I saw Nim’s Island over the weekend, and obviously this movie wasn’t going to be one of the better movies of the year being a children’s movie, but I thought I’d give it a little review anyway.
The movie itself really felt like a modern re-imagining of Swiss Family Robinson with a family who lived on a deserted island in the South Pacific that wanted to be left alone and didn’t want others to taint the island. The island was complete with a nifty little tree house (at least part of it was in the tree and no where near as good as the one in SFR), and invaders from a cruise ship named the “Buccaneer” and animals that the girl talked and played with.
Jodie Foster played the role of an adventure writer which brought an often humorous aspect of the movie, but in the end turned out to be rather pointless. She spent the entire movie getting the courage to make it to the island to help Nim, only to get there the night before her dad returned. I think her part was really necessary only because the other storyline was fairly thin in content…
Overall, i did like the movie. I thought it did a great job of bringing out the imagination of children and adults alike. In the end, I do believe this was the point as using your imagination was a strong theme throughout the movie. Nim was constantly in an imaginary world thinking of what it would be like to be in this book that Alex Rover wrote, and Alex herself was also constantly imagining the world itself as well as her fictional character whom she talked to throughout the movie. It really sparked something in both me and my daughter who saw it that I really do think it was worth watching for just that reason alone. On that end I think it copied Swiss Family Robinson really well, a movie that did the same exact thing when I was a child.