Take two parts E.T., one part Jumanji-Zathura, one part Dreamchild, one part Terminator, shake the mixture up and saturate the whole batch with, say, Kundun—and there you have The Last Mimzy.

I’ll get back to that bit about Kundun.

The basic premise of The Last Mimzy depends rather heavily on our collective cultural consciousness of Spielberg’s fable of childhood and aliens.

First, as E.T. did with California suburbia, Mimzy is set in a highly stylized Seattle, and its Puget Sound environs. People take the Bremerton ferry to get to Whidbey Island, for instance; kids go to “Seattle Elementary School”; science is done at the “Seattle Research Facility”; kids can drive cars from said facility to Whidbey’s Highway 20 without ever hitting a stretch of (very crowded) freeway. Personally, I find this kind of contrived nonsense really annoying—and I bet even the eight-year-old Seattleites with whom I saw the movie could smell something fishy (and it wasn’t the sand-dollars that our young heroes find on Whidbey’s rocky beaches). Still, if that kind of “childlike impressionism” thing worked for you in E.T., it may work for you here, too.

Second, the entire affair hangs on the audience’s willingness to fall deeply in love with Mimzy, the cute Easter bunny that Emma and Noah find tucked inside the recesses of a brine-soaked time capsule. Mimzy is from the future, and she is here both to save and to be saved. Oddly, this part of first-time director Bob Shaye’s gimmickry works pretty well—precisely because Mimzy doesn’t mimick E.T.’s animatronic goofiness. She just sits there, stuffed and cuddly, and coos a little bit of synthesized gibberish that only Emma can understand.

The Jumanji-Zathura effect comes into play because once the kids take that first other-worldly step into the time-space-techno game that the “toys” in Mimzy’s capsule represent, they can’t just stop. They’ve got to follow it through to its bittersweet, sacrificial, and redemptive end.

That time-space game also involves the writings of the Reverend Charles Dodgson. Who’s that, you ask? You might know him better as Lewis Carroll, the pseudonymous writer of Alice in Wonderland. Like 1985’s Dreamchild—which starred Ian Holm as Dodgson and featured some truly creepy, overgrown Jim Henson creatures—Mimzy makes the argument that going through the looking glass isn’t just some quaint fantasy, but that there’s some pretty weighty reality behind it all.

That’s where The Terminator comes in. Rather than Dreamchild’s insistence that troubled sexuality lay behind Dodgson’s fantasy, Mimzy posits the notion that our recurring cultural obsession with trips down various rabbit holes is tied up with a future crisis of humanity—and that a series of Mimzy-like bunnies have been sent from the future to bring back the cure for what ails us. Emma’s Mimzy is the last chance for success. Naturally, the Department of Homeland Security has to get involved (to bring things full circle, invoking the central crisis of E.T.).

So far, so innocently good, I guess.

And now for the Kundun kicker. All of this plotting and mythologizing is set up, explained, and evangelized through a prism of Tibetan spirituality. At every key turn of the story, Emma and Noah encounter (and are psychically instructed in) phenomena such as mental telepathy, palmistry, levitation, telekinesis, and transcendental meditation, all splendiferously visualized through Tibetan iconography. Emma, it seems, is one of those “special,” near-perfect reincarnated beings who, in other parts of the world, warrant lionization and pilgrimages.

I’m not overemphasizing this aspect of the film, by the way. No, Shaye manages to do that well enough on his own, making Mimzy as much an evangelistic exercise as, say, Facing the Giants. Fair warning. And the film is so strident in its spiritual fervor, advocating a single-minded obedience to one’s dreams, that it almost frightened me. Honestly. Put orange robes on David Koresh or Jim Jones, and you kind of get the picture.

As egregious as Shaye’s proselytizing may be, though, the film also struggles because the director can’t seem to coax convincing or sympathetic performances out of any of his adult actors. His stylized Seattle landscape stretches credulity beyond any narrative elasticity, and his shameful product placement is, well, unnecessarily shameful (particularly given the overall genericity of the production). And believe it or not, I can’t really tell you about key product placement because it’s actually a plot spoiler!

At the end of a very long morning, fine performances by the child stars of Mimzy—Chris O’Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn—will probably be wasted in a moderately entertaining children’s film that will likely generate scathing word-of-mouth.

The Last Mimzy is rated PG “for some thematic elements, mild peril and language.” The extent to which Mimzy’s script invokes now-common slang (and what were once sexually-inspired euphemisms—that is, neither curse words nor potty-talk, really, but “coarse language,” I guess?) is truly puzzling and even a bit off-putting. But the real culprits here are those pesky “thematic elements.” We should be at least reassured that the MPAA is as concerned by Buddhist themes as by Christian themes—and, as I noted in my reviews of both Conversations with God and Facing the Giants, if such parental cautions are good for the goose, they’re also good for the gander.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a promotional screening of The Last Mimzy.