NIM'S ISLAND

Monday

August 11, 2008

NIM’S ISLAND (2008)—The latest family fantasy-adventure offering from Walden Media, stars the always adorable 11-year-old Abigail Breslin, Jodie Foster and Gerard Butler, co-directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin. Nim's Island is the story of a young girl who inhabits an isolated island with her scientist father and animal friends, who inadvertently co- mmunicates with a reclusive author who just happens to be the author of her favorite book. All sounds very interesting, while the movie is long on cute due to the irrepressible presence of Breslin, the comedy aspects of this movie and worse of all the adventure quotient is decidedly lacking. Alexandra (Foster) spends far too much time in her farcical but ultimately boring agoraphobic transit to Nim’s Island. Once she gets there, other than Nim’s initial shock that she is in fact not Alex Rover (Butler) the adventurer of her novels, but Alexandra Rover the author, there isn't much for Foster to do. Nim on the other hand is kept busy re-wiring the solar panels after a lacklustre tropical storm and faces the unconvincing threat of island invasion by hapless Aussie tourist. Nim fights back by summoning her “inner Tarzan” complete with zip-lines through the jungle, and flinging lizards through the air like a one girl “ewok” army. Nim further astounds us by rolling boulders placed conveniently yet precariously from a cliff face like a 6th grade Quasimodo, all we lacked was a good lusty eleven-year-old yell of “SANCTUARY” and the scene would have been complete. Yet when given the opportunity, the director/writers fail to connect with the real drama potential of this story, in fact, they seem particularly adept at setting up interesting plot-elements and then ignoring their outcome altogether, e.g. Alexandra never satisfactorily fulfils her mission as ersatz hero. Her hereto all consuming agoraphobic-soup fetish inexplicably vanishes and she is last seen running blissfully on the beach holding hands with Jack (Butler) caught up in some kind of implausible island induced romance. Nim fails to confronts her real fears, or learn the life-lesson that the "real hero" is the hero inside. The whole meeting the Aussie boy, a plot element originally more crucial when Nim still possessed her imaginary friends, is cast off as a meaningless throwaway scene.

I could not believe how badly the direction team of Flackett/Levin missed the mark. The idea that Nim has imaginary friends from classic literature is a great deal more interesting than much of what actually ended up on film. Furthermore, Nim’s potential confusion over the cruise ship for a pirate ship is another missed opportunity, the explanation is that Nim has an adversarial relationship with the imaginary Long John Silver, this crucial clarification is left on the cutting room floor, and we are left just confused. When you consider the potential; the lively scene of Nim lying in bed while reading the latest Alex Rover book, the adventure takes place in the theatre of her mind. These fantasies provide a further juxtaposition between Alexandra Rover's own schizophrenic imaginations of Alex rover the hero. The encounter with the Aussie boy could have been more poignant, Nim pokes him with her finger to see if he's real, but again, Flackett/Levin fail to pursue this plot-line to any meaningful conclusion. Instead, Nim's encounter with Edmund is so much wasted celluloid, reduced to the farce of Edmund’s two clueless parents. The whole point of the story was skewed. What Nim should have learned was that Alex Rover, Huck Finn, and even a scalawag like Long John Silver exist only in books. That people are more important that imaginary friends, and that heroes in real life are just ordinary people like Alexandra Rover. I know I’m re-writing the movie, I just think there was so much missed potential.