Fanciful adventure fun for the whole family. Nim Rusoe(Abigal Breslin)is a young girl that lives on a deserted island with her scientist father Jack(Gerard Butler). He is more interested in one cell creatures in the ocean, while Nim's best friends are a bearded dragon lizard named Fred, Galileo the pelican and Selkie the sea lion. The island paradise is full of adventure and imagination runs wild. While Jack is lost at seal, Nim reaches out via e-mail to her favorite author Alex Rover, who has turned out a series of adventure books about the self-named hero. The author is actually not the rugged swashbuckler adventurer in Nim's imagination, but Alexandra Rover(Jodie Foster), petite and germ obsessed, who lives like a hermit in her San Francisco apartment. Alexandra has hit a writer's block and wants to see for herself the volcano Jack had written about in National Geographic. She makes it to the tropical paradise and helps Nim wait out her father's return. Foster is at times humorous playing second fiddle to a too-damn cutsie, cutsie Breslin.