Here (dir. Robert Zemeckis)
Certificate: 12A
Running Time: 104 mins
UK Distributor: Curzon
UK Release Date: 17 January 2025
WHO’S IN HERE?
Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, Gwilym Lee, Ophelia Lovibond, David Fynn, Leslie Zemeckis, Lauren McQueen, Beau Gadsdon, Jonathan Aris, Daniel Betts, Harry Marcus, Albie Salter, Lilly Aspell, Joel Oulette, Dannie McCallum, Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Cache Vanderpuye, Anya Marco Harris, Zsa Zsa Zemeckis, Dexter Sol Ansell, Stuart Bowman, Angus Wright, Tony Way, Jemima Rooper, Mohammed George
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Robert Zemeckis (director, writer, producer), Eric Roth (writer), Bill Block, Derek Hogue and Jack Rapke (producers), Alan Silvestri (composer), Don Burgess (cinematographer), Jesse Goldsmith (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A peek into the lives of many people throughout time, from the same exact spot…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HERE?
On the one hand, we should be thankful that there are still high-profile filmmakers out there like Robert Zemeckis who are eager to experiment with their craft every now and then, whether it’s creating fully motion-captured animated adventures like The Polar Express or selling his soul to Disney for his flavourless take on Pinocchio. But on the other hand, when the filmic experiment being conducted is fundamentally flawed from the start, as it sadly is in his latest feature Here, it raises the question of whether such visionaries should be allowed to go ahead with their wacky ideas.
The central hook of Here, adapted by Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel of the same name, is that for the whole duration of the film, the camera remains fixed in a single spot, never moving forward or backward, or even to any close-up shots aside from the times its actors move directly in front of the frame. This is done not just to replicate how it was in the original source material, but also to give the film a visual metaphor of life passing by at rapid speed, whether it’s by years or centuries or even millennia. However, what may have literally worked on paper does not translate as well onto the screen, for Zemeckis’s adaptation is crucially detached from the emotional connections that it clearly wants its viewers to feel, much of it coming from this ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful experiment.
As mentioned, the film spans thousands of years in the exact same spot, from the moment when that asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, to an Indigenous romance in pre-colonial America, to the home of Benjamin Frankin’s offspring, to even the inventor of what would become the La-Z-Boy chair. Most of the film, though, focuses on a couple of generations within the same family, beginning with war veteran Al (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) moving into the house that’s been built around this viewpoint, starting a family together, and then later becoming early grandparents when their eldest son Richard (Tom Hanks) gets his girlfriend Margaret (Robin Wright) pregnant. Richard and Margaret eventually marry and raise their child in the same house, and over the years they go through all the motions of family life, all while the audience watches from this corner of the room.
That’s just the problem, though: practically all of Here is shown from this single corner of the room. Therefore, every single important event in all these characters’ lives appears to unfold in this one location, whether it’s a crucial first meeting of a lover’s parents or a heated relationship-defining confrontation, or sometimes even a wedding and (in more than one instance) a funeral. It’s almost comical how Zemeckis attempts to cram every major event into an impractical space, just so they can fit within the frame he’s intentionally restricted from ever moving, thereby making it so much more convoluted than it ever needed to be. Furthermore, the fixed placement of the camera means that much of the acting happens far away, which also creates a chasm between the viewer and the emotional connection they’re meant to make with these characters, for they’re either too far away to fully absorb their quiet and layered feelings (largely conveyed through facial cues), or awkwardly staged so that most times their backs are facing us or even blocked by other objects.
Try as he does to insert enough heartfelt whimsy and drama into the narrative, not to mention so many utterances of the word “here” that one could almost play a drinking game where one would be passed out by the time we reach the turn of the century, Zemeckis is unable to separate the classicism from the attraction. Adding to this is a heavy reliance on de-aging visual effects, especially on the younger versions of Hanks and Wright’s characters, which like most such CGI not only looks uncanny and off-putting in a couple of frames, but the lack of agility in the aged actors means that these are some oddly stiff teenagers (albeit not quite as much as how “young” Robert De Niro came across in The Irishman, but around that same level of disbelief). That’s nothing against the performances themselves, for when you have good actors like Hanks, Wright, Paul Bettany et al, you just know that they’re going to make it work with what they’ve been given, but within the restrictive framing of their director, who seems to be more obsessed with the gimmick than with actually telling an interesting story over an extended period of time, they can only do so much.
Most damaging, though, is the fact that the multiple stories being told within this one space just aren’t that interesting. One could argue that the point of Here is to simply show life go by, no matter how uneventful it may be, but since there is not much of an emotional connection being made with any of these characters, especially since it is all told out of order and frequently cutting back and forth throughout time (via some admittedly impressive editing tricks), the concept is rendered impractical as you’re mainly just watching thing happen without any real investment. For instance, I haven’t even mentioned one sub-plot set during the Gilded Age with Michelle Dockery living with Bohemian Rhapsody’s Gwilym Lee, but that’s because nothing substantial truly happens here – see, now I’m doing it! – while the non-linear structure means that it’s a while before we ever cut back to them, at a point when you’ve almost forgotten about them until it suddenly brings us back to their uninteresting occupation of this space.
In the end, Zemeckis’s ambition is admirable, as is his willingness to still play around with flashier filmmaking tools, but Here is a structurally and practically flawed experiment, one that no amount of good intentions can turn into the success that it so desperately thrives to be.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Here is an ambitious but fatally flawed filmmaking experiment that sees director Robert Zemeckis focus too much on his ultimately limiting framework to establish any real emotional connection within his multi-century narrative.
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