If the question, “How do you make jetpacks boring?” has ever kept you up at night, I heartily recommend you check out Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland. Billed as a rollicking sci-fi adventure movie, Bird’s latest is high on sci-fi gadgets, gizmos, and ideas but short on story, fun, and even adventure. Perhaps he should have spent more time behind a typewriter (or Microsoft Word, whichever) and less in the toybox, since while the attention to detail found in the futurist city at the heart of Tomorrowland is fun to absorb, little else qualifies as exciting, the story least of all. After a few big screen duds some fans found insultingly bad—Prometheus, Star Trek: Into Darkness (both of which I really like)—LOST showrunner Damon Lindelof is back with a co-written screenplay by Bird along with screenwriter Jeff Jensen, and it’s the closest I’ve felt to watching a Star Wars prequel in ten years. Conceived as a vaccine for the movie virus of dour, depressed, and bleak apocalyptic movies we increasingly seem to get off on, “disaster porn,” Tomorrowland sought to rekindle some good old-fashioned awe and wonder reminiscent of early Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T.

Brad Bird is an enormously talented filmmaker, one who has balanced a career of genre-mashing and massively creative films that made him a favorite of producer Kathleen Kennedy for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He turned it down. Bird elected to finish the deeply personal Tomorrowland, a 99% original work that adapts the 1960s retro-futurist exhibit (from which the film gets its name) from the 1964 World’s Fair that paints a bright vision of the future into wholesome big screen fun. Conceptually, it’s all here. Bird’s talent is etched in stone. From the animated classic The Iron Giant to The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, he’s found a way to balance heady ideas in a sleek, often family-focused package.

Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is a high school senior with a powerful mind destined for great things. We meet her breaking into a NASA launch site, and it’s soon after she receives a special blue-gold pin with a “T” on it. When she touches it, she’s mystically transported to a golden-hued meadow with a futurist city shimmering in the background. Eager to learn more, she eventually meets George Clooney’s Frank Walker, a burned out recluse inventor whose house is booby-trapped with cool sci-fi gizmos. Hit the right button, and intruders will be bounced back 20 feet from the front door. Walker is to take her to Tomorrowland and make her dreams come true. We’re told it was a city made by finest minds in the world, a true utopia. Beyond that, I won’t say what happens. I wish I could say a lot of the movie was kept out of trailers, but sadly there’s just so little movie—action or plot—that there’s little left to surprise.