Almost but not quite the Last Mimzy
I opted to take the kids to the special preview of "The Last Mimzy" today (they've been talking about wanting to see it for months). It's surely amazing how we manage to forget the important things... like how much of an production it is to take two kids to a movie. Good grief! Thankfully, I didn't have to kill anyone this trip (not that the option wasn't considered several times), because I'm running out of places to hide all the bodies. =)
The movie was pretty good, and the kids seemed to love it (along with the thirty or so other kids in the theater - it was nearly all kids). Sadly, it could have been better. The movie was peppered with problems and a dozen things that were never explained (like what was up with the boy being able to open wormholes).
In a nutshell, the movie was about a future civilization that managed to corrupt their genes to the point where they'd lost their humanity. In an attempt to save the race one engineer sent back a series of living dolls (humans could not travel in time as it would kill them) called "Mimzy", along with several devices (to the kids, these looks like "Star Trek"-type gadgets, while adults only saw rocks... also never explained) that were to be used to send "uncorrupted" DNA back to the future. After having all of his previous attempts fail, the engineer sent one final doll back. It gets found by a girl and her brother while they are on Easter vacation at a beach house. Over the next week, the devices appear to unlock potential in the two children (it's never really explained what's going on with this or why) that eventually allow them to build a wormhole to the future and send the last Mimzy there (with a single teardrop from the girl as the sample of DNA). In a 20-second montage, the future is saved and so on...
The kids end up doing lots of cool things thanks to the effects of the device, including talking to spiders and opening wormholes. Unfortunately, the director thought that including all these effects ("Intel" etched on the computer parts of Mimzy) would cover up the many plot holes... like why the kids went 80+ miles to their beach cottage, yet ended up at the same school several times over the vacation week. Or what the point of the "looking glass" was, because having the girl see into the future never really did anything for the story (this was supposedly related to Alice from "Alice in Wonderland" who also had a Mimzy). One thing I thought was cool was the theme of technology in the present as a way to show how we become corrupted, but other than showing a ton of scenes containing video games, iPods, Blackberries, and a home with plasma TVs in every room, the theme never really went anywhere - too bad for a decent setup.
The movie is based on a 1943 short story called "Mimsy were the Borogoves", which appears to explain many of the film's plot holes.
The movie was pretty good, and the kids seemed to love it (along with the thirty or so other kids in the theater - it was nearly all kids). Sadly, it could have been better. The movie was peppered with problems and a dozen things that were never explained (like what was up with the boy being able to open wormholes).
In a nutshell, the movie was about a future civilization that managed to corrupt their genes to the point where they'd lost their humanity. In an attempt to save the race one engineer sent back a series of living dolls (humans could not travel in time as it would kill them) called "Mimzy", along with several devices (to the kids, these looks like "Star Trek"-type gadgets, while adults only saw rocks... also never explained) that were to be used to send "uncorrupted" DNA back to the future. After having all of his previous attempts fail, the engineer sent one final doll back. It gets found by a girl and her brother while they are on Easter vacation at a beach house. Over the next week, the devices appear to unlock potential in the two children (it's never really explained what's going on with this or why) that eventually allow them to build a wormhole to the future and send the last Mimzy there (with a single teardrop from the girl as the sample of DNA). In a 20-second montage, the future is saved and so on...
The kids end up doing lots of cool things thanks to the effects of the device, including talking to spiders and opening wormholes. Unfortunately, the director thought that including all these effects ("Intel" etched on the computer parts of Mimzy) would cover up the many plot holes... like why the kids went 80+ miles to their beach cottage, yet ended up at the same school several times over the vacation week. Or what the point of the "looking glass" was, because having the girl see into the future never really did anything for the story (this was supposedly related to Alice from "Alice in Wonderland" who also had a Mimzy). One thing I thought was cool was the theme of technology in the present as a way to show how we become corrupted, but other than showing a ton of scenes containing video games, iPods, Blackberries, and a home with plasma TVs in every room, the theme never really went anywhere - too bad for a decent setup.
The movie is based on a 1943 short story called "Mimsy were the Borogoves", which appears to explain many of the film's plot holes.