Summary Of Mimsy Were The Borogoves

Based on the even more absurdly titled short story Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett, The Last Mimzy begins in the distant future, where school children are telepathically told the ensuing story by their teacher. Nothing is less interesting on film than watching people talk to each other through their psychic abilities. The boredom of watching telepathic conversations actually makes a nice little metaphor for this entire film: we’re watching something, knowing that an interesting story is in there somewhere, but we just can’t see it.

Flashback to present-day Seattle, to your everyday elementary school—a place where test score answers aren’t written on the palm of your hand but text messaged via cell phone, and where it’s normal for school kids to pass through a metal detector before class. (Is it me, or is there something wrong with our society when such sad truths are portrayed in film so nonchalantly?) Enter Noah and Emma Wilder, youngsters with average grades and average parents. They’ve got a personality-less mom (Joely Richardson) and your typical movie dad (Timothy Hutton)—the kind who’s always getting called into work, leaving the wife and kids disappointed for the weekend trip to the beachhouse. Dad is, of course, the skeptic later on.

When touched, these uncanny gizmos make cringe-inducing sounds, which will either just annoy you or will make your head explode. Noah and Emma each have their own supernatural reactions: Noah learns the infinite possibilities of geometry and how to speak to insects; Emma talks to the bunny, named Mimzy, and telekinetically levitates crystalline