Tomorrowland (2015)

Tomorrowland is the rare blockbuster built entirely around a thesis statement about retrofuturism itself: that the mid-century's gleaming, Populuxe vision of tomorrow — jetpacks, monorails, a 1964 World's Fair full of confident optimism — was a genuine civic project, and that its quiet abandonment says something troubling about the present rather than the future. Brad Bird opens the film inside a lovingly recreated 1964 World's Fair, all Populuxe curves and Space Age confidence, before yanking the story forward into a present that has stopped believing that kind of future is still possible.

George Clooney's world-weary Frank Walker and Britt Robertson's stubbornly hopeful Casey make an effective generational argument in miniature — cynicism earned through disappointment versus optimism that hasn't been tested yet — while Raffey Cassidy's Athena, an android recruiter who never physically ages, quietly anchors the film's most melancholy idea: that Tomorrowland itself gave up on humanity before humanity gave up on itself.

The film underperformed at the box office and drew mixed reviews for a third act that struggles to dramatize its own abstract argument as compellingly as its gorgeous first hour promises. But as a mainstream studio film willing to directly argue that civilization needs to want the future again — using the actual visual language of mid-century retrofuturism as its evidence — it's one of the most unusual, sincere failures a major studio has released this century.