One of science fiction's unavoidable contraindications is the genre’s tendency, or shall we say, susceptibility, to catch the virus of ideology. Some SF movies manage to avoid it; it's easy if you're George Lucas or a toy company, and have ambitions that can only be measured in tens of millions of dollars. But most science fiction, by virtue of the genre's speculative-satiric nature, comes down with ideology regularly, usually in the tradition of Frankenstein, the prescriptive philosophy of which can be boiled down simply: Don't get too big for your britches. Don't be God, or the heavens will rain monstrous chaos upon you.

It's not a very progressive message, truth be told, but it's easy to get with, given how we humans have infested the planet, sowed wrack and ruin, mutated ourselves, snuffed life en masse, poisoned every biosphere, and beckoned our own complete obliteration many more times than once. Science fiction that tells us how lacking in foresight and greedy and addicted to convenience and power we are, be it in regards to simple biology or the Internet or conquering interstellar territories, can hardly ever be far from mistaken.

Ironically, troubles arise when science fiction strives toward the sunny side up—a we-can-build-it caste of mind, flying in the face of our cock-ups and daring to imagine a perfect future. These are launches into the wasteland that should have us stopping us in our tracks, checking our pockets, and sniffing for the snake oil on every loudmouth and pulpiteer. There should be no mystery as to why—the kind and size of problem that humans can make do not come with simple, passionate solutions, and certainly not solutions so simple you can limn them out in two hours of screen time. Environmental collapse, for instance, took a century to get started, and it would probably take that long again to roll back.

This is problematic, of course, to the happy-ending-or-die ethos of Hollywood, and so often enough in movies a certain amount of righteous catastrophe is "resolved" in the last reel with as little impact as the opening credits. Every so often, though, something like Brad Bird's Tomorrowland happens, and we're reminded again to be thankful for the sensible nihilism of, say, Mad Max: Fury Road. A Disney-fied cotton-candy boulder rolling down hill at your head, the film is predicated on the idea that Disney World's Tomorrowland, as well as its invention-seeking exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, were merely "recruitment" scenarios by which an elite of brilliant "dreamers" find inductees for a parallel-dimensional paradise of passenger rockets, futuristic (read: Angeleno) architecture, and problem-free scientific progress.

Without going too extensively into the plot's curlicue reasoning and series of sometimes alarming action scenes (involving children), suffice it to say that Britt Robertson's precociously problem-attacking teenage "optimist" Casey is thus recruited, by a superhuman (and creepily gorgeous) 11-year-old robot (Raffey Cassidy), because something has gone terribly wrong "over there," something that involves George Clooney's grumpy hermit, Frank Walker. Casey is repeatedly referred to as "special" and singularly capable of solving the crisis (the nature of which is so vague and preposterous that the girl's "solution" turns out to be laughable and laughably unspecial). The questionable necessity of fixing this rather vague dilemma—Tomorrowland is apparently not a paradise any longer, but a kind of decaying dystopia—is circumvented at many turns by an attack squad of jackbooted androids, and involves many rules, about dimensional pathways and tachyons and exploding devices.

Almost all of the action is rote and comprised of serviceable set pieces left over from other movies. Of course the bogus science is so unscientific the characters finally give up trying to explain it; the climactic gambit is so not "special" that it makes Interstellar look like an airtight quadratic. Instead, there's a good deal of talk about "not giving up" and the virtues of belonging to a select company who dare to try to fix what's wrong with both worlds, or something. Forget the plot—it’s the sociocultural ideas at the cockamamie story's core that begin to crawl up your leg, as the presumptions of elite creatives running the world, like an Ayn Rand daydream, get coupled with Disney sunshine-&-gloss, and the faults of the world as we know it—global warming, wars, etc.—are blamed on small-thinking "pessimists."

The sound you hear is of an ideologue clearing his throat, waiting for our attention. Bird has been here before. Right under the surface of his otherwise entrancing The Incredibles (2004) there's a Randian frustration with "ordinary" people, and a barely suppressed Nietzschean aspiration toward letting your natural superiority rule the land. Even his first directorial effort, The Iron Giant (1999), has as its main narrative hook a desire to simply be super—to fix the world (and the problems made by the un-superior) through above-average powers and will.

Watch this man. I, for one, hope Homeland Security is surveilling him, looking out for secret meetings of Hollywood ubermensch plotting out the realization of their belief systems. In the meantime, Bird seems to be selling a particular vision of the modern world—one to which Walt Disney would've toasted. Tomorrowland recalls its namesake—in love with yesterday's vision of the future, and more than a little maddened that it didn't quite come true. Bird is not unlike the ultra-conservatives who cannot help but remember the idyllic America of their childhood days as being the "way it should be," and struggling like madmen to literally force, by politics or sheer cant, the present to conform to their warped memories of cultural juvenescence.

Of course, that's the thing about cultural time—it goes forward. But what Bird in particular seems to have forgotten, in his lust to extol this oligarchy of big-brain-ness, which would doubtless count the very earnest Bird as a member, is that the imagined future of the past was just that—imagined, science fiction, speculative about technology, about what would be so cool. It's a spectacular kind of naïveté to want the world to be like Disney World, but also a queasy measure of hubris to imagine that life can be engineered—by "the best" of us—in the same way. (Hubris is in no short supply within the Disney corporation—the very real town of Celebration, Florida was designed, owned and administered to by Disney as a functioning municipality-as-theme park, and let's not forget what EPCOT stands for: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.) Bird seems to have forgotten that "Tomorrow" in these contexts is only a "what if," and not at all "what could be."

But you could point out the logical fallacies to the man all day—it won't faze him, just as appeals to science do not dent the belief systems of creationists or white supremacists. In Bird's daydreams, Disney would be a world government, and he its Leni Riefenstahl.