The story of multiple families who all lived in the same place across hundreds of years told from the perspective of a single fixed camera. 

Here is a Robert Zemeckis picture. Zemeckis is the mastermind behind crowd pleasing stories like Romancing The Stone, the Back To The Future trilogy and Death Becomes Her. But more recently he is known for his fascination with exploring cinematic techniques and technologies with rather mixed results. 

His animation adjacent movies The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol feature uncomfortable uncanny valley characters. The Walk has been completely forgotten but made your stomach churn in IMAX 3D for those who saw it. Whilst I suspect people will have already forgotten the effects heavy remake of Roald Dahl’s The Witches and the based on a true story Welcome to Marwen which brought dolls to life. 

Here has the added intrigue that it is also a reunion of the creative minds behind Forrest Gump. Eric Roth co-wrote the screenplay with Zemeckis and Tom Hanks (in his fifth collaboration with Zemeckis) stars alongside Robin Wright. So has he managed to deliver a crowd pleaser or is this another film destined to be forgotten as just another exploration of cinematic technique? 

Unfortunately, the answer is that Here is an awful movie made worse by the methods used to create it. 

The plot mainly revolves around Richard (Tom Hanks) and his parents, wife and children. We see his father Al (Paul Bettany) and mother Rose (Kelly Reilly) buy the house just after returning from World War II. They raise their children there, the eldest of which is Richard. Richard falls in love with Margaret (Robin Wright), they have a child and together this new family lives in the same home. All of which is of course told from a single fixed camera looking at the same spot. 

But Zemeckis needs to break this simple plot up with other characters or else his conceit of telling the story of Here does not work. So we have intercut between this plot various other stories. Dinosaurs. A meteorite hitting the earth. The Ice Age. A Native American couple falling in love and later dying. Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son. An early adopter of the aeroplane. A hipster couple who invent the La-Z-Boy chair. A black family who move in after Richard’s family. 

The result is a mess. Zemeckis may get to reference pandemics across three different timelines but I guarantee you will not care about any of those fringe stories. You do not even get to learn some of those characters’ names and it is a challenge to decide which of the Native American or Black storyline is handled worse. 

You can add to these issues the fact that these unengaging stories slow down and break up any engagement in Richard’s story. Whilst the fixed camera element makes you feel bizarrely at arms length from the main plot. 

And then there are the special effects. The vast amount of effects works present have very differing levels of quality and quite often are very unnatural and just bad looking. The four lead actors play themselves over decades and the result is some very strange uncanny valley moments and some scenes where the characters and the environment they are in not looking remotely like they actually exist together. Whilst the effects work relating to any natural elements looks outlandishly bad. 

And I have not even mentioned the depressing manner in which the film transitions back and forth between timelines by placing white squares and rectangles over sections of the screen, changing that area to another timeline before changing the rest of the image. 

An absolute mess. A weak story surrounded by a number of pointless stories that serve no purpose but that of the “Here” concept. All buried under a swathe of effects work that pulls you out of the film.