Nim's Island - movie review

Ok, so those close to me will know that I am bonkers over the Scottish actor, Gerard Butler. So of course I took off early from work today to go see his new movie on THE day it came out! And I dragged Jennifer, who also has an appreciation of Gerard Butler's body... of work. :)

First, the movie is based on the children's book by Wendy Orr. I'd never heard of her or the book before I found out about the movie, but I have since bought it and it is very skinny. No, I haven't read it yet, but I will. I'm in the middle of a library book, but that's another post.

Basic plot, we have the Little Miss Sunshine kid playing Nim, a very precocious 9 year old (or maybe 10) who lives on an uncharted island with her widowered (sp?) father, a marine biologist, played by GB. Basically, the island is a modern day Gilligan's Island island. They've built quite a nice home on this island and they have the internet and all the modern amenities. Frankly, if I could be guaranteed to have internet and satellite TV, I'd live there in a heartbeat. Especially if GB is available to maybe teach me to swim. But I digress. So dad decides to go off for a couple of days in search of a unknown species of plankton and gets in a storm and wrecks his boat. And while I have seen plenty of GB movies in which his character dies, I was reassured by two things... 1) this is a kids movie, and 2) Jodie Foster's character, Alex(andra) Rover, is a writer of adventure novels and talks to her imaginary hero (Alex Rover) (also played by GB!) So this movie is a GB two-fur!

Anywho, Alexandra Rover sits in an apartment in San Francisco, never leaving it, and writes these novels about her fictitious hero's travels all over the world. She does a lot of Google-ing. She's agoraphobic. Nim loves her books, but doesn't realize that they're fiction. So she writes Rover for help, thinking she's going to get a hunky hero, and instead she gets this very scared woman who spends a lot of the movie arguing with her imaginary hero Alex Rover. It was fun and entertaining.

I should mention that Nim has pets. Not the usual cat, dog, hamster. She has a sea lion named Selkie and a big lizard named Fred. (And I know that it's a big turtle and NOT a sea lion in the picture, but I wanted to get Fred in here somehow, and I couldn't find a picture of both of them! I don't remember the turtle's name. I'm not anti-turtle.) These are very adorable pets and wonderful actors. Especially Fred. I think I'd like a lizard like Fred.. but I don't know how Gizmo would react. I'll have to consider that before I shop.

Again, because this is a kid's movie, based on a kid's book, I can't say the movie was heavy on plot, but it was very entertaining, and I will have no problem adding this DVD to the Gerard Butler wing of my DVD collection. Jennifer asked me if I preferred the father character or the Alex Rover hero character. That's a hard question because the father was great in that sexy intelligent way, but he didn't have GB's Scottish accent (and we all know that "if it's not Scottish, it's CRAP!"); the hero character was rather intense, but he had the accent. So we agreed that the father, if he had the accent, was our choice.

The final vote is 2 thumbs up (or 4 if you count Jennifer) for Nim's Island. Go see it. Take your kids.. or someone else's kids.