In a gorgeous mountain meadow, a teacher tells young children a story from history in a nursery school manner. Their dying world, where environmental pollution had led to spiritual isolation and war (presumably among other ills), was saved by a lone scientist, who sent probes into the past to retrieve “pure” DNA, as humanity’s had all become corrupted.
If you’re not in nursery school yourself, you may already have questions about this scenario: how pollution or corrupted DNA led to war and “spiritual isolation"; what the latter is; why a culture that has mastered matter transmission through time can’t alter DNA; and how it is that major scientific research is done by a lone scientist, which not only doesn’t happen in our world but also doesn’t happen in plausible fiction, at least since a lone French scientist invented a matter transmitter in his garage and ran into some problems with a fly.
But then, this story is being told to very young children, in their Eloi-like, Morlock-less future, and that is a key to the movie’s manner—and its failings.
The Last Mimzy is clearly a family film. The accompanying previews are one giveaway: the next Harry Potter, the next Shrek, Firehouse Dog, etc. It’s rated PG; sex is limited to very brief, if suggestive, kissing, and obscenity to “it sucks,” which hasn’t really been obscene since the seventies. There are some mildly scary and weird moments and some sense of threat, though nothing like the real chill and threat the original story provided.
In the movie two young children—Noah, ten, and Emma, perhaps five—playing on the beach near their vacation home, north of Seattle, find one of the probes, a box of toys, sent back by the future scientist (how far in the future is uncertain; in the story on which this movie is based, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” by Lewis Padgett—the pseudonym of writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore—it was millions of years). Here we are back at the nursery level, and not just literally. Why didn’t the scientist send a jar and a note (“Please spit in this and take the following steps to return it to the future, thank you”) and aim it at grown-ups? We could make up justifications about keeping a low profile and not changing the past by alerting adults, but the movie doesn’t provide them, nor does it clearly adapt the story’s idea that the objects are in the form of toys specifically to appeal to children, to shape and alter their relatively open and unformed minds through play; we are left to assume that the scientist aimed at children because of this potential.
The toys change the way the children think and perceive and ramp up their mental processes to the point where they can use those toys to send one—the Mimzy, a stuffed bunny—back to the future. Among their new abilities are telekinesis, telepathy, and perhaps most marvelous, the ability to do science projects without parental assistance. The child actors, Chris O’Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn, are fine for what they have to do, with Wryn, younger and more attuned to the alien ways of the toys, fairly good at seeming to have mysterious knowledge.
In the film, we are asked to believe that the scientist could know children would find the box or keep the contents to themselves long enough to learn to use them. The rationale for the toys and for what they were doing in the past was much more believable in the original story: they were meant to train the children of the future to move to another dimension, where the adults dwell, and were sent into the past thoughtlessly—an offhand indication of a much more dangerous universe than that of the film—rather than through an ill-conceived, implausible scheme.
But then, the scientist’s “plan” probably has more to do with the film’s main subtext, that adults are clueless and children the true masters of the rapidly changing world, than with plausibility. He stakes the survival of the human race on this belief and seems to have no concern for the effect of the toys on the children who find them.
The movie cleverly plays with, and on, this subtext, which is directed at both adults and children, a threat to one and a vicarious thrill to the other. For adults, it’s the fear parents have had of their children for at least a generation, perhaps always, that as the world changes, ever more quickly, children are part of the world in a way their parents aren’t; that children know the world, can act in and on it, in a way that’s beyond their parents’ ken, even downright mysterious. In short, the presumed parent-child power relations are reversed by the rapid rate of change. In the past decade or so, with the (now already cliche) trope of children who understand new technology more quickly than their parents, what the young can do that the old cannot verges on the magical. First they could program the VCR, then evade the parental controls on the cable box. Can telekinesis and time travel be far behind?
The parents here, a prosperous Seattle attorney (Timothy Hutton) and his stay-at-home wife (Joely Richardson), are indeed first among the ranks of the clueless and only get in the way of saving the future. Richardson, looking unglamorous, and the likable Hutton do the best they can with their limited roles, essentially the Hysterical and the Obtuse, respectively.
Two supporting characters, Noah’s science teacher (Rainn Wilson) and his fiancée (Kathryn Hahn), being younger than the parents, are a bit less clueless; latter-day New Agers, they make the connection between the children’s new powers and the ancient mystical wisdom of Tibet. A running joke about the more spiritual Hahn’s earthly lust to use precognition to win the lottery is a misguided attempt at bringing them closer to the (presumed) level of the audience. They’re humanized enough otherwise; the joke doesn’t work and makes them seem cheap and stupid.
Like many recent speculative fiction movies, this one provides some neat ideas (a naturally appearing mandala associated with time travel) and effects and, in a couple of places, a genuine thrill and sense of wonder. And like many, it mixes those with cheap shots, unbelievable motivations, implausible actions, and ill-thought-out conclusions.
This film adds to that mix a moment of bathos so intense it causes an almost physical ache—perhaps the most egregious product placement since the loathsome practice was conceived. The moviemakers are so intent on getting their sponsor the attention we can only assume their payoff deserved that they insert its logo into the very heart, so to speak, of the film, at a moment that should be both wonder inducing and emotionally affecting. They kick us right out of the movie, back into our seats in the dark, shaking our heads in disbelief at their utter crassness. Because the key artifact from the future—the last Mimzy—has Intel inside, just like your PC. And they make sure you know it.
The bonding of the little girl to the Mimzy would probably leave us a little cold anyway. It has a creepy way of vocalizing, which only she can understand and which to an adult will seem untrustworthy. How do we know what it’s telling her? How do we know she can trust it? We know what she doesn’t: that some cute things in movies—and life—have fangs.
Still, we can appreciate her feelings for it, because we understand how children bond to, say, stuffed animals. But then we find out that the Mimzy is not only mechanical, it’s a mechanical shill, the Energizer Bunny from the future. We don’t care about it and can only appreciate the little girl’s caring with condescension. So at the big emotional moment, when the Mimzy must return to the future . . . so what? This is not E.T. going home. This is returning a rented laptop.
But if we were in that far-future nursery school class, we might feel differently and accept other aspects of this film that an adult would find claptrap. We might accept that, after conducting a scary raid on a suburban house that emitted a surge that blacked out the northwestern U.S., the operationally fascist, remorseless agents of law and order (yes, Homeland Security—another layer of clueless and hindering adults) would, once the plot is resolved, simply turn off the complex apparatus of a federal agency without repercussions or ramifications.
We might believe that in the far future containment suits will look like big bugs or nasty aliens. (No, no, it’s not really a cheap, unearned scare.)
Or that Intel will live for thousands, maybe millions, of years. Or that a government research facility with some very high-tech equipment is infested with cockroaches to an extent that would shame a Florida garbage dump. Or that a very smart mother, panic-stricken about the effect of mysterious artifacts that fascinate her children, would think she’s ended the threat by throwing the things in the garbage can. Or that a ten-year-old (admittedly intellectually enhanced) can drive a truck when his legs must really be too short to reach the pedals.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction may be twelve, but you shouldn’t have to be twelve—or five—to enjoy a film that also seems meant for adults.
Why wouldn’t the filmmakers take more care about these details, about the plausibility of motivations and actions, about real consequences? Since we can’t ask them directly, let’s channel what they might say if we were able to ask them:
“Why should we bother? Unless you’re part of a small, oddball percentage of the audience, this is good enough for you. Most people won’t even notice. Who complains when someone sets a real-life movie within the past fifty years and doesn’t bother to get the slang or haircuts right? Cranks. Hell, lots of you might even defend us to people who do complain, and tell them they’re too critical or lack imagination or failed to enter into the spirit of the film. It’s just a movie—just a kid’s movie!—after all. Bottom line (a key term for us): we ignore sense and sell out the movie to the crassly commercial because we can. Because we can get away with it. Because, by God, this shoddy way of doing things is good enough for you.”
To which we can only reply, "mimsy" is a goddamned adjective, you morons.
Bill Mingin, a graduate of Clarion West, has published seventeen short stories, with more forthcoming, and more than two hundred nonfiction pieces, including reviews in Publishers Weekly. He currently reviews audiobooks for AudioFile Magazine. He's married and lives in central New Jersey, where he runs a small book-export business.