Tom Hanks and the ‘Forrest Gump’ team reunite for ‘Here,’ a high-concept dud that favours technology over storytelling

Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis is perfectly capable of telling a good story — “Forrest Gump,” “Contact” and “Cast Away” attest to this — but traditional moviemaking seems to bore him.
He’s fascinated with technology for its own sake and often leans into it, risking narrative clarity and substance while celebrating innovation.
Sometimes this gamble pays off, as it did with the groundbreaking image-insertion effects of “Forrest Gump,” starring Tom Hanks. But when it doesn’t, it loses big: witness the dead-eyed characters and listless scripting of the motion-capture cartoon “The Polar Express,” also starring Hanks, the director’s favourite actor.
The prosaically titled family study “Here” teams Zemeckis once again with Hanks, and also his “Forrest Gump” co-star, Robin Wright, digitally de-aged by artificial intelligence for their first screen reunion since “Gump”’s Oscar-winning heyday 30 years ago. Zemeckis also called upon “Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth and composer Alan Silvestri. Alas, it all amounts to another unlucky roll of the digital dice thanks to an excess of AI, a surfeit of random incidents and a lack of empathetic storytelling.
Adapted from Richard McGuire’s popular graphic novel, “Here” asks a question not many people would bother to ponder: What was on my land and who was in my home before I occupied it?
Zemeckis answers the first part of that query in the film’s dizzying first five minutes, as a cascade of images shows dinosaurs (and the Ice Age), early Indigenous inhabitants and colonial-era enslavers and enslaved people roaming, toiling and living on a small corner of what is now called Pennsylvania.
The building of a modest family home in 1907, complete with a living room with a bay window and fireplace, starts the parade of human occupants that “Here” most concerns itself with. The camera has been locked down for a fixed POV that is maintained throughout the film, with a barrage of alternate views arrayed like computer windows to offer some visual variety.
First to move into the house are John and Pauline Harter (Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery), a risk-taking early aviator and his risk-averse wife. Other occupants over the ensuing decades will include the supposed inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair and an African-American family, the latter coming across — like the Indigenous couple seen early on — as a performative diversity gesture rather than a respectful dramatic choice, given their lack of screen time.
The first couple we are supposed to care about arrives in 1945: PTSD-afflicted Second World War vet Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his three-months-pregnant wife, Rose (Kelly Reilly).
She’s carrying the son they’ll name Richard, who is played by child actors until his teen years, when he’s replaced by a digitally de-aged Hanks. Teen Richard introduces his family to his new girlfriend, Margaret (Wright), whom he soon gets pregnant. She moves in, they marry and have a daughter; their story (sharing the crowded family home with his parents) becomes the film’s nominal focus.
Sex, birth, death, triumph, failure, laughter, tears and everything else that happens in a busy life flash across the multiple screens in due course, often punctuated by pop tunes and cultural references: the Beatles’ debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964 is seen on the living room’s TV.
None of it really amounts to much and all of it seems designed to illustrate the dim-bulb observation of Richard, a frustrated artist: “Time sure does fly, doesn’t it?” That’s even shallower than Forrest Gump’s banal mantra, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
You do know what you’re gonna get with “Here,” which constantly signals its intentions and starts to feel repetitive even with its brisk 104-minute running time.
And to what end? The de-aging effects are impressive, a vast improvement over the unnerving fakery of Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” a scant five years ago. But they still feel a little strange and suggest a perceptual breakthrough is still to come. The fixed camera conceit, meanwhile, quickly gets old, while the dinos-to-indoors historical sweep was more artistically depicted in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”
The chemistry between Hanks and Wright is real in “Here,” and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to react to the highs and lows of their struggles to keep their family going and intact.
But two fine actors aren’t enough to make this overstuffed movie come truly alive and for this house to really feel like a home. To misquote Gertrude Stein, there’s just no there to “Here.”