What the hell is Robert Zemeckis still doing here?

I’ve more than said my piece about Robert Zemeckis by this point. With all due respect to his past successes and innovations, he’s cooked. This should’ve been firmly established with the triple-whammy of Welcome to Marwen, The Witches (2020), and Pinocchio (2022). Any one of those movies would’ve been enough to destroy literally any other director’s career immediately. But I guess Zemeckis somehow still has enough goodwill left over to indulge in another new cinematic experiment.

Thus we have Here, a non-sequential film that hops between various time periods spanning from the extinction of the dinosaurs clear up to the present day. The gimmick is that the camera never moves at any point in all those 65 million years, and the film primarily takes place in the living room of a house built around the camera. So naturally, the main selling point is the use of cutting-edge CGI and AI algorithms to portray different people at different ages across different time periods.

Of course the other big draw is the reunion of Zemeckis with his Forrest Gump co-leads Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. They play the central couple of the most prominent recurring storyline, growing up in the post-war era of Zemeckis’ treasured childhood memories (see also: Back to the Future). We also get spirited performances from Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly in the roles of Hanks’ parents.

That’s it, folks. That’s pretty much the whole movie. It’s not even worth going into detail about the various storylines because the characters are all one-dimensional at best and none of the storylines go anywhere. As a tech demo, it’s impressive. But as a narrative, the storylines are too jumbled and disconnected to make a decent story. As a thematic rumination on the fleeting nature of time, the characters don’t sit still long enough to drill down into anything more insightful than “time flies”.

I’m seriously at a loss for anything else to say about this movie. It’s 100 minutes of ingenious transitions, beautiful CGI, and tedious melodrama. The jokes aren’t funny and the drama isn’t compelling because the characters and conflict are paper-thin.

Even the stellar de-aging effects seem less impressive upon the recollection that the AI is being used on actors with careers spanning several decades. These are actors whose faces have been filmed from every possible angle in every possible lighting at every age from adulthood onward. Any LLM worth using would have an easy time after training with that much data.

At this point, I feel compelled to point out that the script was co-written by Eric Roth. The man who co-wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and both of Deni Villenueve’s Dune movies. The man is not known for brevity. Roth is the screenwriter you go to for huge grandiose epics that pack five hours of material into a three-hour runtime. And I don’t know how Roth confined himself to only 100 minutes this time, but it feels significantly longer.

Here feels like a bleeding-edge tech demo that got expanded into a feature-length blockbuster because there was no other way to procure the necessary budget. While the film doesn’t exactly overstay its welcome at only 100 minutes, it really should’ve been half an hour long at most. There simply isn’t enough story, character development, comedy, or thematic insight to justify going any longer.

This one isn’t aggressively bad, but it’s not worth anyone’s time, certainly not when Oscar season is coming up. Not recommended.