“The Last Mimzy” not only captures the imagination of childhood, but also how the magic made possible through that imagination is mired in a sense of the fantastic, the intimidating and the unknown.

After all, to grow up – and to learn why the universe is the way it is – is to lose one’s ability to get lost in the mystical. And if nothing else, “The Last Mimzy” reawakens in us the enticing nature of the impossible. It helps us to see again through the awestruck eyes of a kid again.

Directed by Bob Shaye, best known as the executive producer of all three “Lord of the Rings” films, as well as the last great fantasy family film, “Frequency,” “Last Mimzy” might be his most complex work yet. Based on the short story by Lewis Padgett, the tall tale starts with the idealized perfect family and ends with a family that is genuinely confused. Noah (Chris O’Neil) and Emma (Rhiannon Leigh) are the two kids at the story’s center, Noah the frustrated and impatient science all-star who would rather play video games than talk about school with his parents and Emma the ever-optimistic younger sister who throws fake tea parties in the back yard and wishes she could grow up faster.

Everything changes when one day at their summer island home, they discover something lodged in the mud just off shore. It’s a box, filled with strange objects – small chinks of metal that they soon learn can levitate and, when put at the right angle, open up a spinning blue portal to another universe. Along with the metal, they find a small stuffed bunny that speaks in a language only the children can hear, a strange blue blob that looks like a small, mutated animal of some kind and a strange, glowing, remote-sized green slab.

The more these kids experiment with these new toys, the more they become fascinated, and then obsessed with them. Noah looks through the green slab and starts seeing the world – from a soda can to the trees to the sky – as one big jigsaw puzzle with the seams exposed. Together, they both learn how to communicate with the bunny and the blue blob, and while Emma starts falling in love with her bunny, Noah shows sudden sparks of genius in regards to science problems and detailed sketchings.

It’s when this blue blob starts glowing one night and causes a major power outage across the city of Seattle that the FBI comes crashing into Noah and Emma’s house, arresting them and their parents on the suspicion that they just might be terrorists (it’s the second time this year, in addition to “The Astronaut Farmer,” that a mainstream family film has cast anti-terror officials as the enemy).

All great children’s stories treat their target audience seriously, and here “Mimzy” sees something simultaneously pure, naive, brave and tragic in its adolescent adventurers. As they first turn to these toys as a distraction from their boring afternoons and their absentee, workaholic father, the mystery behind their origins comes to serve at first as their hobby, then their obsession and ultimately their obligation, as they go against parents and country in following their instincts that these objects hold within them the fate of the human species.

Shaye pointedly offers us a glimpse of this family before the discovery, and then watches its evolution after. In an ironic twist, these fantastical artifacts, and this childish mission to save a stuffed bunny, gives this family a sense of purpose. It brings them closer together. It makes the parents open their minds to entirely new possibilities.

All mixed together, “The Last Mimzy” presents an intriguing formula, giving us two heroes, a conflicted family and a supernatural mystery that we never quite get to the bottom of. All we know is that there’s magic here – magic that we don’t quite understood, but feel drawn to and intimidated by. It’s this sense of discovery which puts us in Noah and Emma’s shoes – awakened from their complacent comas for an adventure that will test their mettle and change them forever.

For that matter, “The Last Mimzy” is the kind of kid’s film even Noah and Emma would like – a mystery that takes itself seriously enough to be believed and told with enough heart to make us want to believe. Forget the pandering, “Mimzy” has the passion.

by: Steven Snyder steven@zertinet.com, Published 2007-03-20