Somewhere, over the rainbow…

Tomorrowland (English)

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Hugh Laurie

Is George Clooney the new Jeff Goldblum making nerd super cool again? Lanky and lithe Goldblum appeared in all those kooky science movies as a mad, manic scientist making numbers and pi charts so sexy.

In Independence Day he spoke about the virus to kill the evil alien and made it all very haute, in Jurassic Park as chaotician Dr. Ian Malcolm he did more for chaos theory than James Gleick and as Seth Brundle in The Fly —well that is another league of hot-blooded insanity altogether. He successfully married glasses, chess, cycling and black leather.

So here we have Clooney as grumpy inventor Frank Walker who looks very fetching in flannel shirt and salt and pepper hair. How can anyone dislike science, numbers, wormholes and time travel when at the end of the rabbit hole we have a scientist looking like Clooney, nursing a broken heart? Awww.

Tomorrowland is visually stunning — wouldn’t say the same of the pacing though. The world is going to end but there is a place out of the space-time continuum, Tomorrowland, where dreamers are creating a better world. Walker went there as a child but was banished for inventing something he shouldn’t have. Athena, a robot, is looking for dreamers to set the world right and teenager Casey Newton seems to be humanity’s last hope.

The philosophy of the two wolves (the fight between the wolves Hope and Despair is won by the one you choose to feed) is seductive. Being a Disney film, you know which wolf is going to win and that is not such a bad thing — especially if scientists of the world look like George Clooney! Director Brad Bird who has helmed Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and The Incredibles , has created a feel good, if rather simplistic film — Newton, Athena, could you be more obvious? Of the cast, Britt Robertson is cute as Casey while Raffey Cassidy is cuter as Athena. Hugh Laurie plays the Governor of Tomorrowland with a British accent and barely suppressed giggles. There is hope for the world if the future is in the hands of Disney, George Clooney and sundry comely maidens.

MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER