by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
B- Rated PG 98 min.
The Last Mimzy is a stuffed bunny rabbit from the future. This movie is a hippie’s fantasy told as an exciting adventure for kids, ala the Last Starfighter, ET, or Goonies. Noah and Emma Wilder are the only hope the future has. The Wilders, a family that lives in Seattle, takes a weekend off to go to their cabin on the shore. David Wilder (Timothy Hutton) is a busy lawyer and his work keeps him from being able to be there for the first few days. On Noah and Emma’s first jaunt out to the water, Emma, Noah’s little sister (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn), notices something rolling in the surf. Noah (newcomer Chris O’Neil) goes in the cold water to retrieve the object.
The box opens and reveals a strange rock that glows and displays geometric patterns, as well as other stones and odd glowing objects. The children run back to the house and hide these items in their room, swearing to keep them a secret. When Jo Wilder (Joelly Richardson from Nip Tuck), their mother, catches Noah with the seemingly alien device, it looks to her like just another rock. She cannot see the lights or the shapes. When Emma searches the strange box later, she finds more exotic rocks, a mutated seashell, and a stuffed rabbit in a hidden compartment. The stuffed rabbit talks to her in a voice that only she can understand.
Noah’s hippie elementary school science teacher, Larry White (Rainn Wilson of NBC’s The Office) warns his class about pollutants and how our society is jeopardizing the humanity of the future. He is also plagued by dreams about an ancient mandala. His fiancée (Kathryn Hahn), a practicing Buddhist, is interested in his dreams because he once dreamed a winning lottery number. Larry White’s dreams are very similar to the images that Noah has been doodling at school while he thinks about the strange rock with the moving geometric shapes.
Meanwhile, Mimzy, Emma’s stuffed rabbit from the strange box, is teaching Emma all sorts of things. From how to tell the future to how to spin some of the rocks from the box so that they float, Emma is becoming increasingly powerful and wise. Emma has also learned that Lewis Carroll also owned a stuffed rabbit named Mimzy. Larry White and his fiancée pull out their books about ancient Mandalas and find that the sketches Noah has been drawing match the ancient images, and they are also the images Larry has been dreaming about. The science teacher and his fiancée confront Mrs. Wilder about Noah’s strange ability, convinced he is the next Buddha, but when the fiancée reads his palm she is disappointed, until she reads Emma’s and they feel they have discovered something. Then Noah connects two of the objects from the box and the power goes out in the entire Northwest United States. This brings Homeland Security into the issue.
Before long Emma is levitating and Noah is excelling in science, a subject he had previously been bad in, and their entire world is changing because of this magical box. But the Mimzy has an agenda. As it turns out the hippie science teacher is right, the future is contaminated, and the Mimzy is a nanocomputer crafted by the Intel of the future and sent back in time to collect untainted DNA.
This is the point where it begins to be confusing, because as it turns out, Mimzy is an advanced computer and allegedly all of the magic can be explained with futuristic technology. But if that’s the case, how can the hippies have dreams that lead them to the children and use palm reading to decipher the facts?
Be prepared to suspend reality in this film, which my children enjoyed greatly. It is a classic adventure tale and Timothy Hutton and Joely Richardson’s poor acting is made up for by the excellent performances of the children and even Rainn Wilson’s terrific departure from the character of Dwight Schrute on The Office. If you’re under thirteen, you’ll love this picture. If you’re not, take someone that is along with you.
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