PLOT: The events and people who occupy a single spot of land are followed from pre-history to 2024.
REVIEW: Robert Zemeckis is a director who’s always been well ahead of the industry regarding technical innovation. Many of his movies, including Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and, yes, even Forrest Gump, are classics. With Here, he once again tries to innovate, with a static shot of a single spot of land being followed from the dinosaur era to today. Most of the film revolves around the inhabitants of a colonial home built for the son of Benjamin Franklin. Eventually, it is occupied by many different families, with the most significant emphasis being placed on the Young Family.
It’s here that Zemeckis once again tries to innovate in terms of VFX. He uses AI-enhanced de-aging technology to depict about eighty years in the life of this family, with Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Tom Hanks, and Robin Wright all playing their characters at various stages in their lives.
The saga of the Young Family initially starts off as somewhat stilted and frustrating, with Bettany’s Al an alcoholic war veteran who – while well-meaning – is so unhappy that no one in his orbit seems capable of fulfilling themselves. His son, Richard, who’s played by Hanks from age 18 to 80, is utterly unable ever to leave the family nest behind, even once he starts a family of his own with his wife Margaret (Robin Wright), whose dissatisfaction eventually leads to deep fissures in their marriage.
Here, which is adapted from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel by Zemeckis and his Forrest Gump collaborator Eric Roth, tries to tell us a deeply human story about the changing dynamics of a family in crisis. But it’s too scattershot ever to be truly effective. The chunks of the story focused on Hanks and Wright are affecting, thanks both to their superb chemistry and performances, but they have to compete with other storylines from different eras, none of which can really hold our attention. A chapter involving an inventor (David Flynn) and his wife (Ophelia Lovibond) is mainly played as a screwball comedy, while a chunk involving Benjamin Franklin feels like a reject from Hulu’s awful History of the World Part 2. It detracts from the premise more than enhances it. The entire movie should have been devoted to the Young Family.
As for the much talked about AI de-aging, it’s a mixed bag. Certainly, the de-aging here is far better than we’ve seen in anything else, including Scorsese’s The Irishman, and in long shots, the results are striking. At times, Hanks looks like he has just walked off the set of Bosom Buddies. But, in close-up, the CGI suffers from the same dead-eye uncanny valley effect we’ve seen repeatedly in films of this ilk. It should have been used more sparingly, even on Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly, to make them look like they’re in their twenties. Both are young enough that a bit of makeup would have been enough to do a more convincing job than the CGI.
Overall, I’d say that about forty minutes of this 100-minute movie really work. At his best, Zemeckis is still able to tell a solid story, even if his needle drops, as always, are a little too on the nose (using “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is way too obvious). As it is, the movie is too scattershot to work, with many of the sequences not involving Hanks and Wright falling flat or feeling tacked on. It’s an interesting experiment, and with a tighter, more disciplined focus, it might have really been something.
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