‘Here’ review: Tom Hanks can’t save movies using de-aging technology

Robert Zemeckis’ latest film is insanely ambitious, starting with the dinosaurs and ending today with the Roomba. But it is fixed in only one place.

“Here” reunites Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth and actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, which collaborated on “Forest Gump.” This time they’re not telling the larger story of a man moving through time – they’re telling the centuries-old story of a living room and all the different people who lived there.

In this living room we see a wedding, a death, a birth, a marriage test, a funeral, lots of vacuuming, lots of birthdays, Christmas and Thanksgivings, some sex, adults getting drunk and Jazzercise.

Zemeckis sets the camera at a fixed angle for the entire film’s 105-minute duration without moving. It’s not that strange after a while – so bursting with life is every shot and vignette – but there’s a nagging sense that we’re in some kind of cinematic experiment, like testing an audience on how long they’ll watch old security camera footage .

The camera may not move, but eras do, melting back and forth in time from prehistory, to the 18th century, to the 1940s, back to the hunter-gatherer era, and then the 60s and 70s before hitting early 1900s. It begins and ends in 2022.

Hanks and Wright form the backbone of the film, as Richard and Margaret. Over dozens of small scenes, we watch him as a boy grow up in the house and fall in love with Margaret, marry, move her in, have a baby and inherit it all. Whether they survive as a couple is not guaranteed.

Zemeckis is a filmmaker known for incorporating the latest in technology, and this time it’s ablation as a visual effect that basically transforms 68-year-old Hanks into what he looked like while filming “Splash.” It’s a lot of work, often clumsy, and Zemeckis is lost in the uncanny valley, trying to tell a very human story about what unites us, but by changing the actors so much that the human connection is lost. Look closely and you’ll see cigarette smoke enter one character but never come out.

Other roles include Richard’s parents – played brilliantly Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly—and some unrelated people: a fun-loving couple who lived in the home from 1925 to 1944, and a less fun couple in the early 1900s. There’s a 17th-century native couple frolicking in the space the living room will take over in 300 years, and another family riding out in 2020 in the house in the middle of the pandemic.

If that’s not enough, we have an appearance by Benjamin Franklin. Why Benjamin Franklin? He is connected to the house across the street. What he adds is not entirely clear. The movie could do with fewer Founding Fathers and cute details like hummingbirds.