? After finding some unusual objects on a beach (sent from the future), a brother and sister gain unusual abilities. Based on the 1943 story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by the pseudonymous Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore).
+ At its best, the movie is reminiscent of E.T., but darker, almost creepy. The short story is basically a bit of philosophy with a science-fiction underpinning. Less explicitly presented here, the idea is that children have minds that aren’t hard-wired to look at things a certain way, and are therefore more adaptable. The young girl (played by the talented Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) is smart enough to use the word “dexterity” but not to realize that her ability to make objects defy gravity is apt to freak out the adults around her, including, eventually, the government agents. The boy isn’t especially smart at the beginning, so when he suddenly starts demonstrating unusual talent, the parents (Timothy Hutton, Joely Richardson) just don’t understand. Only the curious science teacher (Rainn Wilson) seems to want to. The script does well fleshing out the child characters and extending the premise so that the past connects to the future, and vice versa, in a way that explains what’s going on.
- But it also adds an unfortunate element of pseudoscience. What kind of science teacher has a palm-reading girlfriend whom he calls “very gifted”? Whatever gifts she has are completely unnecessary to the plot and make the scientific advances in the story seem akin to magic. I wish the time wasted on her character had been used to extend the very brief future segments.
= *** Despite the fact that the main characters are about 10 and 6, the film is probably more suited to older children and even adults. There are some lightly comic moments (that’s what the palm-reading girlfriend seems to be there for), but not so many warm and cuddly ones as in E.T.
IMDB link
reviewed 3/29/07
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