As a commercially oriented, artistically ambitious, innovation-embracing filmmaker, Robert Zemeckis (Death Becomes Her, the Back to the Future trilogy, Romancing the Stone) enjoyed an unparalleled pre-21st century career where box-office, critic-approved hits far outweighed the occasional misses or missteps.
Awards recognition wasn't a matter of if, but when. Nominated for several Academy Awards, Zemeckis won a Best Director award in 1994 for Forrest Gump. As Forrest Gump's title character, Tom Hanks won his second back-to-back acting (Hanks won his first for Philadelphia a year earlier).
Seven years later, a second Zemeckis-Hanks collaboration, Cast Away, proved almost as commercially and artistically rewarding. It was The Polar Express, their third time as director and actor (motion-captured via relatively new tech) that doubled as the first major misstep of Zemeckis's career, not due to the subject matter, a kid-friendly animated effort, but in the director's failure, the first of several, to recognize the limitations of visual effects, specifically computer-generated ones, to deliver the kind of seamless blend of character, story, and theme Zemeckis obviously wanted.
Justifiably dismissed then -- and now -- as an unfortunate overreach (the technology did not meet the moment), 2004's The Polar Express visibly suffered from Zemeckis's unwillingness to recognize, let alone, embrace the inherent flaws in then current technology. The result left moviegoers in cringe-induced mode with the dead-eyed, ghoulish result, but that didn't stop a fixated Zemeckis from trying -- and failing -- with Beowulf in 2007 and again in 2012 with A Christmas Carol. Both failed commercially and artistically to varying degrees, the latter finally ending Zemeckis's obsession with mo-capped-based, computer-animated filmmaking.
After a belated return to live-action filmmaking with Flight in 2012, Zemeckis seemed eager to leave his obsession with computer-animated storytelling behind and recenter his career toward human-centered stories, keeping the formal experimentation and boundary-pushing visual effects to a minimum. A decade and three films (The Witches, Allied, The Walk) of varying quality later, Zemeckis reunited with Hanks for a woefully misguided, unessential adaptation of Pinocchio and now Here, a head-scratcher of an adaptation of onetime Liquid Liquid's ("Cavern") bass player Richard McGuire's critically acclaimed, eons-spanning 2014 graphic novel.
While Hanks once again plays a lead role in Here, Zemeckis's latest big-screen effort follows the graphic novel's central conceit, fixing the camera in one, singular spot for the entirety of the film's 104-minute runtime. The camera doesn't move (with one, late-film noticeable exception), but time with a capital "T" does, spanning the fall of the dinosaurs (that pesky asteroid makes a predictable appearance), the arrival of mammals to the American continent, before fast-forwarding to Native Americans, and Anglo-British colonialists (Ben Franklin gets an unusual number of shout-outs), eventually settling on three 20th-century families or generations, starting chronologically with John Harter (Gwilym Lee), an adventurous sort with an aviation obsession, and his perpetually worried wife (Michelle Dockery), before briefly moving on to an amorous younger couple, Leo (David Flynn) and Stella Beckman (Ophelia Lovibond), and the home they share sequentially.
Most of Here, however, concerns itself with the Young family, first of Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his wife, Rose (Kelly Reilly), and their son, Richard (Hanks, mo-capped, smoothed up, and wrinkled down to reflect the decades covered in Here), and Margaret (Robin Wright, reuniting with Zemeckis and Hanks for the first time in 40 years). We follow a young, impressionable, unambitious Richard as he romances, falls in love with, and marries Margaret, and then contrary to all good or common sense, never leaves, remaining in his parents' home as they age, shuffling off their respective mortal coils, and finds himself and Margaret facing the end of their lives -- and their story -- together.
The immobile camera set-up undoubtedly intrigues as both an animating concept and formalist experiment, representing a welcome desire on Zemeckis's part to keep pushing past filmmaking boundaries, but as with all cinema, it's the execution that matters. In Here, that execution quickly becomes tiresome, then irritating, and finally, exhausting.
It's as artificial and contrived as anything found in the bottom half of Zemeckis's filmography. Adhering without variation to the central conceit forces the characters to move in and out of the fixed frame gracelessly, awkwardly moving closer to the camera to approximate a mid-shot or close-up, and delivering faux-profound dialogue about the meaning of life, love, and everything in between with that unmistakable computer-generated, soulless sheen typical of de-aging effects.
While we can't really fault the performers or their performances, it's still fair to ask why Hanks, Wright, and the rest of the cast signed onto Here, given Zemeckis's previous effects-driven missteps, the inherent limitations of the central conceit, or the wobbly, maudlin, ultimately underwhelming script Zemeckis co-write with Academy Award-winning Forrest Gump scribe Eric Roth. Maybe, like Zemeckis, they jumped at the challenge because it offered something new and novel. Maybe they simply wanted to work with Zemeckis again. Or maybe there was simply a hole in their respective schedules.
Whatever the reason, it seems no one answered the simplest question of all, "Just because you can, does it mean you should?" If someone, anyone had, Here probably wouldn't have been made.
The film opens Friday, November 1, only in movie theaters, via Sony Pictures Releasing.