In ‘Here,’ Robert Zemeckis Is Back On His Computer-Generated Bullshit

It’s been some time since I’ve taken Robert Zemeckis seriously. His last film to make a lasting impression was 2007’s Beowulf, an unwieldy but compelling action adaptation of the ancient epic poem that, three years after The Polar Express’s ambitious venture into the uncanny valley, proved that Zemeckis was a filmmaker willing to keep pushing past the bounds of good taste. 3D animation was no longer nascent, but his goal was to blend semi-realistic human characters via motion-capture with the elasticity and graphic creativity of 2D cartoons, somewhere beyond the territory of Looney Tunes and The Incredibles, but a few stops short of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. If one were to term this a bet, Zemeckis won. Performance capture animation, from the new Planet of the Apes franchise to Into the Spider-Verse, has become second nature in Hollywood. Still, Zemeckis, like James Cameron, appeared to be more enamored with the far-off possibilities of 3D animation than its contemporary limitations. His next film, 2009’s A Christmas Carol, also animated in the same computer-generated style, and screened in 3D like Beowulf, marked the begrudging end of an experimental phase. 

The director’s next three-film run—Flight (2012), The Walk (2015), and Allied (2016)—nominally saw Zemeckis return to Oscar-friendly adult drama. These all arrived with a healthy dose of computer-generated imagery, backgrounds, and stand-ins, but also with a concerted focus on the performance of real actors in front of real cameras. By the release of 2020’s live-action Pinocchio, part of a cadre of Disney IP resurrections no one asked for, Zemeckis hadn’t had a cultural hit since Cast Away two decades prior. It would be one thing if Zemeckis’s legacy were ensconced in amber simply because, having made a couple good movies at the right time, he managed to stick around. But between Romancing the Stone and Forrest Gump sits all three Back to the Future films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Death Becomes Her, each of which played with new filmmaking techniques and stayed firmly in the zeitgeist. As a technical director, Zemeckis’s penchant for trying new toys is well-known and, should one be charitable, the above titles would be enough to cement his status as an unimpeachable titan of Hollywood. But pyrotechnics have never been able to substitute for Zemeckis’s films’ lack of emotional complexity or existential depth. 

Zemeckis’s new film, Here, adapted from the graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire, is the director’s return, both formally and narratively, to his roots. Familiarly cloying, visually unsettling, and structurally baffling, Here charts the entirety of human existence from the locked-off perspective of a New England living room. McGuire’s graphic novel exploded time across the page, the very concept of the comic panel repurposed and rearranged. A typical illustration featured the same static view of the living room, with boxes at various points around the frame. In each box lived a different time period from that same location. Prehistoric creatures, indigenous tribes, colonial-era settlers, WWII veterans, and far-future humans could all occupy the same page, their word bubbles crowded into the same space, so that past, present, and future existed all at once. Key to the formal inventiveness of McGuire’s work is the malleability of the graphic medium, which may not have sound or moving pictures, but excels at representing reality in a uniform visual style that ties each disparate timeline together without sacrificing creativity or legibility. Here, the graphic novel, is a non-linear text and, crucially, one largely absent human activity. McGuire’s interest in the natural world, before and after human intervention, poses a serious challenge to any filmmaker hoping to streamline the graphic novel’s complexity. The constantly shifting square frames, like cut-outs or, more aptly, pop-up windows on a computer, toggle between various time periods as a literalization of the unmoored flow of time, neither forward or backward, but omnipresent. 

Zemeckis’s attempt to make something filmic out of this rich material is a prime example of the limits of adaptation. Not only does his interpretation of Here, co-written with Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth, lash the concept to a milquetoast picaresque of a white suburban family led by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, reunited 30 years after Forrest Gump, but Zemeckis seems incapable of meeting McGuire’s concept in its most foundational form. As the film opens, rectangles outlined in white shift sizes and orientation around the static camera view that will, instead of transforming into a window of possible realities, feel more and more like a prison with only one opening. A kaleidoscopic cinematic experience that tries to get a hand in every period of human history tends to be necessarily broad. Montages, like those in The Fifth Element or Darren Aronofsky’s Sphere attraction Postcard from Earth, render time into clips, the overarching sentiment one of awe, beauty, and vastness. Specificity of context, political motivation, and—perhaps most important here—power and oppression, are elided in favor of pat conclusions. Leeloo in The Fifth Element asks for a crash course in human behavior and gets bombarded with evidence of humanity’s destructiveness. In Postcard from Earth, space refugees learn, via virtual reality, how the Earth was exploited and destroyed, and then decide to remake it anew. 

In either case, a speed-run of salient topics—birth, hunting and gathering, tool-making, imperialism, industrialization, invention—presents existence as a time lapse going in one direction. Here, the film, cannot conceive of a way of telling its story without resorting to thematic and emotional capitulations that, while successful in 1994, make little sense now. The primary threads we follow include a Lenni Lenape couple in pre-colonial North America, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin in the late 18th century, a turn-of-the-century amateur pilot and his wife, a 1920s couple, one of whom eventually invents the La-Z-Boy reclining chair, a WWII veteran and his wife who later give birth to Tom Hanks’s character and his siblings, and finally, an upwardly mobile black family making their way through the COVID-19 pandemic. As each of these characters and arcs play out, similarities cohere: heterosexual monogamy, technological development, large-scale health scares, the shifting of culture and art, and the latent resurgence of interest in indigenous history. 

Forrest Gump slouched his way through the most momentous events of the mid-to-late 20th century, learning nothing more than that some people are lucky and some people aren’t, all while being rewarded for his hapless optimism. Here is even more blinkered, making the argument that the land from which the nation is built is merely a springboard for human aspiration, and that the people in it are slaves to the arrow of time. Layered on top of one another, the indigenous, white, and black narratives seem utterly disconnected. The supposition is that every generation, every ethnic group, every gender naturally gets its turn in the spotlight. More bizarrely, this process is one of quiet acquiescence, something that no one opposes with violence or resistance. The living room, and the forest that thrived before its construction, is a microcosm of a universal experience of change. According to Here, this is a fundamental cycle, not the result of struggle, prejudice, or exploitation. 

That’s not to say Here is a cheery film. Foremost among its similarities to Forrest Gump is the cosmic cruelty done to Robin Wright’s character, Jenny in Forrest, Margaret in Here. Margaret gets pregnant in her teens, lives in the childhood home of her boyfriend-turned-husband along with his aging parents and their other children, and, during her time in this house, grows to hate it. Tom Hanks’s Richard, in turn, is a thwarted artist who, after getting a job as an insurance salesman, channels his existential frustration into a constant deferment of Margaret’s dreams—to live in their own house, to travel to Paris, to find something beyond the stilted, gendered expectations of home and hearth. As a consequence, Margaret spends most of her adult life regretful of the decisions she never had the chance to make, ambitions sacrificed in the name of family. Later, when Richard and Margaret divorce, and Margaret finally gets to go to Paris, she suffers premature dementia and is forced into Richard’s care. Here’s infuriating final scene is a trip down memory lane. Margaret remembers her children, all the joy she felt in the house Richard grew up in, no longer resentful but grateful. 

That none of this rings true, even as the subtle yet palpable influences of patriarchal tyranny in the mid-20th century are genuine points of historical and social concern, only highlights the contrived farce of Margaret’s character and Here’s supposed sympathy for her. As Adam Nayman wrote in his Reverse Shot review, focusing on the oddly flat metatextual nature of the film, “Margaret’s fate made me think (again, probably on purpose) of Jenny, a victim of childhood sexual abuse who’s punished for her dalliance with countercultural movements (folk singing, antiwar activism) by contracting an AIDS-related illness after realizing that the mentally handicapped kid who used to sit next to her on the school bus has been her intended all along.” 

Glazing over everything is Zemeckis’s misplaced fascination with digital de-aging technology, aided in Here by generative AI programs that, on set, showed real-time approximations of each actor’s face at the appropriate age they needed to be for a given scene. That familiar waxen complexion one expects from PS2 cutscenes, coupled with the constant use of digital background extensions and set dressing, renders Here as a kind of computer-generated nightmare. A film supposedly interested in historical reality looks utterly disconnected from it. This unreality trickles down into the performances as well. The fixed-camera perspective makes blocking a vital component of the film, one which Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess struggle to make dynamic, and yet every actor delivers their lines as if they’re doing time in community theater. As those same white-outlined frames pop in and out of the film, showing Jurassic creatures, Civil War-era houses, present-day cars, ‘70s children playing in the street, and indigenous rituals that leave behind ancient artifacts, the seams stitching these disparate elements together, many of them clearly not real and performed in front of a green screen, become so obvious that Here turns into a bizarre illustration of what a computer might dream of. 

In other words, Here feels inhuman. Its narrative lack of imagination dovetails with its visual chaos (certain scene transitions appear to completely clip and glitch before fading to black). Though this was a coincidence of timing, the film’s release the weekend before the election augments its associations. While Zemeckis may have been striving for the kind of warm-hearted historical romp that made Forrest Gump a generational smash, he recapitulates that film’s same flaws. The nominally liberal politics at the center of Here, perhaps most adroitly shown in an eye roll-inducing scene where the present-day black family gives their young adult son a step-by-step tutorial in how to respond to a traffic stop, clash with the retrograde nostalgia Zemeckis seems most interested in. The filmmaker’s most charitable defenders claim that, hidden beneath all the fluff and technical pageantry, the film actually interrogates the American dream of owning a house, having kids, and aging gracefully into retirement. But, of the  numerous references to Forrest Gump, the most damning is the recurrence of the hummingbird, as twee and meaningless a motif in 1994 as it is now. Traversing multiple timelines, the bird flits in and out of scenes throughout Here, a sign of change and constancy despite the hardships of life. But its true significance is hollow, a juvenile, toothless symbol, not so much recycled as regurgitated.