Mimzy were the Borogroves

Although I was aware of Golden Age science fiction authors Henry Kutcher and C.L. Moore, writing as Lewis Padgett, I didn’t exactly remember any of their work. But when Ms. Spenser mentioned that one of their stories had been made into The Last Mimzy (2007), I queued it up.

It starts in a Utopian future where children learn telepathically in fields of flowers, and the teacher recounts this tale. It seems that the Earth was dying of pollution, and there wasn’t any untainted DNA to clean up humanity. So a scientist sent packages back in time, hoping they would be found by someone who could set things right.

They wash up on a beach where two kids are playing: Chris O’Neill and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn. There mom, Joely Richardson, has taken them on vacation while dad, Timothy Hutton, has to work. The package contains some mysterious items, and a stuffed rabbit that Wryn says is named Mimzy.

They hide these from the grownups and explore their powers. One is a slab that looks like an iPhone with a smashed screen. When O’Neill shows it to his mother, she just sees a flat rock. But soon the kids are learning telepathy, how to levitate rocks and to control spiders with sound.

O’Neill’s science teacher, Rainn Wilson, is an open-minded groovy type, who begins to suspect the kids know something. He has had psychic experiences before - he once dreamed of a lottery number and it won. To his girlfriend’s chagrin, they didn’t buy a ticket, and now she asks him if he sees numbers after any dream.

When the kids cause a major blackout, the FBI finds them and “borrows” Mimzy. Under extreme magnification, they find that it’s made of advance nanotech, and has a sub-microscopic Intel logo on it. Oddly, the FBI, led by Michael Clarke Duncan, aren’t evil or uncaring. They are pretty helpful actually.

And of course, it all comes out OK. I was a little worried that Timothy Hutton was going to be a problem, what with him always “stuck at work”. But no, he’s just kind of busy.

We enjoyed this as a nice mix of Golden Age SF (1950s era) and modern kids movie. I wonder what kind of audience there is for that, though. Don’t we want more conflict, more peril now? Or more quaintness or nostalgia on the other hand? So, like A Wrinkle in Time, this just didn’t do much business. I don’t think I even heard about it when it came out. Well, at least we got a chance to enjoy it.