Dir. Bob Shaye , US, 2007, 96 mins
Cast: Chris O'Neal, Rainn Wilson, Rhiannon Leigh Wryn
Review by Carol Allen
The film is based on a science fiction
short story written in 1943 by Henry Kuttner and Catherine
Moore under their pseudonym "Lewis Padgett", which is an imaginative
take on children and the magic of mathematics. The movie appears to have moved some
way from its original but does keep the central idea of toys from the future, which
guide children in the learning of abstract mathematics. A box containing these toys
is found here in our time by ten year old Noah (O'Neal) and his five year old sister
Emma (Leigh Wryn) on the beach near their holiday home. Among them is a stuffed
rabbit, Mimzy, with whom Emma immediately falls in love. The box has been sent from
the future, where humanity is dying from mental and physical pollution and the box
with "the last Mimzy" is a final attempt of many previous ones to get humanity
to change our ways and save our descendants. As the children play with the
toys and Mimzy whispers her secrets to Emma, they both develop astonishing
scientific and other skills.
It is an interesting and imaginative sci-fi premise, which holds everything
together despite the film's occasional crassness. The two children play their
parts well; O'Neal as the initially bored Noah, who discovers that life doesn't
suck after all, and Wryn, a very engaging little actress, whose high child's
voice with its American accent is however sometimes a little difficult to understand.
Wilson as Noah's science teacher, who with his palm reading girlfriend Naomi
helps the children, appears to be not only a very good teacher, who makes science
seem like fun, but a bit of a hippy New Ager on the side. Timothy Hutton is
the overworked but loving father of this otherwise typical American family
with Joely Richardson as their protective and rather annoying mum, while the
forces of clumsy authority, who move in heavy handedly, when one of the children's
toys causes a blackout in Seattle triggering off a terrorist alert, are represented
by Michael Clarke Duncan. The ending is a bit soppy - something daftly unscientific
about the future being saved by the pure heart of a child - but this is overall
an entertaining, amusing and, dare one say it, rather educational film,with
its references to scientific theory and Lewis Carroll, which wisely keeps its
young hero and heroine firmly at the centre of the action.
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