HERE (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Here, Tristar Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 31, 2024

Here is less concerned with people and more so with a place, and it's less interested in a place than it is in a gimmick. The gimmick of co-writer/director Robert Zemeckis' semi-experimental movie is everything in the story is viewed from a fixed perspective. Basically, the camera doesn't move from a single angle, which, at some point in the early 20th century, becomes a point situated within the living room of a suburban Philadelphia house. People live, love, fight, and, yes, die in this room over the course of a bit more than 100 years, but like Zemeckis' shot selection itself, the drama here is inert.

This isn't just the story of the house or people within it, because the house is only a recent addition in the long stretch of time that makes up the history of this planet. Early on, we see dinosaurs scurrying about amidst the sweltering plains of prehistory, until their existence is suddenly stopped by a space rock that appears to crash a few miles from the camera. That certainly isn't accurate but definitely doesn't add anything in the way of context about the human lives that will eventually emerge after an ice age passes and vegetation reemerges in this place.

Time is very much on the minds of Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Eric Roth, who have adapted a graphic novel by Richard McGuire. The medium of the source material seems a more appropriate one for this story than a movie, and maybe that's why Zemeckis also includes little boxes in the frame that show what was or will be happening in this space in the past or the future. Some argue that film is primarily or purely a visual medium, and this, perhaps, is that limited view of what's possible with the form of cinema taken to its extreme. The storytelling here is almost exclusively in the visuals, and it's a dull, repetitive, and tiresome experience.

That's mainly because it is essentially a single visual, filled with different items and period details and characters who sometimes don't even look quite human. That last part comes from Zemeckis' career-long desire to embrace and push new technology in his filmmaking. In this case, it means we're watching the likes of Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, and Kelly Reilly digitally "de-aged" as the lives of their characters unfold over several decades.

It's never convincing, because the younger versions of the actors look like animated wax sculptures. In one moment, Hanks does some flailing with his arms, and the digital model simply cannot keep up with his movements. The thing on screen appears to morph into something unnatural for the briefest but most unsettling of moments.

Those characters make up the bulk of the story, if that's what watching the highlights of what occasionally happens in a single room over the course of about 70 years can be called. Al (Bettany), a military veteran (who has lost his hearing in combat but apparently has a miraculous recovery after moving into this place), and his wife Rose (Reilly) buy the house after World War II. The two go about their lives, with him working as a salesman and her quietly wishing for more, and have three kids, including a rambunctious boy who grows up to be Hanks' Richard.

Richard meets and falls in love with Margaret (Wright)—all of it off-screen, obviously. They have a kid of their own, move in with Richard's parents, and go about lives that mirror Al and Rose's.

The narrative holds other reflections, including other love stories and a couple of pandemics that lead to momentary mourning. Those other tales are spread across centuries, as a romance between an indigenous couple (played by Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum), the story of the invention of a reclining chair, the apparently ironic fate of an early pilot (played by Gwilym Lee) and his worrisome wife (played by Michelle Dockery), the quickest of history lessons about a Founding Father's illegitimate son, and the lives of a Black family (played by Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Cache Vanderpuye) in a more recent time that kind of cruelly plays a game with what could happen to their teenage son.

It's a dramatically static collection of little moments, suggesting bigger thoughts about the course of history and the unstoppable movement of time. What's strangest, then, about Here is how the filmmakers simply latch on to those suggestions as the intellectual and, when it's not actively manipulating us with tragedies (not to mention Alan Silvestri's corny score), emotional core of the movie. It doesn't do anything with or say much about those ideas, except when Richard keeps intoning, "Time sure does fly." Not while watching this, it doesn't.

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