Tomorrowland (Brad Bird, 2015)

A critical and commercial flop, Tomorrowland is a little too much a film for kids to satisfy sci-fi geeks, and a little too heavy on the sci-fi to hold the attention of kids. It has a few good things going for it: the presence of George Clooney and Hugh Laurie in its cast, and nice performances from two young actors, Britt Robertson as Casey and Raffey Cassidy as Athena. (It's particularly good to see a sci-fi movie for kids with girls as the protagonists.) Unfortunately, the screenplay by director Bird and Damon Lindelof, with contributions to the story from Jeff Jensen, is dauntingly overcomplicated and more than a little preachy. The premise is that somewhere after the 1964 New York World's Fair, with its glittering images of the future, our culture took a turn toward pessimism. We no longer believe that we can progress toward a more equitable society or that we can solve environmental problems with collective application of science and technology, and this pessimism creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Those of us who were old enough in 1964, after the Kennedy assassination and at the beginning of the Vietnam War, may remember the mood a little more darkly than the film posits. But even granted the premise, it seems unlikely that our contemporary malaise is going to be lightened by launching a cyberpunk spaceship designed by Gustave Eiffel, Jules Verne, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison into another dimension. Keegan-Michael Key has an amusing bit as the proprietor of a sci-fi memorabilia shop who says his name is Hugo Gernsback, an in-joke for science fiction fans. (His partner, played by Kathryn Hahn, is named Ursula. As in Le Guin, perhaps?)  The special effects are elaborately routine CGI stuff.

Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

I recently commented here that I didn't respond particularly well to Gregory Peck because, unlike stars such as Cary Grant and Bette Davis, he never surprised me with a line reading or a facial expression. I think the same is true of Tom Cruise, whose range seems to be limited to intensity: He never seems to unclench. That becomes apparent in this fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible series when he shares the screen with a much more versatile star, Jeremy Renner, who can be both intense and casually self-deprecating. I'm not saying Cruise is a bad actor: I thought his performance in Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) was superior to Dustin Hoffman's Oscar-winning one. All Hoffman had to do was find a shtick and stay with it; Cruise was the one who had to grow and change over the course of the movie. It's just that he built his career on muscular action and a captivating grin that grew into a rictus as his career thrived. This Mission film is, I think, superior to the first three because it doesn't take on more than it can handle. It turns its heroes -- Cruise, Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton -- into fallible beings who screw up but manage to get on the right course at the last minute. It's all familiar super-action stuff, of the kind we've seen and marveled at ever since James Bond hit the screen. Renner and Pegg especially are instrumental in saving the movie from tedium, especially in their interplay in the sequence when Renner is called on to reprise the famous drop to within an inch of danger that Cruise did in the first Mission film back in 1996. This time, Renner has to do it with no restraint, free-falling until a magnet repels his magnetized suit, and both Renner and Pegg play it for laughs, something that director Brad Bird is skilled at providing. The screenplay (by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec) tries to build some suspense around a secret that Renner's character, Brandt, is hiding from Cruise's Ethan Hunt, but that's just filler between action sequences.