, not of new lands but of human potential. Walt Disney was a perfect fit for the organization, and was recruited because he embodied this idea that the future is this thing that we’re constantly striving toward. But things changed and today the future is much more nebulous, more uncertain. We’re cynical about progress; we’re skeptical that things can get better. We think of the future as something that’s going to happen to us, not something that we are making. Of course, not everything about the past is great, it was all much more complex and political than we know, and not all of it should carry forward. But can we recover something of that idealistic midcentury futurism? Is any of it relevant to today’s world?”
“Tomorrowland” pushes and pulls this interplay between retro optimism and what the film paints as modern defeatist realism, juxtaposing the real and surreal around the ideas of innovation and human nature. Scenes at the real-life Apollo launch pad, ready to be disassembled, play off of how Tomorrowland itself changes with different retro futuristic flourishes in each time period the film visits it.
NASA advised on the film, and hosted the production in late 2013 when it shot at Cape Canaveral. Bert Ulrich, NASA’s Multimedia Liaison for Film and TV Collaboration, recounted the experience of advising on the film in an interview for this story last Thursday, May 14. He watched as the “Tomorrowland” cast and crew filmed at an old Apollo launch site, which happened to occur at the same time as the real-life launch of the Mars Maven probe.
“Brad [Bird] came onsite and saw all these monuments to the 60s, but at the same time watched what we were doing in the future by seeing the Maven launching off to Mars,” said Ulrich. “It was retro futuristic in how it mimicked what the film was about. It was a strange experience; the movie deals a lot with time travel between past, present and future, and [the cast and crew’s] experience at NASA really did bridge all three because they were filming around a pad used during the Apollo era and up into a shuttle that has been repurposed since for SpaceX commercial flight. Then they were able to watch the launch and you saw them really take it all in, through this silent awe of watching something going to Mars.”
Ulrich likened the film’s combination of science and imagination to the inception of the original Tomorrowland, where Disney worked with scientist Wernher von Braun, considered one of the “Fathers of Rocket Science” on a shared vision for what the future of space travel would look like.
The film’s 1960s and utopian Tomorrowland-set 1980s portions harken back to the golden age of space exploration. That NASA doesn’t exist anymore; not to the same boundless degree. Half a century later with a fraction of the funding, NASA acts more as a shepherd to the future of privatized space travel with companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. The film tackles this pretty heavy-handedly with the main character’s Casey’s father, a NASA engineer (Tim McGraw), who’s about to be laid off.
There are no more NASA missions to launch…in the film, anyway. In real life the organization does play the wise mentor role for the corporations taking the lead in space exploration, but NASA still finds the money to run a few of its own missions. The Mars rovers and probes. The unmanned New Horizons probe set to fly by Pluto in July. The Kepler mission to discover exoplanets. For a deeper dive into what role NASA is playing in the coming era of privatized space exploration, read Dan P. Lee’s mind-blowing 2013 feature in “New York Magazine” entitled “Welcome to the Real Space Age.”
Ulrich said even after the Cape Canaveral scenes, which take place early in the movie, NASA plays a symbolic role in the film. “Tomorrowland” works to imbue that sense of wonder in the audience through its depiction of technology, from a iPhone-controlled drone in the present day to all the small retro futuristic details crafted around the utopian vision of Tomorrowland.
In the 1964 Tomorrowland flashback, a young Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) — who grows up to be George Clooney’s character — tries to strap himself into a bolted metal pod complete with white hard hats and old-timey leather seatbelt straps. In Casey’s vision of the 1984 Tomorrowland, induced by touching a magical pin (it is a Disney movie, after all,) she passes Tesla stations and display samples from other planets, walks by a monorail commuter wearing a retro tweed jacket and bowler hat while reading a holographic newspaper, and listens as parents drop their teenager off at Tomorrowland’s Space Port while the teen explains: “Don’t worry, I’m only going 20 light years out!”
(Tomorrowland is far from the only example of Retro Futurism in pop culture. Retro Futurism is awesome. Tumble down the r/RetroFuturism subreddit rabbit hole and get lost.)
“Tomorrowland” takes a unique cross-genre concept, infusing the wonder of pure thought and possibility across mid-20th century American idealism and 21st century realism, and packages into a conventionally plotted Disney epic with a beginning, a middle and a happy ending. That’s not a bad thing. The film positions itself as a cultural touchstone, gauging and stoking America and the world’s sense of wonder towards space exploration. It gives the audience a set of characters and a message that feels familiar, steeped in all the eye-popping phantasmagoria immersion of a $190 million Retro Futurism blockbuster.
NASA’s Ulrich said he hopes the film can inspire a new generation of naive dreamers to Google a launch or a mission, to feel inspired by sci-fi the way America was a generation ago to pursue careers in science, go out and explore the unknown, and then make it known.
“NASA is a lot of scientists, engineers and astronauts,” said Ulrich. “A lot of the reasons they got into this field were the sci-fi of great films and TV shows — everything from “2001[: A Space Odyssey]” to “Star Trek.” They got people really energized and was sort of an entrée to them. These movies are gifts to future generations to spark their curiosity and learn what space exploration is really about.”
