Oh, the once-great Robert Zemeckis. The man who gave us Back to the Future has gotten into a bit of a rut by putting technological advancements in front of good storytelling and solid filmmaking.
I think it all started with The Polar Express, one of the animated films I hate the most, in which Zemeckis gave cartoon characters inhabited by the likes of Tom Hanks a ghoulish, creepy quality by “pioneering” an all-digital-capture approach. He broke ground, but it looked like shit.
With Here, he got Forrest Gump’s Hanks and Robin Wright together again for an all-new attempt to break ground. This time, he’s going to tell the entire story of one parcel of land, from dinosaur times up until the modern day, without moving the camera.
So … we see dinos running around, Native Americans hanging out, Benjamin Franklin (yeah, the guy with the kite) riding in a horse and buggy, and eventually characters played by Hanks, Wright and others aging through the years. Zemeckis uses randomly placed square frames as viewfinders into different times in the same place, including an eventual house, setting the moves from one period to another.
At times, it’s almost impressive. The aging and de-aging of the performers is some of the best put to screen yet—despite some bad wigs—and the film isn’t as tedious as it could’ve been. But it’s hard to get invested in the story (there really isn’t one), and some of the acting comes off as rather stage-y, like this is some sort of subpar adaptation of a play to film.
Here was better than I thought it was going to be, but I still didn’t like it. Zemeckis, yet again, has put technology before actual storytelling, and the results of him trying to be a maverick become too unbearable and distracting. Hey, Robert: You are already a maverick. You made Back to the Future. Just tell us a good story the next time, and leave your crazy film toolbox at home.
Here is available via various streaming services.