The world has turned, leaving Robert Zemeckis (and his gimmicks) Here

Robert Zemeckis’ Here isn’t a movie. It’s a carousel. From his fixed point of view, the film travels around and around and back home again. Here is an ambitious project filled with technical innovation and formal know-how that, like Megalopolis, has a reach that extends beyond its grasp. The director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Forrest Gump, and The Polar Express does not fear the Uncanny Valley. He lives in it, finding inspiration in the digital makeup effects that transform Tom Hanks into his Bosom Buddies former self. This isn’t the first time viewers have been horrified by Hanks’ dead-eyed CG visage, but it’s the first time we’ve seen him from this vantage. 

But Here’s riskiest gambit isn’t the de-aging. It’s how Zemeckis presents it. Told from a single angle at about seven o’clock in the film’s only location, Here tells the story of a patch of land home to dinosaurs, a view of Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son’s home, and the extended family of Richard Young (Hanks). From its floating position about six feet in the air, the camera captures the five billion-year journey from the tar pits of the Jurassic era to Richard sitting in his empty former home with his now-senile ex-wife Margaret (Robin Wright), saying, “We used to live here.” By the end of Zemeckis’ merry-go-round, the visual memory becomes a mental picture for Hanks to paint.

We’re not the first to notice the similarities between Here and Walt Disney’s Carousel Of Progress, the 1964 World’s Fair entrant turned longest-running stage show in American theater history. Now housed at Disneyland and World, Carousel tells the story of the 20th century through an animatronic narrator named John (voiced by Jean Shepherd in its current iteration). There are many parallels between the attraction and Zemeckis’ film, including Carousel’s pioneering use of motion capture to animate its robotic actors. But it’s the fixed position of the audience that Zemeckis clings to. With belief properly suspended, the space stays the same as the specifics within it change. Meanwhile, the audience never moves as the 20th century whizzes by.

Unlike Carousel, Here has a Doctor Manhattan view of time. Different eras appear simultaneously throughout the film via frames within frames, a technique pulled from Here’s source material, the 1989 six-page comic by Richard McGuire (later expanded into a graphic novel). In the comic and film, a frame housing a moment from a different era appears overlaying the same space as the main action of the scene. McGuire’s comic allowed time to fall on top of itself to highlight the chaos, joy, and emptiness of life. 

Here has a much sunnier, more controlled disposition. It mimics that style without its formal grace or emotional curiosity, opting to use the formal idiosyncrasy as a means to an end. Zemeckis will square off a TV playing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and carry it over to other periods, allowing him to transition between periods while seamlessly hiding his form. He coasts, as he has in the past, on references, like The Beatles, to give a sense of continuum, but it’s more weaponized nostalgia than compelling filmmaking. Everyone knows The Beatles, but what does it say for the inventor of the La-Z-Boy to build his chair alongside “All My Loving” on the soundtrack? Zemeckis isn’t interested in exploring that. The sequence becomes a montage of technical delight: times change, “here” changes, but Here remains the same. If you ask Richard Young what it means, he’d probably say, “Time flies.” 

Zemeckis isn’t the first person to tell the story of a space. David Lowery’s 2015 drama, A Ghost Story, tells the history and pre-history of a house from the perspective of a ghost who once lived there. Here sticks to the land’s POV, allowing Zemeckis to fade from one era to another at will. Characters move in and out of the frame and, in one jarring instance, walk through the area the camera supposedly owns. It’s a presentational film whose perspective is that of the fourth wall, with actors playing directly to it. 

Zemeckis cedes much of his directorial power to his actors, allowing them to set the pace of scenes in uninterrupted moments of familial turmoil and bliss. Instead of the director pushing into an actor for a close-up, Richard’s father, Al (Paul Bettany), walks into the shot, revealing emotions his family cannot see to the audience. However, while actors can walk into a close-up, they rarely do, and much of the action happens in the center of the living room, where characters mainly discuss the furniture, ignoring the irony that this is exactly what Zemeckis has turned them into.

The objects around the room break up the action. Zemeckis moves furniture, electronics, and the world outside the living room window to give a sense of impermanence. This also creates boundaries for his actors, sectioning off portions of the frame for specific activities and imbuing them with import. At times, there’s more of an emotional charge to Hanks standing at his easel on the far side of the room, a digital frame housing a moon from centuries ago shining above him, than the actor shouting at his off-screen wife. Because the space doesn’t move, the acting must be ever-conscious of the camera, knowing that the mise-en-scène is everything in a movie with only one angle. 

A wide breadth of superficial human experience walks in front of Zemeckis’ camera, but it’s only at the end of Here that the camera finally unhinges itself. For reasons heretofore unknown, Zemeckis follows a hummingbird (the film’s equivalent to Gump’s floating feather) to the top of the historic mansion on the adjacent lot. From this perspective, Zemeckis sledgehammers home the idea that these stories are all of our stories, and because they’re broad enough, he’s kind of right. People do live in homes. They do have money problems. They do argue with their parents about space. To Zemeckis, the camera is an omniscient observer, with the only perspective coming from the actors and where Zemeckis positions them. Watching Hanks, Wright, and Bettany perform superficial melodrama gives Here the atmosphere of a filmed play. If it weren’t for the uncanny visual effects, there’d be nothing “cinematic” about Here. It’s about as deep as a stage show at Disneyland. 

Zemeckis eschews the chaos of McGuire’s comic by opting for a more theme park-inspired approach. As a result, he cannot harness life’s uncertainties or repetitions, replacing them instead with dictatorial control. The hammy acting, restrictive blocking, and generalized melodrama turn his stars into puppets. Surely, Hanks could’ve sold this movie without looking like Potato Jesus, even with Zemeckis and Eric Roth’s cornball script. It wouldn’t be the first time the two-time Oscar-winner played a younger character—remember the time he played a 12-year-old? But, like in the Carousel Of Progress, these elements are all mere vessels for nostalgia and technological propaganda touting forward momentum. Ironically, though, the tech-world advancement costs the film its humanity. There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow (and yesterday) that Here simply can’t see from that perspective.