Six Degrees is a regular feature that utilizes one of the web’s many recommendation engines to find and examine films that are related to Hollywood’s biggest new releases—but removed by six entire degrees of other cinematic features.
The Path: Jurassic World —> Jurassic Park —> Jurassic Park III —> Land Of The Lost —> Journey 2 —> Race To Witch Mountain —> The Last Mimzy
The Recommendation Engine: Amazon
An early venture—the Jurassic Park of this endeavor, if you will—into finding a film that relates to Jurassic World resulted in a Netflix-generated path that led straight to Next, the 2007 “hey, Nicolas Cage is a magician who can see the future” thriller that also somehow centered on a terrorist attack and co-starred both Julianne Moore and Jessica Biel. If you’re looking for Jurassic World-centric recommendations, it seems there are two paths to take, two Isla Nublar roads in a yellow wood, and I am not sorry I could not travel both. The Next path is one that plays up the sci-fi elements of the Jurassic Park franchise, but it only got darker and deeper by degree. Jurassic World should be about wonder.
A trip into the jungles of Amazon, however, churned up a better option. By utilizing Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” widget, a visit to Jurassic Park sent us to Jurassic Park III (fair), which then beget a recommendation to purchase the Will Ferrell-led Land Of The Lost remake, which then set us on a wonder-y and kid-centric path, skipping from Journey 2 to Race To Witch Mountain to The Last Mimzy. Hey, it is a film that relies on cuddly-ish animals, the bond between siblings, and a somewhat gross insistence on using ill-begotten DNA for crafty plans. These films have things in common.
The 2007 family feature, while rife with dumb-bunny product placement, a tenuous understanding of literary history, and Kathryn Hahn being oddly obsessed with the lottery for someone who gets her kicks by palm-reading Tibetan genius children, does pack a family-friendly message about connectivity. It also makes the U.S. government look deeply inept, but we’ll get to that.
The film opens with a calm-eyed woman imploring a group of children to “tune in” to the story she’s about to tell—by extension, she’s also asking us, the audience, to tune in, though she has failed to provide any, uh, refreshments that may assist. No matter, however, because she’s soon telepathically sharing a story about a phenomenally disorganized laboratory, a harried smarty-type, and a stuffed bunny that’s going to save the world. Perhaps we should have imbibed something to aid in storytelling time.
Back on Earth, we meet the young Wilder siblings—the gifted Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn, who will hopefully grow to appreciate her parents’ apparent affection for Fleetwood Mac) and the headstrong Noah (Chris O’Neil). The kids don’t have much in common, and the older Noah isn’t too nice to the clearly smart (if a little strange) Emma. Looks like somebody is going to learn a lesson about family!
Accompanied by their mom Jo (Joely Richardson), the Wilder kids head out to a local island for a little Easter weekend fun (there is a subplot involving their workaholic dad, played by Timothy Hutton, being unable to join them at first, one of those unnecessary details that should have been sliced away during the script’s first draft). Although the Wilder kids are different, both of them love nature, and they eagerly anticipate their island-set break, all calm beaches and cute cottages. Within 10 minutes of the film’s opening, however, they’ve kissed nature goodbye and whole-heartedly embraced the strange box they pull from the ocean, a weird spacey thing that jibbers and chats at them, and contains all sorts of strange rocks and even a stuffed bunny. Who needs Earth nature?
It’s any kid’s dream, a magic box filled with cool toys that they feel the need to hide from their parents. (They just don’t understand, man.) Emma takes a shine to the box’s most recognizable—and cute—toy: a bunny rabbit she names Mimzy that soon begins to communicate telepathically with the little girl. Noah goes in for the rocks, because boyz. The first half of The Last Mimzy is stellar, a fine kid flick that toes the line between wonder and fear, curiosity and terror, with ease. Finding a box filled with space junk could easily be the start of a horror film, but director Robert Shaye keeps things even-keeled, at least long enough for the kids to have fun and the audience to relax.
Both kids find connections in the box—the lonely Emma discovers a new pal in the bunny, while Noah begins to see links between the Mimzy items and the world around him (this is a kid who yelled “life sucks!” during the film’s first five minutes, so he’s looking for something)—and while the consequences are initially heartening, Jo soon realizes that there is something going on with her children. Meanwhile, Noah’s own science teacher (played by Rainn Wilson) continually chats to his lotto-and-Zen-obsessed lady friend (Hahn) about weird dreams that keep burrowing into his sleeping brain. COULD IT ALL BE CONNECTED? Probably.
Things come to a head when Noah presents a science-fair project that essentially announces that he can communicate with spiders and use them to build bridges so strong and so long that they can cross whole galaxies. Everyone goes nuts and declares that he’s a genius, even though his ideas are genuinely bonkers, like a mini Howard Hughes who is unafraid of arachnids. Also, sure, when Noah does something smart, he’s a genius. When Emma does, she’s just gifted. (Fast forward to teen Emma, sporting a “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY” shirt or similar.)
Everything gets much, much more complicated when Noah accidentally bonds together some of the toys, setting into motion a city-wide blackout that eventually sends the FBI (headed up by the late Michael Clarke Duncan) right to their door, because they think they are terrorists or something. It’s unclear, but you better believe that someone yells about the Patriot Act at some point.
By its second half, The Last Mimzy has gotten miles more complicated than it needs to be, what with Noah controlling roaches and Emma screaming that Mimzy is dying and Duncan’s Nathanial Broadman holding them without pressing charges and Wilson’s Larry just talking a lot about ancient mandalas. Eventually, everyone realizes that Mimzy is an alien item from a future human civilization, which sounds cool until the film also asks us to believe that Intel made her, which seems both very ambitious and legitimately insane. Combined with Emma’s strong connection with the bunny and Noah’s abilities to use the other “toys” to build a space bridge, Mimzy may be able to save the future human society that built her and rocketed her back into space. Oh, but she needs DNA. Human DNA. Fresh human DNA. Remember how the film wasn’t scary at first? Yeah, not so much anymore.
The kids make that space bridge, and Emma seeds Mimzy with her own human tears, and the fabric of space and time rip open in front of all of the film’s principal characters. It works! Mimzy’s tear-stained body will save the future, Intel-obsessed humans! (Worst Velveteen Rabbit cosplay ever.) The FBI is basically like “we dunno what happened here, k, bye” and Hahn is still yelling about lottery numbers and all the Wilders are very happy. It’s a happy, confusing conclusion that never made anyone, ever, at any time, want to purchase an Intel product.
The film ends with Emma’s teacher asking Emma to talk about her weekend with her elementary school class, a request that Emma perks right up to, but which—and we’re just guessing here—will likely not engender Emma any further to her peers. At least she’s considered the “mother” of some future, Intel-reliant society. Surely that has to count for something.
DNA is weird.
Previously on Six Degrees:
Tomorrowland to Sky High
Spy to Speed Zone
The Last Mimzy is available for DVD rental on Netflix, available for streaming rental on Amazon, and available for purchase on iTunes.