Nim's Island DVD Review
Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 08.05.2008
I can think of better people to be stuck on an island with then Abigail Breslin and Jodie Foster
Directed by: Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin Written by: Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin, Joseph Kwong & Paula Mazur
Starring: Abigail Breslin - Nim Rusoe Jodie Foster - Alexandra Rover Gerard Butler - Jack Rusoe / Alex Rover Alphonso McAuley - Russell Morgan Griffin - Alice Michael Carman - Captain Christopher Baker - Ensign Maddison Joyce - Edmund
DVD Release Date: 8/5/2008 Running Time: 95 minutes
Rated PG for mild adventure action and brief language
Jodie Foster is one of the most well-known and respected actresses working in Hollywood today. With over seventy performances to her resume, four Oscar nominations (and two wins), more than fifty other award nominations and a worldwide combined box office gross of 1.7 billion dollars, that is not a statement that is in dispute. She rose to prominence with a star-making turn as Iris, the teenage prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The role earned Foster her first Academy Award nomination and put her on the map, so much that it cause deranged fan John Hinckley to try to assassination President Reagan in order to impress her. After the quintessential difficult era for child actors trying to transition into adult roles, she broke through with the performance of rape survivor Sarah Tobias in 1988’s The Accused, winning her first Oscar and reinvigorating her career. The role she is perhaps best known for, Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lamps, followed soon after, and since then Foster has been in that elite group of Hollywood actresses known as “stars.”
Of course, this is not to say all of her movies have been successful or great ones. Alongside her successes in the nineties, there were a fair amount of failures, such as Contact, an overly long and boring mess with perhaps the most infamous bait and switch of the last fifteen years. There was the abysmal Nell, which earned Foster her fourth Academy Award nomination but also bored audiences to death. With the turn of the new millennium, Foster became more selective in her movie roles, and started taking fewer projects on—often to good results. Panic Room was a tense, enjoyable thriller, and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys was one of the best independent films to come out in 2002. Inside Man was a great film, and The Brave One, while it had its faults, was an interesting and new take on the Death Wish formula. Her more selective style led people to believe that Nim’s Island, which debuted on movie screens in April of this year, had something special to it. Featuring Foster alongside hot properties Abigail Breslin and Gerard Butler, the family film failed to connect with audiences or critics, but managed to become a success anyway by the time it left movie screens. It now gets its chance to shine on DVD, where 20th Century Fox hopes for it to find its way into the collections of parents nationwide.
The Movie
Nim (Breslin) is a young girl who lives on a remote island somewhere in the South Pacific. Her father Jack (Butler) is a marine biologist who is obsessed with discovering a new species of plankton; her mother was lost at sea soon after she was born. Somehow, they manage to keep in touch with the rest of the world via an internet connection…generally though, they appreciate the simple joys living on their own private paradise offers them. Nim has several animal friends who she can communicate with, including a sea lion named Selkie, a lizard named Fred, a turtle named Chica and a pelican named Galileo. One of the few things Nim loves from the outside world is the books she receives every now and then in the monthly supplies that are delivered to them, featuring a globe-trotting, Indiana Jones-like adventurer named Alex Rover. When Jack heads out one night to try and find his new species, he leaves Nim behind so she can see to the turtle’s birthing of her children. Things go well, and Nim even receives, to her amazement, an email from Alex Rover, asking her dad for help in learning more about volcanoes. She responds back posing as her dad’s research assistant; what she doesn’t know is that the real Alex Rover is in fact Alexandra Rover (Foster), an agoraphobic and neurotic mess who happens to write the Alex Rover novels. Alexandra is working on her latest novel and thus needs help figuring out more about the volcanoes; the imaginary Alex Rover that she talks to (Butler in a second role) isn’t being much help.
The day after Nim and Alexandra begin corresponding, a storm breaks out, and Jack is adrift at sea. Nim gets injured and asks for Alexandra’s help; to make matters worse, a group of tourists—believed by the over-imaginative Nim to be pirates—come to the island, looking to set up a resort. Nim asks Alexandra for help, and at the fictional Alex’s urgings, the author steps foot out of her home for the first time in forever to head to this island paradise and help Nim. She has to try and overcome her own neuroses so she can help Nim keep her island a secret from the outside world, and Jack must try to get back to them.
The biggest problem inherent in Nim’s Island is the script, based on the children’s book by Wendy Orr. The film unabashedly ignores several elements of reality in order to get its story across; in a children’s adventure film like this one, this is entirely acceptable. The problem is that it isn’t consistent in these rules. Being able to talk to animals is fine, but when Jack inexplicably starts to be able to do it midway through the film, it doesn’t make sense. The film is an uneven mix of Swiss Family Robinson, Play It Again, Sam and Home Alone, and in trying to strike a balance between the three moods, it fails badly. The early moments of the film set it up quite nicely, establishing the mood as a nice, fantastical sort of children’s story that would be easy to get lost in, but as soon as the story of Alexandra is introduced, it starts to switch back and forth between the two in a way that feels like riding a lopsided see-saw. The later moments, when Nim turns into Macaulay Culkin and starts fighting back against the “pirates,” just adds to that problem. It doesn’t help that the film doesn’t bother to treat its audience as particularly intelligent, particularly with the animals. They display, frankly, more intelligence then almost any character other than Nim herself as they retrieve tool belts and carry them over long distances, put out fires, and act like more or less like people with flippers and feathers. The semi-fantasy nature gives us some leeway, but they stretch it further then it should really be stretched, and it hurts the movie.
The acting, similarly, is largely dumbed down. Jodie Foster is a gifted dramatic actress; this is not in any doubt. She can even handle comedy moderately well, as seen in Maverick. Unfortunately, here Foster tries to expand her boundaries into the area of dumb comedy and fails miserably. Her performance as Alexandra sees her performing physical comedy in such an awkward manner that it’s painful rather than funny. She does better in the scenes where she talks with her imaginary creation, but outside of that, the entire performance is pretty much a misstep for her. Breslin is, for her part, starting to show at least a little maturity with this performance, something she’s failed to do in her past two roles, No Reservations and Definitely, Maybe. She still ends up resorting to the standard “precocious kid” more often than not, and she comes off more annoying than actually charming. On the other hand, Butler does work better than his co-stars in letting his charisma come through better, and his performance seem more natural. Even he seems forced at times, such as when he has to work with the animals, and the relationship between father and daughter doesn’t carry off particularly well, but when he’s playing the more adventurous Rover, he shines and helps hold up those portions of the movie.
What the movie does right is the visuals. The New Zealand scenery doubles very nicely for an island paradise, and it’s certainly beautiful. Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, who’s shown his talent for shooting beautiful settings in The Beautiful Country and The Piano, the latter of which he won an Oscar nomination for, does an exquisite job of giving Nim, Jack, and Alexandra a gorgeous framework in which to set their story. In fact, the majority of the fun of Nim’s Island can be found in ignoring what the director wants us to focus on, and just watching the landscape around it. It’s as much a credit to Dryburgh as it is a detraction to the rest of the movie that this is the case, but it at least gives adults something to enjoy while the kids have fun watching a seal drive tourists away with bad gas. Film Rating: 3.5
The Video
Considering most of the film is shot in a lush, beautiful jungle setting, the visuals of Nim’s Island are particularly important. The 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen video transfer is perfectly serviceable, though one could have hoped that, in a film as attractive as this, that Fox would have sprung for a higher-quality transfer then just “serviceable.” There is some noticeable grain, and blacks don’t have the proper depth they sometimes should. There is some slight pixelation and, while it’s not hugely noticeable, it does distract on higher-quality televisions.
Video Rating: 6.5
The Audio
The English 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound audio track sounds good, presenting the Patrick Doyle score nice and evenly with the dialogue and sound effects. The sound of the storm that rages through gives the speakers a decent if not overly intense workout, and the various sounds of the island jungle come across nicely, well-balanced and nicely leveled. All in all, it’s a nice listening experience, if not particularly challenging.
Audio Rating: 7.5
Special Features
Adventure Commentary with Jodie Foster and Abigail Breslin: This is the “fun commentary,” featuring Foster and Breslin chatting it up. It’s more aimed at kids, but smart enough that adults can enjoy it too, with Foster providing most of the information and Breslin being herself. There’s some good discussion, and it’s a fairly easy listen that provides some good tidbits.
Commentary with Director/Writers Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett: This is the “informative” commentary, and is superior to the Adventure Commentary in several ways. Most of it ‘s higher quality is due to the fact that Levin and Flackett are easy to listen to as well, yet provide a lot of good information from the adaptation of the book through the shooting process.
Nim’s Friends: (6:17) This featurette talks about all the animal friends, with Breslin and the animal coordinators talking at some length about what all the characters represent, and showing Breslin interacting with the animals behind the scenes. It’s cute enough, though fairly pedestrian for what you would expect and not particularly informative. The one tidbit you learn is how many animals played each of the characters (two for the seal, five for the bearded dragon and two for the pelicans).
Abigail’s Journey: (6:42) This behind-the-scenes short focuses on Breslin, and is a pretty typical piece of promotional fluff. There are the standard complimentary comments from everyone, and Breslin talking about the character. Unfortunately, amidst all the praise she receives, Breslin herself comes off as your pretty standard annoying kid actor. She’s charming, sure, but only in small doses, and this is too much unfortunately.
Working on Water: (6:06) This featurette comes off far better than the previous two. It discusses the challenges of filming on and under the water in the scenes that required it. They discuss how Breslin trained to be able to swim and stay underwater long enough to film the scenes, and highlight the difficulties of filming in the environment. There’s some showing of the green screen work they did as well. The featurette is both more informative and more fun to watch then the other two put together.
Deleted Scenes: (15:29) Most of the time, deleted scenes are fluff that wouldn’t have added anything to the film and are cut for timing. I’m sure these were cut for timing, but to say that there wouldn’t have been anything added is far from the truth. There’s a set of deleted scenes where Nim has, besides her animal friends, some great imaginary characters from her favorite books like Huck Finn, Alice in Wonderland, and Long John Silver. They would have provided some great interaction for Nim that didn’t involve non-speaking animals, given her a connection with Alexandra’s imaginary friend issues and really enhanced the story—it’s a shame they were left out. Another set of scenes introduces an assistant for Alexandra. It provides Alexandra with some scenes with good dialogue and again, would have been better left in. The last set features the Great Blue Whale as talked about in the beginning of the film by Nim. This is far less necessary, but provides some interesting and creative visuals.
Public Service Announcements: (1:46) There are a couple nature-related PSA’s, one featuring scenes from the movie to promote the National Wildlife Federation, the other using Sam the seal. They are what they are, and it’s always nice to see Hollywood doing what they can to preserve our natural resources.
Trailers: (3:02) We’ve got three direct-to-DvD trailers, for the horrible-looking Dr. Doolittle: A Tinsel Town Tail, the talking animal film Elephant Tales and high-school comedy Picture This. They all seem entirely forgettable unless you’re under sixteen.
Special Features Rating: 7.5
The 411: Try as they might, the cast and crew of Nim's Island are unable to make this anything other then a weak and dumbed-down version of a "children's adventure." The script suffers from too many moods combined into one, and Foster and Breslin fail to deliver anything of real value. Only the lush visuals and Butler's easy-going perfomance as the imaginary Alex Rover do the film any favors. The audio track and special features do it a lot of favors, but there are a lot better family films out there. Check them out instead of this one.
