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Here Movie Review

Here is a 2024 drama film directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. It’s a very original, experimental film, but one that ultimately didn’t quite work.

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“I could spend the rest of my life here“

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Multiple generations of couples and families inhabit the same home over the course of a century in this experimental film from Zemeckis, a filmmaker who has turned his attention to technical innovations in recent years. It’s a shame that this once incredible director has forgotten how to make a meaningful, well crafted story that is more than just a technical treat.

This movie was based on a graphic novel and it’s a very intriguing experiment from the onset. It follows many generations of families throughout the decades and centuries that inhabit the same house. How Zemeckis does this is through this very unique innovation where the movie never leaves this one location and it was filmed from pretty much just one viewpoint. It resembles one take and one shot, but spread throughout decades.

There is also another interesting idea and that is the inclusion of these squares that appear on the screen, highlighting a certain character or situation and eventually enveloping the entire screen, signifying a transition from one time period to another. It’s difficult to explain what is going on here without seeing it for yourself, but let’s just say that this experiment was immensely fascinating at first, but eventually it became a bit tiresome as the movie would jump from one time to another way too rapidly. I would have let every scene breathe for at least two minutes, but jumping for every minute or even less so was quite frustrating. It made it feel like a gimmick film and nothing else.

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Tom Hanks and Robin Wright were needlessly cast as the younger versions of themselves. CGI was employed to de-age them and the result was a bit too obvious and shiny. But they were by far the most memorable couple in a film that failed to develop any other characters properly. There is an inventor and his wife form the 40s and those were quite forgettable. An aviator from the turn of the century also failed to rouse interest. And the less said about the modern black couple the better. Their roles were ridiculously small.

We also get the dinosaur era here along with the Native American tribe and 18^th century America. None of these three worked all that well as they got the least amount of screen time, which was unfortunate as they appealed to me the most given that they were set in the distant past. I would have personally also added a futuristic period to shake things up more. Here is solidly acted, but Zemeckis failed to imbue the film with an emotionally engaging narrative.

The final sequence is definitely moving and I liked the idea of the house harboring human lives, connections and memories, but it failed to truly move me as the characterization was quite poor. The movie’s score was quite beautiful and so was the cinematography and the stunning production design. The house looked meticulously detailed and very much alive. But the use of CGI was overwhelming, making for a plastic look to the film that was unappealing.

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