Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Here’ on Netflix, Robert Zemeckis’ Time-Spanning Mega-Clunker Starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright

Here (now on Netflix) is the hyper-collision of filmmaker Robert Zemeckis’ sensibilities: boundary-pushing technical exercises and gratuitous sentimentality. In this sense, the movie is hands-down no-argument the successor to his Oscar-winning smash Forrest Gump – and that’s before you consider that Here reunites Zemeckis with a host of his Gump collaborators, including stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri and cinematographer Don Burgess. It’s the last guy who arguably has less to do this time around, considering Here is an experimental film whose camera remains fixed in one spot at one angle the entire time as it documents millions of years (millions!) worth of events occurring in a single location, using Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name as inspiration. And boy howdy, you can’t help but admire the experiment, even as it failed to find an audience ($15 million at the box office worldwide, ouch) and crashes and burns into a big heap of schmaltz in front of our eyes.

HERE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Let’s begin with the how of Here. The camera stays fixed, watching everything happening in front of it, from dinosaurs trampling through literal primordial slop to the modern-day people living in a suburban American home. Images dissolve and morph into each other; smaller frames overlap objects and people within the larger frame, fading in and out. The narrative proceeds in a nonlinear fashion, jumping back and forth through the millennia, but mostly fixating on the 20th century because Boomers made this movie. Hanks and Wright play characters from age 16 or so to 80ish, and are the victi- er, subjects of de-aging effects implemented by CG and AI and a good bit of OMG and LMFAO.    

Now for the who. The dinosaurs don’t survive extinction events; RIP to Chompo and Toothface and Littlefoot and all those guys. A nameless indigenous couple (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) fall in love on a rock in the frame, and he gives her a necklace and gets her pregnant and assures that the future residents of this space are living on, yes, an Indian burial ground. A big three-story colonial is built over yonder during the Revolutionary War era – using Black men as slave labor, it seems – and it’s the home of Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son, William (Daniel Betts). We spend a bits and bites of time with these folk, but the film mostly zooms in on the relatively contemporary residents of a home, built around 1900; our view is of its spacious living room, with a lovely bay window as a backdrop, the William Franklin colonial omnipresent through the glass.

The first residents are John (Gwilym Lee), an airplane pilot whose wife Pauline (Michelle Dockery) is terrified that he’s going to die in a horrible, horrible plane crash. During the Roaring ’20s, Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) poses for sexy photos for her hubs Leo (David Fynn) as she lies in his big invention, a reclining chair he calls a “Relax-e-boy” (note: that name sure seems destined to change). And then, the big ones move in. World War II is over and returning soldier Al (Paul Bettany) and newly preggo wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) settle in to raise a family. They’re the Youngs and, of course, we will watch them grow lowercase-o old. We also meet Helen (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Devon (Nicholas Pinnock), who occupy the space after the Youngs, dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and giving their teenage son a grave talk about what he should do if he’s ever pulled over by the police. 

The Youngs are the main focus here, though. Al and Rose’s firstborn is Richard, who will be played by Hanks as an uncanny-valley teenager who brings home his girlfriend Margaret (Wright) and knocks her up on the couch. The shotgun wedding will occur right there in the living room, as will Richard’s abandonment of his dreams of being an artist for the drudgery of making a living as an insurance salesman. The younger Youngs live with the older Youngs for a long time, because Richard worries about not being able to afford a mortgage, and also because they can’t move outside the frame lest they blow up the entire concept of the movie, which is ostensibly about the Big Questions of life and the passage of time, but also might be about Zemeckis playing god. But hey, it’s his movie, and his prerogative.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Here is out-ambitioned by The Tree of Life, which had enough loony chutzpah to contextualize its suburban-America drama by going all the way back to the Big Bang. Paranormal Activity didn’t like to move its camera very much either. Roth scripted a similarly mawkish experiment in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Let’s not forget Zemeckis’ other technological innovations – the live action/animation combo of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the motion-capture stuff of The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. Here also brings to mind the master of movies about the passage of time, Richard Linklater, but only if Richard Linklater sucked, which he absolutely doesn’t.

Performance Worth Watching: You have to commend Zemeckis for having so much confidence in his technology, he isn’t afraid to have Uncanny Valley Tom Hanks wander real close to the camera so we can all get a big eyeful of how not-quite-right he looks. Note, it’s not as freaky as many are saying, perhaps because the film doesn’t invite as much scrutiny when watched on the small screen. 

Memorable Dialogue: Roth’s script has his characters running around punching things right in the nose and hammering nails right on their heads:

Pauline: The future?

John: That’s right, Pauline. It’s the only direction we’re headed! It’s happening right now! Right here!

Sex and Skin: A few suggestive, but ultimately chaste PG-13 instances.

Our Take: All that, and I feel nothing. My raging indifference to Here stems less from the method (Zemeckis is without a doubt a brilliant technician) or its execution (de-aging tech was far, far worse in other films, and in significantly less quantity), and more from a couple of key factors in Roth’s screenplay: The dialogue is either phony, declarative junk (“Have you heard of this thing called television?”) or platitudes and aphorisms culled from fortune cookies and placards found in the home decor section of Hobby Lobby, thus burdening Tom Hanks, one of the all-time greats, with multiple banal variations of “where did all the time go?” And the general structure of this narrative lends itself to depictions of primarily the Big Moments – you know, the kind we remember through a bit of a haze – saddling the film with marryins and buryins and child-conceivins and births and deaths and volcanoes raining fire upon the earth in the cycle of destruction and rebirth, all in that very living room, or the big rock that sat there before it.

Which brings us to the why. For a movie about all-caps-necessary LIFE, it’s so counterintuitive for Zemeckis to engineer it with such visible calculation, and essentially make it all about its own structure and method. Interactions between characters show the seams of shoddy writing, which pushes the cast to shout big, broadstroked emotions to the back of the room (Reilly and Bettany are saddled with the worst of it). The Benjamin Franklin stuff is flat-out awful. The modern-Black-family scenes feel tossed in to make the lefties shut up with the woke-DEI talk, and do little more than pay lip service to representation. There’s the inevitable groanworthy scene where the TV in the living room shows the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. It’s all hokey beyond belief.

Here is so relentlessly manufactured to be a Profound Rumination on the nature of life and death and suffering and love and the passage of time, but it delivers an avalanche of achingly trite sentiment, all while the characters are perfectly centered in the frame. There’s a chance Here will wear down your cynicism, but a far greater chance this mega-clunker will wear you down to your very last nerve.

Our Call: Time flies – just like this movie when you pitch it out the window. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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