I didn’t really enjoy The X-Files until the second season (though later I went back and enjoyed that first one as well). It was because the first episode treated alien contact very seriously, and so I took that to be the premise of the show: there has been alien contact. But then, in following weeks, we found that everything else that anyone ever imagined on a dark and stormy night also existed – telepathy, bigfoot, ghosts, vampires – but with no linking rationale, other than that they always existed, which I found intensely frustrating, both as a science fiction fan and as a rationalist. Soon, though, I came to see the program had much more to do with horror than science fiction, and was able to enjoy it again, and enjoy it thoroughly. Different rules apply in horror: its goal is not to help us make sense of the world around us, or speculate about the future, but just to frighten our socks off, and The X-Files did that in spades.
The Last Mimzy, a new movie for children, at first seemed to me to be falling into that same trap. Two children discover a mysterious artefact on the beach, and began to display unusual abilities and intelligence after playing with it. It’s Chocky, in short. Anyway, so far, so good, though derivative, but I felt my hackles raising as palmistry was shown to be a valuable means of gauging a child's potential, not to mention the discovery of the scientific significance of Buddhist mandalas, the usefulness of oneiromancy, and a science teacher explaining to his pupils that DNA can be affected by “cultural contaminants”.
I laughed out loud at the portentousness of a shot of a bus that pulled out to show how none of the children on a school bus talked to each other, but rather fiddled with their Nintendo handhelds and mobile phones, and laughed even harder at a scene where the children run across the beach (thanks to the Mimzy’s influence), as if for the first time, and the boy slumps to the ground in exhausted happiness, saying with surprise, “That feels good!” (My daughter and I were the only people watching this film in the cinema, else I would have been more circumspect about laughing so loudly, although even she gave me something of a glare.)
I was ready to dismiss the film then, as a hippy-ish piece of “let’s put down the computer games and talk to each other again!” nonsense. But at some point it turned me around. It had something of an M. Night Shyamalan quality, an eerie calmness of the camera, and indeed might well have benefited from being aimed at adults rather than children. The pace, for example, is almost meticulously slow. If it had been a film for adults, though, the happy ending would not have been shown in the very first scene, since it removes any real tension from the film, as do the constant reassurances that the Mimzy’s motives are good.
However, anyone, regardless of age, will enjoy the way it builds to a satisfying conclusion as the kids take matters into their own hands, using their new-found abilities, a conclusion that brought back fond memories of the Witch Mountain films.
All through the movie my daughter (three years old) was shuffling around, intrigued by the novelty of the cinema’s folding seats, and I thought she had been thoroughly bored, but the movie kept at least one surprise to the end. During the movie’s final scenes she burst into floods of tears, to my astonishment. I asked her what was up, and she explained, weeping still (and she would be for another ten minutes yet): “I really loved watching that film, but it’s finished now.” That probably says more about the film's appeal to children that a ten thousand-word review could. Stephen Theaker ***
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