I just spent nearly two hours in HERE, and can clearly say there's not much there.
Robert Zemeckis has made many of my favorite films of the past 40 years.
From big box office hits like "Romancing the Stone" and "Back to the Future" to his flops like "The Walk", I am usually in sync with his films. (If you haven't seen "The Walk", I encourage you to do so now, on the biggest screen you have. It's jaw dropping.)
This time out, he spends so much time on his visual trickery, that any real emotional impact gets lost in the shuffle.
Zemeckis reunites his creative team from "Forrest Gump", including writer Eric Roth, music composer Alan Silvestri and the first pairing of actors Tom Hanks & Robin Wright since that delicious box of chocolates, and buries them in a simple trick that never sparks any true magic.
Our camera finds a spot on the ground as the film opens and never moves.
Dinosaurs roam, asteroids fall, extinctions arrive and eras pass, Native Americans hunt, a famous politician's bastard son builds a massive estate across the newly paved street and a house is constructed around us, plopping our perspective right into a spot between the living room and the kitchen.
We meet all the families that live in this house, or on its grounds.
A Native American hunt is on, a romance blossoms.
An English couple arrive, bickering from the start over his passion as a pilot in a newfangled invention called an aeroplane.
The next occupants are a funny and horny young couple, The Beekmans. He's got an eye for invention and a passion for comfortable chairs.
We meet Al (Paul Bettany) returning from WW2 to buy the house with his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly from "Yellowstone"). Their children include Richard (played by Tom Hanks as an adult).
Every time the film changes to another era, a window frame of varying sizes appears, the event begins to be seen and it takes over the whole screen. There is no rhyme or reason in the time hopping, beyond, I would assume, Roth trying to manipulate your expectations. Unfortunately, some of his time hops that I'm sure looked clever on paper, thud to Earth on screen like that Asteroid that wipes out the dinos in an early scene.
We begin to spend more time with Richard as a 19 year old and meet his girlfriend Margaret (Robin Wright). Zemeckis's effects make them look like they are in their early 20's and for all the online bitching about the effects, I think they're pretty amazing. Look! There is Hanks, on screen, in his pre-Bosom Buddies era, cutting us up! But Hanks isn't really given a lot of funny things to do. Early pregnancies happen, young aspirations and dreams fade away for necessary jobs and the film seems to go out of its way to focus on Covid (oh boy, THAT'S entertainment), the heavy emotional lift of aging parents and the regrets of the elderly.
As Silvestri's music rises in key moments, hoping to conjure up an emotional response, it rings hollow. It's the first time that I've seen one or Zemeckis' visions and visuals fail to embellish the story. I thought back to what he did for CGI performance capture with the trailblazing "The Polar Express" in 2004, or the groundbreaking interaction of animated and live actors in 1988's "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". Both movies were made better because of his maverick approach.
This time out, it feels like the framing conceit wears thin as a story device pretty quickly.
This same type of "What happens to these characters across decades" story was told much more emotionally in the flawed 1981film "The Four Seasons". A very similar tale including the dinos was brilliantly told by Terrence Malick in 2011's "The Tree of Life". It's beautiful and almost impenetrable, but it overwhelms you.
HERE never does.
Some of the virtue signaling with the Native American and African American characters is so forced, its insulting to both groups.
Nikki Amuka-Bird (Knock at the Cabin) and Nicholas Pinnock (Captain America: The First Avenger) are both superb actors, and wasted here.
Writer Eric Roth wrote "Killers of the Flower Moon" and "Munich", but his screenplay here more closely recalls his one of his earliest works, "Airport 1979: The Concorde". Forced, flat humor and long, dull sections.
The trials of Forrest and Jenny, OOPS I mean Richard and Margaret, are so everyday and predictable that the film just kind of sits there, windows opening and closing to the point of numbness.
When the camera actually does begin to sweep up and away, I was just thrilled because I knew the end titles were about to begin. How did I know? Because Silvestri's music score was swelling to full strength and a hummingbird was flying around the screen, a pale imitation of that main title feather in "Gump".
HERE goes NOwHERE and gets a C-.
It lands on screen as "Tree of Life" for dummies.
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