Nim's Island (2008)

Nim's Island arrives from 2008, a year before cultural criticism became a full-contact sport, and it carries the soft progressive instincts of its era like a cardigan worn to a beach. Jennifer Flackett co-directs and co-writes, the protagonist is an 11-year-old girl with abundant resourcefulness, and the adult lead is a woman who must conquer her own terror to function. These are gestures toward empowerment. They are never assembled into an argument. The film is content to let a girl be capable and a woman be brave, which is agreeable and costs nothing.

The supporting architecture is similarly gentle. Jodie Foster's Alexandra Rover is an agoraphobe whose condition drives the plot, and the film treats her anxiety as a personal obstacle to be overcome with the help of a hallucinated adventurer, not as an identity to be honored. A cruise crew schemes to turn the island into a resort, which supplies a faint anti-development tingle without a single systemic thought behind it. The Pacific setting and the handful of non-white crew members exist as scenery. No one remarks on any of it. A marine biologist father chases nanoplankton, which nods at science without making a case for anything.

The result is a children's adventure that delivers its morals about courage and family through shipwrecks, sea lions, and a volcano, never through a lecture. That restraint is to its credit. It is a pleasant, harmless, mildly confused piece of filmmaking, and its cultural footprint is roughly that of a tide pool. The sequel recast everyone and vanished, which feels about right.