Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Nim's Island.

My daughter really has no respect for noted movie reviewers. Upon being told that Mark Kermode had put me off Nim's Island with a poor review, she decided that we were going to see it anyway.
Sorry Mr Kermode.

So off we toddled to Pocklington Arts Centre and had a pretty entertaining, diverting couple of hours. Nothing special but it would make a Sunday afternoon's viewing with the family.

The thing is, there's at least three really quite good movies shoehorned into here. Ideas are thrown out and ignored. Take for example the Foster character. Her writer's block, agrophobia and fragile mental state (haunted by her adventure hero character) are never properly explored, but could have been really good.

There's also many, many ridiculously stupid moments, contrivences for the camera thrown about like confetti.
One of the (many) silly points came when this 10 year old girl looks around at the devastation wreaked upon her utopian treehouse existence. Realising that the power has gone, she heads up to the roof, kicks a bit of tree off the solar panels, grabs a couple of cables, plugs them into each other and, hey presto, power is restored. Huh?

But the main problem with the whole thing (and I'm really giving nothing away that isn't in the trailer here) is that it sets the whole thing up as the journey of Jodie Foster to the island to rescue Nim after her father goes missing at sea. Surely then, it may have been nice to see the relationship between Jodie Foster and Nim develop for more than the five minutes it was before daddy came round the headland, saw Foster, fell madly in love and all three of them wandered off into the sunset. Strange pacing indeed.

It was nothing more than okay. Molly liked it though.

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