Review: Brad Bird’s ‘Tomorrowland’ Starring George Clooney, Britt Robertson & Hugh Laurie

If the cinematic landscape in recent years has revealed a zeitgeist forming around the cultural anxieties of artificial intelligence, then perhaps not far behind as a rapidly crystallizing notion in the collective consciousness is an ad-astra-esque optimism in the face of dystopian ruin. Christopher Nolan looked to the stars in his sci-fi drama “Interstellar,” and while Disney’s “Tomorrowland” does not explore our solar system per se, the sci-fi mystery adventure does employ inter-dimensional travel and similar themes of imagination, wonder, the power of dreams and other abandoned qualities of human idealism to shine a beacon of hope and guide humanity through its darkest passages.

But if Nolan’s ambitious “Interstellar” was undone by its sentimentality and quantifying-the-power-of-love miscalculations, then “Tomorrowland” buckles under the weight of another kind of romanticism: its own futurist themes, the need to incessantly repeat them and a drinking-the-kool-aid intoxication...