‘Tomorrowland’ is equal parts suspense and wonder

“Tomorrowland” is a big budget kids movie. It’s very Disney and very good but first and foremost, it’s a kids movie. A kids empowerment movie, to be exact.

It starts off with an eager, scrub-faced boy who’s so bright and upbeat about life that he’s invented a homemade jet pack for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. His story eventually gives way to present day when we meet the movie’s true hero, a determined teenage girl named Casey. Along with the help of an even younger but preternaturally smart girl named Athena, Casey has to try to save the world, save Tomorrowland, and yes, even save the future. Talk about kids power!

It’s true Casey also has the help of an adult. But this grown man, played by George Clooney, turns out to be a boy at heart. Frank Walker is that rare man who has not given up on his childhood dreams.

“What if there was a place – a secret place where nothing was impossible, a miraculous place where you could actually could change the world. You want to go?”

All this sunny optimism is plopped into the middle of a downbeat world. News channels are full of bleak prognostications &#8212 war, rioting in the streets, and climate change wreaking havoc on the planet. Closer to home for our Casey, her Dad’s employer, NASA, is shutting down the Cape Canaveral launch site. Life is bleak.

But Casey’s life changes when she finds a mysterious Tomorrowland pin that temporarily transports her to a futuristic world full of swooshing transports, flying jet packs, floating baby carriages, and space-agey costumes galore.

“When I touched this thing, it felt like anything was possible,” she said.

“What you saw was a place where the best and the brightest came together to actually change it,” Clooney’s character explains.

With the help of Athena and Frank, Casey spends the rest of the movie trying to discover the secrets of Tomorrowland.

While this is very much a kids movie, it’s not a movie for little kids. “Tomorrowland” earns its PG-13 rating. It has a complicated, even convoluted, plot and is surprisingly violent and graphic, albeit in small doses.

But mostly this is an adventure movie, equal parts suspense and wonder (I especially like its imaginative use of the Eiffel Tower). It’s an adventure movie and a call to arms, of sorts, a call to kids worldwide to use their imaginations to make this world a better place. To bring Tomorrowland into the present. Utopia out of dystopia. How very Walt Disney.