Here (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – From the reunited director, writer, and stars of FORREST GUMP, HERE is an original film about multiple families and a special place they inhabit. The story travels through generations, capturing the human experience in its purest form.

My Take – Often considered as one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time, Robert Zemeckis has been indeed having a hard time off late, particularly helming poorly made remakes, The Witches (2020) and Pinocchio (2022).

However, his latest was supposed to be a big event, after all it sees a 30-year reunion of his Oscar-winning Forrest Gump (1994) team: co-writer Eric Roth and co-stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. The setup itself is one of the most unique and ambitious concepts we’ve seen in a while – a multi-generational exploration of love, loss, and the passage of time, all centered on a single spot of land.

All done via the film’s gimmick of a single camera sitting in the one location, focusing on the living room of a house. But while director Zemeckis manages to utilize the space well and keep the shot dynamic despite being so static, he fails to experiment with the concept properly, resulting in a tedious and underwhelming watch.

The script, by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, who adapted it from the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, has some solid and interesting moments, yet backed by bloated plot lines, an unbalanced structure, and characters that aren’t fully developed, the emotional weight and engagement becomes more of a snooze fest.

The concept means well, teasing a potential for something truly meaningful and poignant, and of course it’s nice to see Tom Hanks and Robin Wright together again as they continue to share excellent chemistry. But nothing work due to it’s the sloppy and ham-fisted approach that really fails to do any justice.

It wants us to feel something while watching these paper-thin characters go about their lives in a house that means nothing to us without doing the work to get us there and shaking off the emptiness.

Set in single piece of land that later becomes a part of house, the story follows a Native American courtship, Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son William (Daniel Betts) during the civil war, an ambitious early pilot, John (Gwilym Lee), and his wife Pauline (Michelle Dockery), to the inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair Leo (David Fynn) and his pin-up wife Stella (Ophelia Lovibond), a WWII veteran Al (Paul Bettany) starting a family with his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly).

And then his son Richard (Tom Hanks) starting his own with Margaret (Robin Wright) and their daughter Vanessa (Zsa Zsa Zemeckis), and up-to-date with a Black family consisting of Devon (Nicholas Pinnock), Helen (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Justin (Cache Vanderpuye) dealing with racial injustice and a pandemic.

Here, the narrative is creative and the themes interesting, but Zemeckis‘ direction and the lack of emotional depth of the film ruins the whole experience.

His trick of staying in the exact same corner leaves the film feeling airless and always told at a cold distance, creating disconnect for a film filled with such simple, over-scored sentimentality. We see the film struggling to justify its length, and it never entirely does it, surprising considering it is only 104 minutes long.

The biggest complaint is obviously the non-linear storytelling and the sort of random drops into some of the stories. The tale uses one of the periods to serve as visual chapter headings to usher the next theme of life but serves little to the story and, at times, feels short-changed and worthless. This, unfortunately, extends to just about every other tale in the film that is not related to Richard, making them feel last minute and unnecessary.

A result of which the sentimental, and even potentially deep, moments aren’t given enough room to breathe, as the film moves quickly from one scene to the next and from one period to another without much thought to fluidity and cohesiveness. Even moments that are meant to be taken seriously turn out unintentionally funny.

It isn’t even exactly good on a technical level. The CGI animals look obviously fake, the faces of the de-aged actors are as distracting, and the transitions, announced whenever a white outline, usually in the form of a square or rectangle featuring a different era, get tiresome fast.

Performance wise, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright do the best they can with the restrictions of the technology that warps them through time but they’re at least as competent as they can be. Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly are decent enough, while Michelle Dockery, Gwilym Lee, Ophelia Lovibond, David Fynn, Daniel Betts, Zsa Zsa Zemeckis, Cache Vanderpuye, Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird are fine. On the whole, ‘Here’ is an ambitious experiment that ultimately fails to deliver a fully satisfying story.