On Conan O’Brien‘s final appearance as the host of the Tonight Show (a dream gig he gave up to preserve his integrity), the emotional Late Night legend made one request of his young fans: “Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere.” It was concise, it was poignant, and it was from the heart. Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland has a message similarly meant to galvanize young people to be more optimistic, specifically about the future of our planet. But the road it takes to get there is so long and twisty and convoluted that the message is sapped of all its power. In 130 minutes, Tomorrowland fails to do what Conan did in seven seconds.

Bird’s second foray into the world of live-action filmmaking (after Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) is a certifiable disappointment. It’s a preachy, low-stakes affair that only halfway delivers on its promise of shiny, futuristic spectacle; when the film’s dreary central mystery story becomes its prime focus, fun falls by the wayside in favor of thinly veiled patronization. Tomorrowland is a didactic indictment on the world’s pessimists, complainers and slouches who, according to Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof, will be the planet’s death-bringers, ushering in the apocalypse. Yeesh.

The filmmakers’ intentions are good, but man is this movie overbearing. Bird and Lindelof seem to get caught up in the idea that Tomorrowland needs to be as culturally and socially relevant and as possible. “This movie needs to be important,” I can hear them saying. “It needs to change the world!” If they had spent more time making the movie more fun and entertaining rather than “important,” a better time would have been had by all and their big ideas would have shone through brighter. They try to dazzle and inspire by showing us a limitless future full of excitement and brave technology, but when their haughty finger-wagging takes over, it feels like we’re sitting in on a lecture at a chalkboard.

The film’s opener is a bumbling dud. George Clooney, playing a crotchety old scientist named Frank Walker, addresses the camera directly, recounting the extraordinary series of events from his boyhood that led him to Tomorrowland, a sort of dreamers’ utopia existing in a parallel universe, built by the brightest minds in history as a place for big thinkers to unleash their true potential. We flash back to the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, New York (a stunning recreation), where a young Frank hopes to wow the crowds by entering into an inventors’ competition with his homemade jet-pack. He’s denied admittance, though, by a sniveling, arrogant judge (Hugh Laurie) who’s got “big bad” written on his forehead from the moment we see him. A young, freckle-faced girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) takes a liking to Frank (he’s gobsmacked, too) and sneaks him an extraordinary pin with a “T” on it that gains him entry to Tomorrowland.

The fleeting glimpses of Tomorrowland we get early in the movie are the best bits. The art direction is wonderful. We see miraculous things like petri dish-shaped swimming pools impossibly suspended in mid-air, with people diving into them and popping out of the bottom, only to land in another pool hovering several feet underneath. There’s a hulking, helpful robot that gives Frank a thumbs-up after fixing his broken jet-pack (a fun nod to Bird’s The Iron Giant), flying vehicles of all shapes and sizes, and sleek-looking towers reaching up to the stars.

Then, sadly, the cool stuff gets cut off as the story’s timeline fractures again, jumping to the present day where we follow a second protagonist, a teenage tech whiz with a rebel attitude named Casey (Britt Robertson). Through little acts of sabotage, she delays the dismantling of a NASA launch pad in her hometown of Cape Canaveral. Her focused devotion to such a futile endeavor makes her a perfect candidate for Plus Ultra, the group that populates Tomorrowland, and so one of the “T” pins mysteriously comes into her possession. We learn that it’s none other than Athena (who hasn’t aged a day, suspiciously) whose mission it is to recruit thinkers like Casey for Plus Ultra. After an explosive tussle with deadly robots disguised as geeky game store owners and a lot of driving, the two find Frank, now an old grouch exiled from Tomorrowland, living in a creaky old house decked out with futuristic gizmos. After another run-in with deadly robots, Casey and Athena convince Frank to take them back to the future. Er, I mean, Tomorrowland. Back to Tomorrowland.

While a lot of the visual tricks and set pieces are inventive and unconventional (a flashy-looking “time bomb” particularly tickled my fancy), the action overall feels kinda, well, weird. Everything moves a little too fast, and the camerawork and staging is so frenzied that we always feel one step behind. Things get disturbing, too, when the robots start shooting people with laser guns that dematerialize them, reducing them to thousands of bits of human remains. It’s off-putting to see these random acts of murder come and go so casually. Even the robots (who look like people) get literally torn to shreds by the booby traps in Frank’s house. One of them gets its face mangled by Casey when she bludgeons it over and over with a baseball bat. It’s like watching a blood-less version of Saw, and it gets really, really uncomfortable.

Frank’s arc plays out like you’d expect, with Casey and Athena re-igniting in the old grump the can-do spirit he lost as a boy. Clooney’s really good at his job (he constantly growls, “Ah, hell!” to sell us on his crankiness, and it works), but there’s nothing performance we can take home with us. Robertson sells the visual effects well with her open-jawed looks of astonishment (Jennifer Lawrence has become a grandmaster at this). But she, like Clooney, doesn’t go above and beyond her call of duty. Cassidy, the youngest cast member, is the only actor in the movie who excels, delivering her lines with as much maturity and poise as Clooney and Laurie. Sometimes you’ll see her standing in the background or on the side of the frame, reacting to Clooney and Robertson’s banter with looks of concern or amusement or sadness: In these small moments, she’s the best thing on the screen. That’s saying a lot.

Tomorrowland is all about bigness. It’s full of big ideas, big-budget visual effects, big-time action, and a great, big chin (his name is George). Why in the world, then, does it feel so goddamn small? It’s an issue of scale; while the movie starts off with sense of grandeur, reveling in the joy of imagination and ingenuity, the story’s scale progressively shrinks, to the point where, by the finale, the fate of two worlds is being fought over by four white people in a claustrophobic, computer generated room. I specify them as being white because I think it’s offensive that a film which claims to have a global message (at the end we see a montage of dreamers of all ethnicities looking to the sky with a glimmer in their eye; where were they in the rest of the film?!) suggests that the world can be a brighter place, but only once the human race’s potential is unlocked by caucasian geniuses.

The doomsday device that drives the film’s narrative is a machine on top of a tower that essentially spreads fear and cynicism across the world, poisoning our fragile minds. It’s a barely disguised skewering of modern media and news outlets, and ironically, it’s comes across like an off-base observation of the new generation’s collective intellect and temperament. Young people these days do have a troublingly romantic fascination with the idea of a dystopian future, but they’re not helplessly susceptible idiots. There’s a difference between cynicism and skepticism, and I don’t believe young people are little emo sacks of inaction Bird and Lindelof seem to suggest they are by making the movie’s messaging so blunt and condescending.

It hurts me that Bird, a storyteller near and dear to my heart, has produced such a clunker of a film. Tomorrowland fits into his filmography only to the extent that it’s about people striving to maximize their potential, a thread that runs throughout all his work. In almost every other respect, it’s uncharacteristically messy, contrived and ideologically confused. Optimism is key, though, and I sincerely hope Bird’s next offering will reflect the greatness he showed in The Incredibles, The Iron Giant and Ratatouille. Onwards and upwards, I suppose.

Let’s be honest for a minute. We all love George Clooney. He’s funny (Fantastic Mr. Fox), he’s sexy (The American), he’s smart (Michael Clayton), and he makes great movies (Ides of March). We also all love Brad Bird, whether we know it or not (The Incredibles, Mission: Impossible–Ghost Protocol). Which means we’re all pretty pumped for this summer’s Disney adventure Tomorrowland.

Tomorrowland sees disillusioned genius Frank (Clooney) and teenage scientist Casey (Britt Robertson) team up for a dangerous mission to uncover a secret place in time and space known only as Tomorrowland. For the most part the rest of the details have been kept tightly lidded, but since it’s a Disney movie we’re guessing that spectacle and hope will abound.

But even before we knew anything about this one, we were excited; Clooney is always solid, no matter the film, and Bird knows a thing or two about some good ol’ fashion light-hearted adventure that still leaves you hanging on the edge of your seat (not to mention his two Oscars). Pair that with a pretty wild supporting cast: Robertson, Hugh Laurie, Tim McGraw (?), Kathryn Hahn, and Judy Greer.  We had this one on our list of the 22 features we are most looking forward to in 2015, and it’s safe to say we are only getting more excited with each new trailer (the Eiffel Tower is a space ship!).

Check out the second trailer below:

Based on the 2009 young adult novel “Undiscovered Gyrl” and directed by the book’s author, Allison Burnett, Ask Me Anything is the brash-but-not-bold tale of a recent high school graduate deferring college to make poor relationship decisions instead. Starring Britt Robertson (Dan in Real Life, the upcoming Tomorrowland) as Katie Kampenfelt, the film begins with Katie’s deferment of college and her high school guidance counselor’s suggestion that she start a blog in order to better work through what she’s actually searching for. The film has the openness of the blogging format (a la MTV’s show Awkward), but its twist ending and unreliable narrative make for a mixed-up and confusing viewing experience with very little takeaway.

Katie starts her anonymous blog explicitly detailing in as nonchalant a way as possible her thoughts on life as they pertain to her. Immediately we discover she has a boyfriend, Rory (Max Carver), but is more concerned with her ongoing tryst with a community college film professor, Dan (Justin Long), who is about 15 years older than her. Her mother (Molly Hagan) has a moustached boyfriend (Andy Buckley), and demonstrates a lack of interest or insight in her daughter’s life. Her father (Robert Patrick) is a sofa-bound alcoholic, whose death she seems always to be preparing for. She gets a great job at a bookstore with a wise boss to guide her (Martin Sheen) and then has to drop the job almost immediately when mom’s cop boyfriend discovers her boss has a sexual assault history. A new job drops into her lap in the form of Paul Spooner (Christian Slater), who needs a nanny to aid his wife (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) with their newborn.

When Dan moves and shrugs off Katie for his age-appropriate girlfriend, she spirals out of control, breaking up with and then dangling her boyfriend for attention. More predictably, she promptly allows a flirtation and then affair to happen between her and Paul. It’s one bad decision after the next and we might be able to feel some iota of sympathy for Katie if her issues weren’t just so obvious and remorseless. Burnett tries to build a deeper connection, throwing a seemingly random, clinically depressed, old high school acquaintance into Katie’s life to ask her the deep questions she won’t ask herself, including those about sexual abuse as a child. Old home footage of her childhood play out on-screen whenever Katie engages in sex in an overt attempt to express her sex use as a form of escape and to feel significant. It’s not especially affective in off-setting the sense of fantasy in this girl’s world. It’s hard to take her seriously or care about her decisions when every adult in her world is given plenty of opportunity to intervene and then doesn’t.

This especially works against the film’s ending, which I won’t spoil, but will say is very much trying to make a point about perspective, voyeurism, and teenagers in the digital age, but only succeeds in leaving us feeling lied to and taken advantage of. I get the point of it, what Burnett was hoping to achieve, but think there might have been a better way to get there other than dumping a ton of emotion into the last 10 minutes.

With such a promising cast, it very much seems that this film should have been able to go further. But here we have a case of too much reliance on emotional connection to the writing, and whereas the novel’s quirky blog style and adorable typos helped teenagers build a rapport with Katie, the film doesn’t feel like a blog, it feels like a look into the life of a person determined to choose wrong and with no desire to have anyone tell them not to.

Burnett has proven he has writing down, having written several screenplays and multiple best-selling novels, but the bond between reader and character is most definitely not the same as the bond between character and viewer. And this attempt at page-to-screen just doesn’t seem to entirely translate.

Ask Me Anything opens in LA and in VOD on Friday Dec. 19th.