Two kids and a toy rabbit are going to save the world, and they're going to do it with their keen understanding of hyperspace.
""The Last Mimzy"" came out last week as the most recent science fiction story adapted for the big-screen. As an adaptation, it comes close to the spirit of the original story, a short piece by Henry Kuttner called ""All Mimsy Were the Borogoves."" Aside from trying to pump up the tension with a saving-the-world motif, the movie remains the tale of two children and a box of very odd toys, stretched out to 90 minutes and with a few subplots.
The children, middle-schooler Noah Wilder (Chris O'Neil) and his precocious little sister Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn), discover the toys over Spring Break vacation. The toys are teaching tools from some ominously shadowed lab, presumably in the far future. Emma, already a know-it-all child genius, becomes even more self-assuredly intelligent when she picks up ""Mimzy,"" a stuffed bunny rabbit hidden in the collection. And Noah discovers a talent for advanced engineering techniques just in time for the local science fair.
Unsurprisingly, adults observing the sudden change in the kids are less than comfortable with the situation. Mr. and Mrs. Wilder would just as soon have things back to normal. When they try, however, to impose some semblance of order, Emma gets miffed at her father at the breakfast table and levitates all the sugar in the sugar bowl into his cereal. Their hopes for normality are dashed, along with the sugar.
Noah's science teacher Larry White (Rainn Wilson), gets drawn in when he recognizes that Noah has been scribbling ancient Indian symbols for time and the universe on the back of test papers. Larry and his fiancAce Naomi (Kathryn Hahn) serve admirably to explain the spiritual side of all the mysteries the Wilders encounter. After all, Naomi has some New Age sensibilities of her own. She meditates, engages in palmistry and looks for numbers that might win the lottery.
All the actors and actresses do a fine job of conveying the excitement and confusion you might expect to see in this sort of situation. The acting is spot on, which sometimes is all that keeps the mediocre script on track. The movie itself feels a little recycled. Children discover something wonderful and adults are concerned. Children keep it secret for a while, but ... cue government involvement. Didn't we see this in ""E.T.""? The difference is that instead of an endearingly strange alien, we get an immobile toy rabbit who establishes a deep emotional attachment to the child, in this case Emma.
But Mimzy never says anything so comprehensible as ""E.T. phone home,"" at least not to anyone in the audience. We know the rabbit's saying something, since a buzzing sound fills the theater every time Emma bends her head to listen—a sound effect the characters in the movie were evidently spared, as they remain happily oblivious to any sign of sentience from the toy. For audience members, however, the noises that signal mysterious technology at work remain annoying for the duration of the film.
On the other hand, ""The Last Mimzy"" tries and succeeds in creating magical images. Glowing quartz and shimmering lights abound. Bright colors balance the shadows, keeping the overall optimism of the movie in check. And when all is said and done, there's something cool about watching a person atomize their hand.
