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[–]Alan_Crowe 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I fell down a rabbit hole, trying to discover the message of the Tomorrowland movie, without having to watch all one and three quarter hours, and without having to pay for it. Movie Shortens, reviews, trailers; the story seems to go like this:

There's this place, Tomorrow Land. Earth in the future? Some-where else in this universe? In a little bubble universe budded off from our universe? The story in a little incoherent, but this doesn't matter.

They have a viewer, that lets them view Earth's future. Earth's future is bad. Bad due to human action and inaction. So they send messages to today's Earth about Earth's grim future. That is supposed to encourage people to do the right things and thus change the future for the better.

Mysteriously, things keep getting worse. The cinema goer may infer that the gadget in the film, that the people in the movie think is sending a warning message, is actually doing something else. It is demoralizing and subverting the recipients in the movie. They work less hard to make a good future.

As the future revealed in the gadget that sees the future gets worse, the people in Tomorrow Land get desperate, sending ever more urgent warnings. Unaware they they are actually sending self-fulfilling prophecies in a tightening cycle of doom.

This leads to a second ambiguity in the movie. Is there a super-natural element in which the message gives people bad beliefs which directly affect reality? Is it supposed to be naturalistic, with the message giving people bad beliefs which leads to foolish behaviour which in turn affects reality. Do beliefs always have to be mediated through actions to affect reality? Yes, and it is important to stick to this "chain" aspect of casual chains. But the movie has doom shrinking to just 90 days away, which is rather supernatural That is flaw in the movie. I'll put the flaw down to "That it how it is done in Hollywood.".

I think core message of the movie is: There is an ambiguity between messages that warn and messages that demoralize and become self-fulfilling prophecies of the thing they warn against.

Example: A violent movie, such as Roller Ball, that the writers intended as a warning against "bread and circuses", (especially as a warning against the "circus" becoming ever more degrading and violent) ends up as part of the spectacle. It becomes the path to even worse spectacles, The writers wanted us to turn back from that path, not to hasten us along it :-(

Example: We need to be careful with technology, nuclear power plants can blow up, industrialization will concrete over nature. So England responds to Global Warming by failing to build nuclear power plants and by banning on shore windfarms (to protect rural England). By being too careful, we get too many problems to juggle and drop some. Being too care about technology makes us careless :-(

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Actually the main guy what he did was he pumped the media full of violence in order to get people to be sick of it to avert the future he came from but instead it did the opposite effect making people GO towards it even more! Every tactic he tried failed to advert that 99 percent. The problem with Tomorrowland was the editing was done so horrible as it flipped back and forth between people so fast almost nobody really followed it. Most reviewers pretty much only remember the weird sexy robot because of how bad the editing is.

Most of the good parts didn't come till about halfway thru when the agents broke into the guy's house.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That's the funny thing about Tomorrowland is they call out on their own media all thru the movie. Yet do the same things themselves!