The Last Mimzy
Only occasionally do I see a movie so good that I feel compelled to write about it. I saw The Last Mimzy over the weekend and it is a beautiful story; it’s a story of hope and the simple love of a child. It is also a story of how interconnected we are to the Earth. For so long we have had a view of nature as something separate from us, something we have control over. However, as the famous quote says, “The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. What he does to the Earth he does to himself.”
Mimzy travels back in time from a far distance future where our damage to the Earth has become etched into human DNA. The human race is dying. It really is an absurd notion that we can somehow escape the damage we are doing to ourselves and the planet. We won’t even notice the change as it approaches. Like the beautiful sunsets we have today that result from high levels of pollution in the atmosphere. It’s called the Sunset Effect. It means that as long as we are blinded by the beautiful sunset, we won’t see the coming ecological crisis until it is too late.
Two children (Emma and Noah), their science teacher and his finance are drawn into the drama though dreams and inexplicable visions of intricate circles, or mandalas. Only Emma recognizes the message sent from the future understands its importance. It’s important that the message is in the form of a stuffed animal because even millions of years in the future humans know that some messages can only be understood by children. It’s the kind of understanding that is simple and obvious. The kind of understanding we all have before we learn that our childish notions can’t fit into some Nobel Prize winner’s framework of the universe – before we unlearn all the knowledge that we are born with.
The Last Mimzy encourages us to look within and remember that we are part of the Earth and it is a part of us. Until we understand this simple lesson we will continue to put off onto the next generation the diseases of today. If the last Mimzy dropped into my back yard, I doubt I would understand the message. Would you?
