Brad Bird has put the finishing touches on his mysterious drama Tomorrowland, Tweeting the above image to commemorate the moment, as well as to drop yet another hint about what we might expect to see in his movie. And yet, despite Bird buying into the "Shroud of Mystery" approach, we're not nearly as annoyed at him as we tend to get with, say, J.J. Abrams. Imagine that.
What was Bird filming at the Disneyland Resort in California? No clue, and his reference to the 1964 World’s Fair sequence ("where we began," the director hints) only throws more shadows over a project that has lived in the darkness, for the most part, since it was announced. By choice, mind you. Tomorrowland is a project that has enyoyed its anonymity, and even when it chooses to reveal details about its rich, historical inspirations, they are vague.
Remember when Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof took to the stage at D23 back in August and started pulling props out of box without really clarifying what they were, or how they keyed into the narrative Bird is trying to cobble together for this film? They showed a photograph of Walt Disney with pilot Amelia Earhart… snapped years after she disappeared. They showed a 1928 issue of the magazine "Amazing Stories," and plans for an It’s A Small World ride at the ’64 Fair. But there was no thread to connect. Not yet anyway. And we still don’t have one.
But Bird did confirm that in order to celebrate his project going to wrap, he and longtime composer Michael Giacchino hopped on Space Mountain. Look at how happy they are!
So, what do we know about Tomorrowland? It stars George Clooney as a brilliant inventor who gets caught up in a sci-fi adventure with a wunderkind kid and, from what we’ve heard, a child robot named Athena. Britt Robertson was hired to play the teenager at Clooney’s side. Hugh Laurie (of House) landed the villainous role of David Nix. But the logline provided by the studio during the movie’s Vancouver shoot was vague. Read it below. Tomorrowland reaches theaters on May 22, 2015.
"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.’"
