Hacker Cinema
Tomorrowland
2015 · Film · 130 min
Directed by Brad Bird
AdventureFamilyMysteryScience Fiction
Bound by a shared destiny, a bright, optimistic teen bursting with scientific curiosity and a former boy-genius inventor jaded by disillusionment embark on a danger-filled mission to unearth the secrets of an enigmatic place somewhere in time and space that exists in their collective memory as "Tomorrowland."
8 positive2 mixed8 neutralfrom 18 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
22 comments on Hacker News
reminds me of the college scene in the movie Tomorrowland where all the teachers going on and on about about the things that would end us and when she asked "Can we fix it?" and teacher is like "What?" "I get things are bad but what can we do?"
learned helplessness is really a problem, but personally all I have gotten is scorn and hatred for trying to make a difference/improve things that I managed/had control of. All people care about is precious number go up/ignoring the future while everyone around me is looking at me like I have two heads for not blindly following the insanity
what do we honestly do?
Correct. This was initially being developed shortly after "Legacy but the failure of "Tomorrowland" canned the whole thing. Leto came on years later, offered to produce it and star in the film and brought the project back from the dead. This is basically his film, it doesn't exist without Leto as the lead
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
>Disney's Tomorrowland - not the fair, the 2015 movie
The thing about Tomorrowland is that it really digs into the viewer in that beyond just all the blaming of external forces of corporates or governments, how much did the people truly desire the future.
And it seems as people fear the future, they also want it, they desire that bleak future. Because cynicism dosen't demand anything of them. That they can sit in their chairs comfortably and continue disparging the world, even as things slowly turn worse around them like a frog boiling in a pot.
Look at the discussions here, how so many deperately seek easy theories on how the economy might fail tomorrow or how the stock market would crash. There's nobody trying to build or maintain confidence, even as when those fears would realize would be directly detetrimental to them. They blame social media, they blame the "Algorithm" even as they consciously continue to use those very media. They want things to collapse, they want the economy to burn, they want insitutions to fail even they want to close the path to the future. And the more things get worse, the more they'll double down on a path of self-destruction.
If you were poor and just trying to survive it could be understandable, but it's arguably the poor who have a more optimistic outlook. No, it's the middle class, with far more opportunities than 90% of the other world that seem hell bent on their own own annihilation. How else can you explain how the middle-class in China, in Dubai have far less opportunities and rights than in America, yet they are far more optimistic and confident in their nation and their future? Countries are built on Confidence, and replace that confidence with Cynicism and it's over.
When you see that, it's honestly not difficult to emphasize with the elites' disdain with the whole affair, and their own efforts to building their "arks" just like Governor Nix.
Curious. The article mentions Star Trek three times, in all cases referring to The Original Series, while stating that "Outside of niche books and magazines, the golden age of optimistic science fiction did not exist.", which is surprising it how it missed the golden era of Star Trek, beginning with The Next Generation (1987-1994), aka. the reference work for optimistic future in popular sci-fi, subsequently followed by several more series and movies set in the same continuity, culminating with Enterprise (2001 - 2005). That's 18 years of stories about humanity enjoying Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism aka. a post-scarcity society! Seven seasons of a show set on a starship that looks like a luxury hotel inside - because why wouldn't it be?
People still joke about the carpets on starships (including in-universe in the recent shows), but honestly, you can pretty much measure how we've lost the optimistic future by tracking how Star Trek shows (including the post-2005 ones) got darker (literally, I'm talking about how the scenes were lit), the architecture less Hilton-like, and eventually, when carpets started to disappear.
Apropos visual media, there's another example of an optimistic vision of the future, which the article also indirectly mentions: Disney's Tomorrowland - not the fair, the 2015 movie. Severely underrated, that one. I broke down in tears when I watched it (okay, I was in a vulnerable period), because it was an unexpected breath of pure optimism about progress. I mean, the movie is literally about the very thing the article talks about - it recalls the optimism of yore, presents a protagonist who's asking herself and us, where did it all go wrong, and then tackles the question directly. The answer it gives may or may not be any good[0], but at least an attempt was made to talk about it. Sadly, this is the last attempt made so far in popular media, at least as far as I know.
I'm puzzled as to why these two stories were not mentioned. They're not exactly outliers no one has heard of.
--
[0] - We're effectively fucking our own future up by only ever talking about disasters - past ones, current ones, and every plausible prediction of future ones - in a feedback loop with news and entertainment; we're simmering in despair, securing a doomed future by not being able to envision anything good as a society.
Even with 7 trillion, he is still going to need a national grid that can supply the power for the compute.
There is a lot that has to planned and put in place now to get there.
As for people that have opted out of life. We would have a better world if we started encouraging more dreamers/doers like out of the movie Tomorrowland.
Time loop logic is a hypothetical system of computation that exploits the Novikov self-consistency principle. In this system the computer is able to send the result of a computation backwards through time and rely upon the self-consistency principle to force the sent result to be correct.
I've written about this before. Instantaneous data transfer with zero lag is theoretically possible through use of quantum entanglement. You can use this same technique to build a doomsday clock similar to the film "Tomorrowland".
I do wonder what a good World's Fair of 2022 would look like. Perhaps it's a bit silly, but I think the movie Tomorrowland got at some sort fundamental change in outlook that seems to have accompanied the earlier World's Fairs. How would you avoid making it simply a trade show?
Since my divorce, I've found that I get a lot of help out of media like this for recharging my spirit to work on things. Sometimes kids' movies are the best, because they aren't at all about the 'how', but they are about the 'why'. Here's a list of a few that I find helpful:
Tomorrowland
Big Hero 6
Robots (2005)
The Martian
Sneakers
Real Genius
Wargames
Macguyver (80s show)
Cosmos
October Sky
Iron Man
The Astronaut Farmer
Flight of the Phoenix
Something Ventured
Now if I can only figure out how to get a team behind me like in those movies... :)
> There is a shocking obliviousness to climate change, plastic pollution, economic problems, healthcare (personal and the system), philosophical/existential inquiries, etc. Not to say people don’t know climate change is happening - they just aren’t aware of any details beyond surface level memes.
In the 60s-80s, there was impending nuclear war, overpopulation, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, radioactive and chemical waste, deforestation of the Amazon at an alarming rate, and various species placed on endangered lists. That and all the religious rapture expectations, in the US at least.
Somehow civilization managed not to collapse or annihilate itself decades ago. So the updated crisis of climate change, plastic in the ocean, etc. starts to sound like more of the same doomsday talk. Not that all of these things aren't problems to deal with, but are they existential in nature? Do they mean we should expect life to get worse? Because the overpopulation bomb and mass starvation didn't pan out. We produce more food now than we ever have. Acid rain and the ozone layer were manageable. Species often make recoveries after being protected. Rivers recover after being cleaned up. A majority of the original Amazon still remains, even though deforestation and fires remain concerns. There are more trees in the world today than 100 years ago. And standards of living having been going up around the globe over that same time, while absolute poverty has been diminishing.
Maybe we can manage our problems and avoid the worst case scenarios. In the movie Tomorrowland, Hugh Laurie as the villain does give a really compelling speech in which he talks about how all the doomsday expectations are an excuse to not fix problems, which contrasts with the main character, who is very optimistic that humans can find solutions, unlike all her classmates and teachers.
That's essentially the plot to Tomorrowland (2015). Images of the dystopian future are broadcasted from "Tomorrowland" (sort of a different universe) back to ours as a warning to prevent it. Instead we fetish these images in pop culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrowland_(film)#Plot
The movie isn't great, but it's critique of pop culture isn't wrong. We have very little hopeful science fiction these days apart from Star Trek.
For me, one of the most impactful movies in the last decade has been Tomorrowland. The entire movie was about how we relate to the future, and how that relationship creates it. I don't believe optimism is a luxury. We have to hold an image in our head of our ideal future and work to make it.
It's a lot like this pandemic. I read the news, and it conjures images in my head from every pandemic movie ever. Cars abandoned in the street. Trash everywhere. Society reduced to tribalism. Then I go outside to see that the sun is shining and everything appears somewhat normal except people are wearing masks.
Thank you for this, I did not know about Syd Mead, but just flipping through the images on that page it's clear how influential he was. Wikipedia lists pretty much exactly the associations I made:
> Mead worked with major studios on the feature films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, The Spirit of '76, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowland and Blade Runner 2049. George Lucas created the AT-AT for his Star Wars saga based on art by Mead.
This is in no way to diminish his work, but the impression I got (and that I'm trying to confirm/debunk, given the wikipedia article doesn't really address this) is that his art really transposes the society of its time into the future. That is, he almost exclusively addresses the technological advancement, while keeping the societal structures largely intact. For example, that's why the retrofitted houses give the impression of still being inhabited largely by working class people, while the ski resort and leisure time imagery with the sports cars still seems to be a luxury only few can afford even in the future. I don't see signs of "fully automated luxury space communism" there.
This may be me projecting though, hence the question if this is correct. And again, this is not to take away from his work. They are stunning. :)
Tomorrowland is the Disney movie I have enjoyed most in my life.
Oh, so Second Life is still a thing? I was meaning to check it out for close to a decade now.
> Tomorrowland is a theme park. Swooping roads with no offramps. Big round unflyable craft that land in cradles. Giant tubes full of plants. It's not a working future.
Yeah, the architecture definitely isn't. It just looks nice. But that wasn't the thing I meant in my comment. I meant the underlying theme. Better future through competence, dreams and - yes - technology. And (spoilers) how all was almost lost when they unleashed the positive feedback loop of expecting dystopia and giving up. I like that movie because it's the first thing in a long time that rekindles this, perhaps childlike, positive thinking, that we can make things better.
"- Huxley's "Brave New World", Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", Orwell's "1984": once considered fiction, these futuristic novels are actually happening right now and they seem to be getting worse. Yes, Miss Newton?
- Can we fix it?
- Sorry?
- I get things are bad, but what are we doing to fix it?"
--
Thanks for the thoughts on urban design in other sci-fi movies. I admit I never thought much about it when I watched them; I'll likely pay more attention from now on. Also anything in Second Life you recommend checking out?
--
EDIT: Also for "commercial", it was great. I almost jumped out of my seat when I saw rockets landing old sci-fi/SpaceX style, and a launch loop just casually shooting a rocket the next moment. Sci-fi porn that scene was for sure.
Everyone here owes themselves to watch Disney's "Tomorrowland".
"'We saved a seat for you?' That's a commercial."
I was just looking at stills from Tomorrowland, for inspiration for things to build in Second Life. Second Life is a good test for futuristic architecture, because, after you build it, you get to live, work, and play in it. You find out if anyone else wants to. Not much passes that test.
Tomorrowland is a theme park. Swooping roads with no offramps. Big round unflyable craft that land in cradles. Giant tubes full of plants. It's not a working future.
"Minority Report" is considered one of the better examples of futuristic urban design in film. It suffers from the usual problems. Giant arcology structures mean nobody in the interior volume has a window. The road network's connectivity is far too low. Overall, though, it looks halfway workable.
"I, Robot" is a bit more workable. Worlds with a lot of "nature", like "Avatar" and "Jurassic Park" do OK. The giant tree thing tends to be overdone.
There's a whole world building department at USC's film school.[1] Their videos are not impressive. There's a startup in this space.[2] Mostly they do title sequences and ads.
[1] http://worldbuilding.institute
[2] https://www.imaginaryforces.com/
Honestly, the first part of your response sounds pretty much like the very symptom of the problem discussed here. You presented a very bleak outlook, no doubt informed as much by dystopian fiction (and the culture enjoying it) as it is by rational analysis.
If everything seems destined to hell, with no one capable of doing anything about it, people just give up and live their lives focused on short-term needs. This ends up directly contributing to those world problems we're all worried about. Maybe an influx of positive fiction could help change the overall mood towards the idea that the brighter future is both possible and worth fighting for?
--
Honestly, everyone here owes themselves to watch Disney's "Tomorrowland". Yes, it's a bit clichéd. But it's also heartwarming, and for me it was the first thing since many years that left me smiling and full of energy. The movie asks some very pointed questions about the state of the world, and covers this very topic: that our obsession with dystopias is forming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that this is a kind of dumb thing to do to ourselves.
I think that's one of the problems with Incredibles setting that 2 only makes worse: the films don't seem to be set in the 50s/60s, they seem to be set in a world that never grew out of the 50s/60s. There is too much anachronism for it to be the 50s/60s. It's maybe the case that Incredibles 1 started in the equivalent of our 50s or 60s, but the time jump of "no supers" and the births and ages of the kids would indicate that most of the Incredibles happened maybe in the 80s/90s.
The timeline is probably a mess, but the clear point is that it can't be set in the 50s/60s so much as a world trapped in the 50s/60s idea of a future. It's retrofuturist nostalgia, at best. (Which between Incredibles 2 and Tomorrowland is perhaps where poor Brad Bird is trapped mentally and needs help escaping?)
I love Tomorrowland and I recommend it to all my friends. I'm sad it bombed; I only discovered it accidentally on Netflix last year. Now I rewatch it from time to time to get a boost of motivation and positive energy.
I love this movie because it's positive about humans and future - which is unlike pretty much anything made in the last two decades. (Hell, it even goes meta on that point.)
The film Tomorrowland (by Brad Bird) is a wonderful take on this. Like Iron Giant, it bombed in theaters. And somewhat ironically, got some of the worst reviews of any good movie I can think of.
Since people here are sharing positive stories, I want to mention this one:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964418/ - Tomorrowland.
Yes, I know it's Disney. Yes, I know it's naïve. Yes, I know it has been criticized as having a weak plot by people who would prefer depressing shit. But it's also the single most positive thing I've seen made in the past 10 years. It just overflows with hope about the future. So I do strongly recommend watching it.
Yeah, there's no real story here, is there? Pixar is now a Disney brand, charged with keeping its existing properties chugging along happily. Meanwhile, the original Pixar team has spread out and created stuff like Tomorrowland (far from perfect, but way more interesting than the average movie) and Frozen (which it's fashionable to hate on but is actually as good as its receipts). Wreck It Ralph and Zootopia _are_ Pixar movies, they just don't have the brand.