I remember a lesson I learned in a creative writing class long ago.  While writing always came easier to me than say, math or foreign languages, I still second guessed myself quite a bit when it came time to turn in one paper or another.  Often I would go back through something I had written and add in descriptive words, longer explanations, more colorful phrasing…until I thought I had written exactly what the teacher wanted.  It took a few times before I realized that the more I did this, the lesser my grade would be.  You see, I was entirely capable of writing a perfectly fine story or report, but when I tried to show off or write what I thought others would want…it just came across as fake and over the top.  Obviously, this isn’t a lesson that was ever taught to the filmmakers of Nim’s Island.

While Nim’s Island makes for a fairly entertaining children’s film, it continually manages to go just a bit too far the entire running length.  In fact, Nim’s Island is so full of over-the-top and totally random plot devices, characters and bizarre moments, that it ceases entirely to feel like a film made for young adults, and instead conveys itself in the manner of a film made by young adults.  Imagine if you got a dozen nine-year-olds in a room and told them to tell you a story, one part at a time, each taking turns until it was finished.  What you would get is something that feels a whole heck of a lot like this film.  Characters pop up and disappear without anything but the fleetest of import to the story, situations arise simply to fill space and time and are never mentioned again, and to add further emphasis to the jumbled cacophony that is the middle of this film, it is bookended by a perfect kick-off beginning and a right-off-the-shelf tidy ending.  While I have no problem with a movie that is written for children…I must take exception at a film which is handled so childishly.

Nim (Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine) has an amazingly great dad who is a quirky scientist searching for unknown strains of plankton.  Not for anything of import mind you, but just because he likes to.  To facilitate this end, he has moved his young daughter to a remote island, complete with towering volcano, which is unknown to the rest of the world.  Here, he raises her healthily (?) with nothing but animals and books about the adventuring hero Alex Rover to keep her company, because, heck, we all know that human interaction isn’t important for a child as long as her daddy is super sweet and she has animals that apparently understand English to hang out with.  Where is Nim’s mom you might ask?  We don’t know, other than the cutesy story that her dad tells her about a ship called the Buccaneer which scared a whale into eating her mom.  Oh.  I see.

What we do know is that Alex Rover is the character is a series of books written by…well…Alex Rover (Jodie Foster); a novelist who writes of great adventures while actually suffering from agoraphobia…the fear of leaving one’s home.  Doing research for her next book she winds up learning of the scientist on a far away island, and figures, “Heck, if I want to know about volcanoes for my book I better email someone who actually LIVES on an island with a volcano”.  If only there was such a situation…wait!

When Nim’s dad (Gerard Butler) goes off to sea to find yet another type of plankton (this one glows), he is hit by a storm and his boat is knocked out of commission.  While he struggles not to be eaten by the sharks which are apparently attracted to and compelled to follow all vessels adrift at sea, Nim cuts her leg, which develops puss and is apparently in enough mortal danger from this grievous injury that between running around the island just fine, she compels Alex Rover to come save her.  Of course, the Alex Rover she gets may not be exactly what she was expecting, but when you’ve got a single dad, with a mysteriously missing mom, and a young girl in peril…somehow I think it will all work out okay.

Now here is the fun part; I haven’t even mentioned any of the REALLY weird and misplaced stuff.  The writer’s delusions, the piratical cruise ship line, the “SERIOUSLY ripped off from Harry Potter’s Aunt and Uncle characters”, the flying lizards, a farting sea lion, or the airline that won’t let you carry on a bottle of hand sanitizer, but allows a full bag of canned soup.  The thing with Nim’s Island is that nothing that happens within its hour and a half matters in the slightest.  The whole thing is so overly invented, stuffed with un-necessaries and creative moments purely for creativity’s sake, you simple have to ask yourself, do I want my kids to be entertained for a while or not.  This, it seems, may be the only part of this film that may work.

I can see the youngest of children laughing at parts of this movie, but honestly I know a few youngsters who would be completely confused with what the heck is going on here.  Not in the sense that they could not understand the film, but that they would simply be confused why someone would have made it.  There are SO many near-misses here that I feel compelled to say that it is obvious the filmmakers wanted to make a decent film, and that their failure was not due to malicious intent…merely a lack of a solid idea or at the very least the capability to put such an idea down on paper.

There are performances in the film, however once again they are each so overblown and contrived that it is difficult to differentiate between overacting a character and accurately playing an overwritten one.  Either way, Jodie Foster is pleasantly tolerable as the whack-job novelist who is forced into the great wide open after years holed up in her home, but Butler’s scientist comes off as a doofus and even the promising, young Breslin just grates on the nerves after a while with her constant waves of high and low spirits.

The extra features range from informative to damaging.  For instance, the featurette about shooting the water and storm sequences was interesting and more exciting to watch than some of the finished scenes!  In contrast however, another featurette shows us that there was to be an entire subplot involving imaginary friends for Nim (because why should Foster’s character be the only one with imaginary friends), and illustrates that this story used to be even MORE convoluted and all over the map.  A couple of Public Service Announcements, some deleted scenes and two separate commentaries pretty much round things out.  I must say that the commentary with Foster and Breslin is a great addition because it is a totally kid-friendly one.  Not since Brother Bear’s commentary with the two moose from the film, Rutt and Tuke, have I come across a commentary that could hold a child’s attention…until now.

Well, if you have kids I suppose you can just ask yourself how easily amused they are.  If they were the ones too ADD to sit still during Pixar movies, then they just might like the fractured pacing and endless sight gags of Nim’s Island.  If however, they are a bit more discerning in their entertainment, I would caution against the assumption that all kid’s movies are the same.  In the same example of some kids I’ve come across, there are those films that are a sheer delight...and then there are those which should not be seen nor heard.  Nim’s Island failed to delight this film fan.

-aaron-