The Most Important Thing You're Missing

This is not a movie review.

That's coming later.

I'm going to talk about Tomorrowland, but not I'm not going to talk about how the movie was made, the story, or the characters. I'm going to talk about the message of this film, and how it relates to you and the world you live in. Or more importantly, how it relates to you and the lives you touch. I'll say this much, I liked the movie, and it's definitely worth a rent. Me, I'll be buying it. Not because it's the best movie of our time, but because of the lesson it teaches me, because of the lesson I hope it will remind me to teach my kids.

The lesson that the world is what we make it, and that the world is subject to change.

Tomorrowland starts with the suggestion that the future was different when George Clooney was a kid. They're talking specifically about the late 40's early 50's, and I think the temptation of a modern audience is to go "yeah, it was worse! We've got technology now your fiction writers wouldn't have dreamed of back then!"

Let's ignore the fact that a lot of their dreamed-up technology influenced the developments we've made since, and talk about why everyone who thought that was utterly missing the point. The future back then wasn't different because the technology they imagined was different, it was different because IT WASN'T A STEAMING PILE OF PESSIMISM! It was flying cars, cities made of silver, personal jet-packs! Contrast that with the future being paraded by basically everyone who talks about it now, and what do we have? Wars, disease, starvation, natural disasters, nuclear apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, robot apocalypse, X-Men: Apocalypse! Why do we have so many different apocalypses??

To be fair, I'm actually pretty excited for that last one.

We've gone from imagining a world in which everyone was happy and the human family existed in unison to picturing a world in which everyone is miserable and the human family is essentially exterminated. What gives? What happened to gleaming cities and flying cars? To a society where fairness was the basic fabric of existence and money, greed, and hate had all ceased to exist?

Where did we lose our optimism for tomorrow? The most optimistic thing we can come up with anymore, as evidenced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is "The world is going to end due to circumstances completely outside our control, but at least there will always be demigods to save us at the last minute!"

And that might be the most frustrating thing of all, this idea that the world is going to end and we can't do anything about it. What kind of an attitude is that? Not the kind of attitude that's going to convince kids they can grow up to invent flying cars, that's for sure! And look around for a minute. There is nothing else out there. Tomorrowland is the first movie in a very long time that dares to be optimistic about our future. To suggest that we can do things. To look its audience in the eye and ask "what are you doing about this?"

So What's The Point?

I don't mean to suggest that the future is all rainbows and unicorns. Bad things will happen, of course. What I do mean to suggest is that we can do something about it. Working together, sincerely trying to meet everybody's best interests, the future looks pretty good. As a species we've already demonstrated a remarkable ability to solve seemingly impossible problems. Why not teach the rising generation that they can do that too? Why not tell them that the world is getting better, and if they apply themselves, they might be the one who actually invents that flying car I want so badly? Let's stop complaining about the future. Let's stop dwelling on all the things that could go wrong. Let's stop telling kids that bad things will happen and there's nothing they can do about it.

And let's start solving problems instead.

I want to finish with a tidbit of wisdom from Tomorrowland. After watching the movie my wife observed that she didn't really feel like a dreamer. In the world of the film she wouldn't be handed a pin. And I thought that was where the analogy fell apart slightly. But then I realized that the character Athena wasn't either. She didn't get a pin, she wasn't a dreamer. She says herself that she doesn't have ideas. She just finds the people who do. So if you aren't getting a pin, you're giving them out. Finding people who are dreamers and encouraging them to make tomorrow better.

There's no reason the future shouldn't be optimistic. The question you need to ask yourself is "what can I do to make it that way?" And as long as we're all doing that, we'll make it happen. I'm heading for Tomorrowland. Here's your invitation to come along.