The film has managed to secure a release after some legal wrangling, and while Moore’s guerilla instincts are to be saluted, his filmmaking shortcomings are not. When Escape From Tomorrow premiered at Sundance, audiences reacted in part to Moore’s audacity: He made a film criticizing the Disney-fication of American life that defied the company by shooting within one of its major tourist attractions without its knowledge. Consequently, Moore had to shoot covertly, hoping not to attract attention while he and his cast filmed scenes in and around Epcot, Space Mountain and the “It’s a Small World” ride. Escape From Tomorrow is set at Walt Disney World in Florida, and much of the movie was shot on the park grounds, without permission. The story behind the making of Escape From Tomorrow is more riveting than the film’s actual plot, which by design wanders and meanders, sometimes stumbling into surreal territory.
Perhaps that’s true to a degree, but not to the level Moore hopes. Worse, the misses often work under the belief that it doesn’t necessarily matter-we all hate Disney already, so we’ll happily forgive any comedic misfires because of the filmmaker’s worthy intentions. The feature debut of writer-director Randy Moore has a juicy cultural totem in its sights, the Disney empire, but it misses more than it hits. The great failing of Escape From Tomorrow is that it suffers from the same malady as Fehn. The character was a helpful reminder that no matter how deserving a satiric target was, it still had to be torpedoed properly. Fehn’s misplaced smugness-his utter assurance that by simply mentioning certain topics he was tapping into a collective disgust-was endlessly delicious. But Fehn never actually did that: Instead, after reading the headline he would immediately become apoplectic and inarticulate, as if there was nothing that needed to be said about corporate media or other sitting-duck topics because we already understood how ridiculous they were. His routine would be to read headlines from, say, The Wall Street Journal and then offer his own “skewed view” of the news items. When Fred Armisen was part of Saturday Night Live, one of his best recurring characters was Nicholas Fehn, a pretentious and painfully unfunny comic who fancied himself a political satirist.
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