Robert Zemeckis’ film “Here” is an object lesson in how to take a touching idea and make an extremely annoying movie out of it. “Here” is like “Leave It to Beaver” with CGI, alcoholism, COVID and an F-bomb. Even in the nostalgic film’s darkest moments, it’s wholesome as hopscotch. That Tom Hanks stars in it only piles on the powdered sugar.
Robert Zemeckis’ film “Here” is an object lesson in how to take a touching idea and make an extremely annoying movie out of it.
The “Forrest Gump” director’s lofty concept, adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, is that a single camera sits in one spot for the entirety of the film as the action jumps back and forth through time.
So, the viewers witness decades of scenes play out in the living room of an old house.
An omnipresent spy cam observes births, deaths, weddings, funerals, Thanksgivings, Christmases, divorces and reunions all within four walls.
Isn’t that nice?
Cloyingly so, as fashioned by Zemeckis. “Here” is like “Leave It to Beaver” with CGI, alcoholism, COVID and an F-bomb. Even in the nostalgic film’s darkest moments, it’s wholesome as hopscotch. That Tom Hanks stars in it only piles on the powdered sugar.
But it’s not the story of just one family, or even one millennium. The ambitious movie erratically traverses the timeline to make the point that the house you bought has a long-lost history.
Had “Here” been more thoughtfully written and not acted by automatons, that conclusion could have been profound. Instead, it’s painfully obvious.
The “Back to the Future” director again reunites with Hanks, who plays Richard Young, the closest thing without drywall that “Here” has to a main character. Starting off as an old man, he walks into a sunlit modern living room only for the shot to fade away to the era of dinosaurs.
Zemeckis whooshes back … to the Cretaceous! The good old days when Pennsylvania apparently had volcanoes. The dinos’ extinction is then followed by the Ice Age and makes a giant leap to the earliest human inhabitants, about 11,500 years ago.
