Robert Zemeckis has never been afraid to experiment. He did so marvelously with the blend of live action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and so-so as one of the first major filmmakers to utilize motion-capture technology for The Polar Express. His latest movie experiment, Here, tells a story of the lives lived in a single location from the dawn of the dinosaurs to today, all from a single, unmoving perspective.
Thankfully the movie skims over the dinosaurs pretty quickly and instead focuses on a time frame of about 400 years or so, focusing on different families that live in the same house. We spend most of the time with two generations of a family as they go through life, love and death, portrayed primarily by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, Zemeckis' Forrest Gump co-stars, reuniting for the first time in 30 years. Adding to it all, the script was written by Forrest Gump's Oscar-winning scribe Eric Roth.
But Forrest Gump this movie is not. In fact, Here is easily one of the worst movies I've seen this year.
Here is based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire. I haven't read the source material, but I can understand how it would work in that form. And it's possible that telling a story entirely just one perspective and seeing the events unfold in the designated space could have worked, but Zemeckis doesn't do nearly enough to achieve that.
The movie is composed like a stage play. It feels as if the actors were instructed not to turn their back to the camera, limiting what they can do in the space. It also seems to have impacted how the cast performed, like they are acting for the audiences in the back of the house, forgetting that the screen is 50 feet wide and we can see and hear them fine. And this is not a bad cast — Hanks, Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly and Michelle Dockery are among the players, all great talents — but they are hamstrung by the movie's setup and a hammy script filled with eye-rolling generalizations about life and attempts to be either too cute or too clever in showing how life parallels itself across generations.
There are also about six different storylines that we check in on from time to time, at least two of which offer absolutely no real value to the story (the William Franklin drop ins and the bit about the inventor of the La-Z-Boy). While we spend the most time with the Hanks and Wright storyline, at least these other ones offer some interesting tidbits here or there, but not enough to make this one hour and 44 minute movie feel like anything but a slog.
To make matters worse, the movie just looks bad. I understand that to pull off the idea Zemeckis wanted, filming in an actual location without the aid of green screen would have been difficult, if not impossible. But the background that we have no choice but to look at for the entirety of the movie just looks fake. Then there are instances were Hanks and Wright are digitally de-aged to play the younger versions of themselves (and one where Hanks is not the stand-in but his voice is awkwardly inserted for the young actor), a technique that still has a bit of the uncanny valley feel to it. But the biggest sin is that when the camera finally does move in the movie's final moments to show the world outside these four walls, the house and town look entirely computer animated, and obviously so. They couldn't figure out how to create a camera movement transition to actually show a real place, something movies have been doing for years?
I don't blame Zemeckis for wanting to experiment with format, but that clearly took precedence here. And when you do that the story and performances are bound to suffer. That's what unfortunately happened here.
Here releases in US movie theaters on November 1; it arrives in the UK on January 17, 2025.
