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Robert Zemeckis’s ambitions make sense. They’re admirable, even. From Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) to Forrest Gump (1994), his career has repeatedly sought to discover how technology can be used to tell old stories in an entirely new fashion. But the quest backfires – and increasingly so in his run of uncanny valleys this century, among them The Polar Express (2004) and Pinocchio (2022) – when there’s a failure to ask how said technology informs the story being told, beyond simply allowing it to exist. In more simple terms, to quote a film by Zemeckis’s mentor Steven Spielberg: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Here fits the bill perfectly. It’s bold in theory, a struggle to sit through in practice. The film is adapted from Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel, in which panels are layered over each other in order to depict an anonymous living room corner across time, as we become silent observers through decades and centuries of mundane incidents. It renders individual existence as small but precious.
Zemeckis replicates those panels-within-panels as a way to transition between scenes but without the graphic beauty of McGuire’s drawings. He may slingshot between eras – dinosaurs, the Lenni Lenape people pre-colonisation, the American Revolutionary War – yet we’re largely watching snippets from 20th- and 21st-century life play out in a static wide shot. For the most part, we’re stuck with the same family: Al Young (Paul Bettany), returning from the frontlines of the Second World War, his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), their eldest son Richard (Tom Hanks), and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright), who first moves in after she becomes pregnant at the age of 18.
It’s an idea that’s fresher in the realm of cinema, yet fairly routine in the world of museums and theme parks. And because we’re so physically detached from these actors’ expressions, performances are locked in broad, theatrical mode: every line is terribly well-pronounced, and limbs fly about in exaggerated gestures. Wright and Hanks, in particular, often have to fight against the forces of generative AI, used to create a kind of “digital makeup” to age them both up and down – applied to the footage not in post-production but in real-time, on set. It renders them both dead-eyed and waxy.
Here is seemingly intended by Zemeckis as a homage or companion piece to Forrest Gump. He wrote the script with its screenwriter, Eric Roth; has reunited its stars Hanks and Wright; and applied that same naive, sickly sweet optimism, in which America’s little dreamers are given the weight of the mythic. We meet the previous owners of the house: suffragette Pauline (Michelle Dockery) warning her husband John (Gwilym Lee) against those newfangled flying machines, and inventor Leo (David Fynn) with his adoring pin-up bride Stella (Ophelia Lovibond). But their lives are all primarily driven by the forces of dramatic irony. Not a single character or emotion feels genuinely human.
And it’s all made worse by the somewhat tone-deaf way the film acknowledges its non-white characters: the two Lenni Lenape (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum), a 21st-century Black family (Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Cache Vanderpuye), and their Latina domestic worker (Anya Marco Harris). We learn nothing about their lives beyond a few “timely” conversations about police brutality and Covid-19. Barely respected as characters, they’re instead treated as obligations. If the point of Here is merely to observe ordinary life, why is it so stilted? So plainly manipulated? What, then, is the point of all this technology, beyond its mere existence?
Dir: Robert Zemeckis. Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly. Cert 12A, 104 mins.
‘Here’ is in cinemas from 17 January
This post was originally published on here
