Here (2024)
Robert Zemeckis is responsible for many classic films that mean so much to so many. These include films like I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, Contact, Cast Away, and Flight. He’s also unafraid of the changes and challenges new technologies bring to the film industry, for better or worse. The thing that makes the movies listed above movies that will stand the test of time and even a handful of other films in his history that I didn’t mention, is that they are very human stories at their core. Yes, they might involve time travel, talking cartoons, unreal history, and aliens, but the main core is humanity. Even in his less acclaimed and more technologically focused films The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol, he was still focused on bringing as much of the human element to these movies through that technology. With Here, Zemeckis completely loses that touch he had while still trying to get a human story to the world. The technology overshadows and muddies anything he tries to say, but even that real human message feels unnatural and inauthentic.
Here is co-written by Robert Zemeckis and Eric Roth and based upon a comic book by Richard McGuire. Although I’ve not read the comic at this time, I’ve seen plenty of pages comparing it to the film and the difference between the art and storytelling within the comic and the storytelling within this movie is staggering. The main premise of both stories is that the whole story takes place on one screen/panel. That everything happens in one view for the audience. In this, they both try to tell the story of the world in that one frame and connect all these different times. McGuire’s comic uses the limitations of storytelling to enhance the art form. Panels upon panels layered onto each other to bring a sense of collectiveness to the storytelling. Instead of using this limitation of the frame to push the art form in interesting or creative ways, Zemeckis dumbs everything down.
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Every moment within the film is strong-armed into the living room of this house. Even if the reasoning doesn’t make logical sense to how people live or react in these situations, they will end up in this room. When touching upon the past, nothing of interest is ever captured in aframe. There is one moment where a piece of furniture is brought into a frame with a mirror to give a different flavor two-thirds of the way through the movie, but nothing interesting happens in this choice. We’re presented with very bland and basic human narratives that we could all predict with our eyes closed and our ears sewed shut.
This includes all the dialog written for the players to let fall out of their mouths. Zemeckis tries to be relevant with his narrative choices, but they are the most surface-level storytelling beats that you would learn in an introduction to writing class. Paul Bettany’s character Al suffers from PTSD from WW2 and struggles to bring home enough money to make his life the one he wants, Tom Hanks’ Richard gives up his art career to work a corporate job for most of his life letting things just happen, The Harris family (played by Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Cache Vanderpuye) a black family have a serious talk about how to handle a cop that pulls them over, all of these could go to interesting and compelling places, but they are all just the characters stating what I wrote above out loud to the audience, nothing deeper. This is for every character in the film. The script relies on the nostalgia of tragedy and the history of the world but never questions its reality or presents the audience with anything resembling a message worth more than a Hallmark card.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright save the movie from being a complete disaster as they both somehow bring emotional performances out of this script, and you can still connect to them as the movie progresses. Zemeckis still finds a way to kneecap these two leads by bringing his obsession with modern technology into filmmaking. De-aging actors have been around for a while now. I remember the first time I came across it in Captain America: Civil War. A de-aged Robert Downey Jr. appeared on screen, and it felt almost believable. Scorsese would use this technology in the Irishman to lesser success, but still an interesting use of it. De-aging technologies have gotten to the point that “Deep Fakes” have become popular. Deep Faking is AI machine learning mapping another person’s face onto yours. It’s become quite easy to use for a lot of people in the modern landscape. According to Hanks on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron, Deep Fake technology is what they used Here. Although I haven’t read anywhere else that shows what kind of de-aging techniques are used, Deep Fakes make the most sense based on the quality we see on screen. The issue with this is that Deep Fakes still look bad. The skin of the person who it is used on looks completely unnatural. Faces never fold or wrinkle in the right way. In high definition, there is no texture to the face. Every time a younger Hanks or Wright shows up, they look completely unnatural to the audience until they become near their actual age. There are moments where characters are even aged past their current age and for that, the use of practical age makeup is used and it looks so much better.
So where does that leave us? Here left me wanting to leave. It upset me that there is so much creative talent in the source material and within the cast and crew who made the film, but nothing came across on screen. That we received a movie full of sentiment, but lacking anything real to be sentimental about. It makes you wonder where all the interesting movies have gone because they certainly are not Here. — 2/10
