Tomorrowland / YMMV

Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Reading and watching dystopian fiction, apparently. It doesn't help that there's a recurring Show Within a Show called toxiCosmos 3, which according to many viewers actually looks pretty cool.
Don't Shoot the Message: A lot of viewers agree with the movie's message of aspiring to an optimistic future, but dislike the actual story, and its implications regarding humanity's ability to improve itself as a whole. It's discussed pretty thoroughly here.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Raffey Cassidy's Athena has been getting just as much praise from critics and viewers alike, if not more. She's sometimes known as "British Ninja Terminator Girl!"
Fandom Rivalry:
- At least on social media websites such as Tumblr or YouTube, there is some competition between fans of Tomorrowland and fans of Mad Max: Fury Road as to whether or not the idea of a hopeful future is a better message, or whether apocalyptic fiction like Mad Max is better.
  - Some reviewers have pointed out that the core message is the same; having great dreams isn't enough — you have to go out and make them reality.
    Nix: In every moment, there is the possibility of a better future, but you people won't believe it! And because you won't believe it, you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality. So you dwell on this terrible future, and you resign yourselves to it. And for one reason; because that future doesn't ask anything of you, today.
    Max: Hope is a mistake. If you can't fix what is broken, you'll go insane.
  - In a similar vein, both movies make the claim that though bad things have a source - Immortan Joe, the Monitor - and removing that source will improve the world, the real reason bad things happen is because most people are too apathetic to resist it.
    Nix: You gave up. That's not the Monitor's fault. That's yours.
    Nux: We're not to blame!
    Angharad: Then who killed the world?
- The film also entered one with TRON and TRON: Legacy fans, since Disney halted their plans for a third TRON film because of the lukewarm response Tomorrowland got.
- When Sanzaru Games developed Tron RUN/r as a Replacement Scrappy to the cancelled film, Sly Cooper fans joined in with Tron fans on the rivalry out of their shared anger over cancelled sequels.
- In general, it has one with fans of the Disney Animated Canon, who blame Tomorrowland for the endless live-action remakes out of profit and defeatism.
Fan Nickname: "British Ninja Terminator Girl" for Athena.
Harsher in Hindsight: When Casey sneaks back into her room, Nate shouts out "identify yourself!" - a Catchphrase of TRON. This film's failure caused Disney to scrap a planned sequel to TRON: Legacy.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Considering how the movie is against the kind of presumptions apocalyptic fiction makes about human beings, it feels pretty weird knowing that Mad Max: Fury Road came out the week before this movie and still managed to avoid most of them in spite of the Crapsack World.
- Speaking of which, the fact that Tomorrowland and Fury Road were released within a week of each other becomes even more hilarious when you consider that the third Mad Max film featured a location called Tomorrow-morrow Land (which ultimately turned out to be Sydney, or rather what was left of it).
- When Casey first sees Tomorrowland, a quote from Albert Einstein - "Imagination is more important than knowledge."^note - can be seen. The same quote was used in season two of Teen Wolf - whose lead is Britt Robertson's boyfriend Dylan O'Brien.
Just Here for Godzilla: More than a few of Brad Bird's fans went to see the film in the hopes that its success would convince Hollywood to let him do whatever dream project he wanted, especially after he announced that he'd like to do another traditionally animated film. Sadly, the movie failed in the cinema circuit instead, and that fact may sideline those plans.
One-Scene Wonder: Keegan-Michael Key and Kathryn Hahn as Hugo and Ursula, the owners of the Blast From The Past shop who are also evil robots.
She Really Can Act: Raffey Cassidy shows her acting talent as Athena.
So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus seems to be that the film has a lot of great ideas and executes them rather well, but doesn't quite do it well enough.
- On a related note, one line in the film manages to sum up what most audience members thought. "So you gave them like, one second of blue skies and jet packs..." It's not often that a movie tells you in its own dialog exactly where the wheels came off, but this one does.
Spiritual Adaptation: Manages to capture the spirit of various pieces of science-fiction pop culture:
- Given the very similar premises, one can easily see this movie as a considerably less cynical adaptation of William Gibson's famous short story "The Gernsback Continuum".
- Alternatively, this is probably the best adaption of BioShock we're going to get outside of Snowpiercer. The key difference is that after humanity's best and brightest were transported to a libertarian utopia run by a cynical isolationist things didn't immediately go hell after said geniuses succumbed to selfishness and greed, since this film is relentlessly optimistic where BioShock is crushingly pessimistic. In that sense, Tomorrowland manages to somehow be the Spiritual Licensee and Spiritual Antithesis of BioShock.
- Related to the above, it's also more of Brad Bird's Take That! to Ayn Rand; Tomorrowland was built with altruistic reasons, but along the way it became another thing entirely. Tomorrowland in it's last days in the beginning of the movie became the Galt's Gulch the films didn't have the budget to show - a haven for humanity's greatest minds to make their dreams reality without interference. They even choose to let the world destroy itself for the exact same reason; because it refused to value them and the future they offered. They failed. And that destruction is even their fault, albeit for entirely opposite reasons - where Galt spent decades Walking the Earth headhunting the world's dreamers right out from under an apathetic world after it declared him a slave, Nix tried to warn the world of what was in store only for it to choose destruction, so he withdrew from it in disgust. Not only that, as soon as the "best and brightest" chose to hid themselves from the world and be a society that is a copy of Galt's dream society of Atlas Shrugged and not help other people and the world itself anymore, Tomorrowland itself began to decay. This actually makes Tomorrowland an amazing Anti-Objectivist movie; where Galt gave the world the opportunity to change right 'til the very end, Nix is literally crushed by his altruistic warning - a giant sphere he refused to shrug off! Better yet, Nix's speech about trying to warn the world is almost lifted word-for-word from how Robert Stadler believes that most people - politicians in particular - are too stupid to deal with reality. All of this becomes hilarious when you notice see the decaying state of Tomorrowland itself when it follows Galt's dream to the max. Nix doesn't realise the irony of his own situation and that retreating themselves from the world and not helping other people anymore (Tomorrowland was built with ALTRUISTIC REASONS, not Objectivists ones) Tomorrowland will fade into nothing and it is then a mere shadow of what once was. Many[1] Objectivists [2] regard the movie as socialist.. The movie itself seems celebration of that special individual who works to make the world a better place for everyone and a condemnation of the selfish Randian hero.
- The above misses much of the point of Galt's Gulch, and Galt's Gulch and Tomorrowland have rather more in common than might be supposed. In Atlas, the geniuses quit the world after decades of being treated with hatred and exploitation, and they only leave when they are pushed beyond endurance - what finally breaks them is the realization that they are letting their work be used to destroy everything they love. It's also worth noticing that Stadler is a villain in Atlas who lets his work be used to manufacture weapons of genocide, and it is exactly to avoid such a thing that most of the geniuses in Atlas leave. One character says, "If there are degrees of damnation, the scientist who places his mind in the service of brute force is the longest-range murderer on earth." Would that line be so out of place in Tomorrowland?
- In a time period where Disney is obsessed with remaking their animated films into live-action films, Tomorrowland manages to share similarities and themes with Meet the Robinsons.
- It also has similarities with Daniel Suarez's Influx - a secret society of scientists have created the world our grandparents expected us to be born in, and have chosen not to share it with the rest of the world. Only, in Influx they hoard technology to maintain their role as the secret rulers of the world, whereas the scientific elite of Tomorrowland would gladly share their works except when they tried to warn us the world was coming to an end, we created a global Apocalypse Cult instead of trying to fix it. For forty years.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Much of the early viral build-up to the film such as "The Optimist" and the "1952 Box" highlighted the portions of the backstory relating to Walt Disney's connection to Plus Ultra and Tomorrowland. However, much of these scenes outside the inclusion of It's a Small World ended up on the cutting room floor as Lindelof felt like such a meta subplot would "make the movie seem too much like a Disney movie" and most of the scenes in question were exposition.

YMMV / Tomorrowland

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