The Last Mimzy (2007)

            I tried to like this film. I really did. I saw it once in theatres and then gave it a nice, long, three-year period to reevaluate my assessment before a second viewing. And yet, it seems that three years in film school were enough to justify my disliking it even more. Simply put, The Last Mimzy is a mess.

            Directed by Robert Shaye, the film centers around siblings Noah and Emma Wilder (Chris O’Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn), who discover a mysterious box washed up on shore near their family’s Washington beach home. They shortly find that the box is filled with foreign objects, including a plate of crystal that casts geometric shapes of light, an assortment of rocks (which the children term “spinners”), a gooey blue blob made up of goodness knows what, and an old stuffed rabbit (to which young Emma takes an immediate liking). Emma soon realizes that the rabbit can communicate with her, and it tells her its name is Mimzy. The children become obsessed with unlocking the potential of the various “toys,” which the audience knows have been sent from a future superhuman race in danger of extinction. Of course, the only thing that can heal their failing society is the goodness of a child, which is where the Wilder kids come in.  

The film is based on a short story entitled Mimsy Were the Borogoves, written in 1943 by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym for married science fiction authors Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, who often worked together). I’m unsure why Shaye changed the spelling of the title from “Mimsy” to “Mimzy,” but that is certainly the least unforgivable deviance from the story. The Padgett work mentions nothing about the children developing superpowers (such as corporeal levitation or communicating with spiders), nor does it include any mention of the disturbingly powerful stuffed rabbit, whom Emma seems to love more than her own family.

While the short story is told from the parents’ perspective, Shaye opts to present it from the children’s point of view. My best guess is that we’re supposed to empathize with Mimzy as she pleads for Noah and Emma’s help, but it’s hard for me to feel sorry for something so eerily subversive, as she encourages the children to keep the box hidden from their parents. Of course, it’s probably the parents’ fault for lack of investigation.

In fact, what drove me especially crazy was the fact that the Wilder parents (Timothy Hutton and Joely Richardson) seemed to have little control over the kids. They allow Noah to play video games nonstop, and don’t seem to notice Emma’s fixation on Mimzy until it becomes blatantly harmful. They don’t even take a moment to ask her where she got the toy. About halfway through the film, Richardson’s character becomes overwhelmed with emotion at her children’s increasingly strange behavior and finally reprimands them and throws the toys away. A few cuts later we see Emma with Mimzy (whom Noah retrieved from the dumpster), and the parents do nothing to enforce their punishment. Richardson’s mother character overreacts to the situation by weeping incessantly, while Hutton’s workaholic father doesn’t seem to realize its magnitude. The child actors are sweet and sincere, but their limited experience due to young age is quite evident in their performances.

The film’s saving graces come in the forms of Noah’s hippie science teacher Larry White (Rainn Wilson) and his quirky fiancée Naomi (Kathryn Hahn), the only people who believe there is some otherworldly importance to the children’s abnormal behavior. Wilson and Hahn provide the film with a much-needed infusion of humor while advancing the story’s more ethereal themes. 

One of the reasons the film saw little success at the time of its release in 2007 was because it was incorrectly marketed as a children’s film, what with its PG rating and 90-minute running time. In reality, the storyline is much too complicated for children to understand. Yet it has little to offer adults, either. There is no sweeping romance, intense fight scenes, or gripping drama. It’s a simple story about some spoiled children and their fixation on a box of potentially dangerous materials. Take into consideration the film’s shamelessly sugary score (which was no doubt intended to inspire a sense of overwhelming hope, but made me feel more nauseated than anything), some ill-executed dialogue dubbing, and an unrealistically perfect ending, and you have a pretty accurate picture of why this film severely underperformed at the box office. Perhaps it would have been prudent for Shaye to stick more closely to the story, or – better yet – to have adapted a work better suited for the silver screen.