Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024)

[diamonds]

Robert Zemeckis's Here

[Mr Sausage]

Robert Zemeckis's Here

This is a brilliant graphic novel showing all the various things that happened over millennia on a single spot on earth that, to judge by the trailer, Robert Zemeckis has turned into sentimental pap. I can only hope the film itself plays with a juxtaposition of tones, because the collection of heartwarming nonsense in that trailer set my teeth on edge and I can't imagine ever wanting to see more of it.

[beamish14]

Robert Zemeckis's Here

This is a brilliant graphic novel showing all the various things that happened over millennia on a single spot on earth that, to judge by the trailer, Robert Zemeckis has turned into sentimental pap. I can only hope the film itself plays with a juxtaposition of tones, because the collection of heartwarming nonsense in that trailer set my teeth on edge and I can't imagine ever wanting to see more of it.

I gave up on Zemeckis many years ago. He’s just incapable of writing a screenplay or directing a movie that doesn’t feature bullshit moralizing or his thinly-veiled right-wing politics. Apparently this is one of the first major features to use a significant amount of AI for its visual effects

[colinr0380]

Without having read the graphic novel I am actually rather intrigued by that premise of telling a story through one locked off camera shot (like the one in the tunnel in Irreversible but turned into an entire film? Is it going to be in 3D, so a de-aged Bachelor Party-era Tom Hanks can loom straight out of the screen at us?) unmoving and observing time going past. You could take that premise into both the most theatrical and stagey directions (maybe heartbreaking ones where you want to stay with a character but they inevitably leave the room and we as the audience remain trapped there, unlike the characters who have independent agency. That's also kind of the aspect that ties in with most haunted house tales too: spirits becoming inextricably attached to the spot where they spent the most significant moments of their lives, watching as the world moves on around them) and into the Zemeckis realm of total CGI too (I'm hoping that we not only get a Prehistoric section up to the modern day, but maybe a 'post-modern' finale. Maybe after the inevitable nuclear apocalypse? ). It will all depend on how the material is handled and what the filmmaker's intentions are.

(Although how well a film that appears to be about emphasising the importance of a family home being passed through generations will go down in a world that has moved towards promoting forever renting and "owning nothing and being happy by 2030" might end up becoming an issue)

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Has anyone made the joke of calling it Robert Zemeckis' Wavelength?

[Matt]

Yes! I saw a couple of those on Twitter/X

[hearthesilence]

Supposedly Zemeckis isn't using any zooms so some of Andy Warhol's fims were the first thing to come to mind.

[brundlefly]

That's also kind of the aspect that ties in with most haunted house tales too: spirits becoming inextricably attached to the spot where they spent the most significant moments of their lives, watching as the world moves on around them) and into the Zemeckis realm of total CGI too (I'm hoping that we not only get a Prehistoric section up to the modern day, but maybe a 'post-modern' finale. Maybe after the inevitable nuclear apocalypse? ).

I had not heard of the graphic novel (and am glad now I have, and that that guy's getting paid), but the first thing this reminded me of was A Ghost Story. I wanted the trailer to end with Hanks pointing and saying, "And there's where you ate that pie."

[Never Cursed]

For those who feel strongly about it (like myself): this film uses generative AI for the digital de-aging

[willoneill]

It will be interesting to see how good the effect ends up looking in the context of the whole film, and, if it does look good, will it get awards nominations for effects or whether there will be an anti-AI backlash amongst the voters.

[beamish14]

For those who feel strongly about it (like myself): this film uses generative AI for the digital de-aging

Zemeckis has a strong talent for costing people their livelihoods

[yoloswegmaster]

Maybe it's just me but the AI tech is making the faces look a bit... off? Especially with Robin Wright's face.

Zemeckis has a strong talent for costing people their livelihoods

To be fair, it was Disney and not Zemeckis who shut down his studio.

[hearthesilence]

Dave Kehr (as usual) and I think Nick Pinkerton or Craig Keller (or both?) championed Welcome to Marwen from 2018 so that's still one I want to see albeit reluctantly.

I never thought Zemeckis was nearly the great filmmaker Kehr made him out to be, but he's not completely wrong about Zemeckis and I don't think it's hard to catch many of the strengths he'll point out making his case. The climax of The Walk does have real merit even though I disliked the rest of the film, and Allied was a solid adventure film that recalled the old-fashioned merits of similar movies done in the studio era while featuring some truly inventive use of modern day effects (the parachuting scene is a classic example of Zemeckis doing that sort of thing well).

I shouldn't be too hard on Zemeckis because AI usage aside, this is the type of film that I could see him making 30 years ago if given the opportunity. It's the kind of experimentation that should be welcome in terms of seeing how experimental concepts can work in mainstream filmmaking without coming off as a mere gimmick - beyond that, the fact that it's a literal translation of what was done for a comic book kind of expands some of Kehr's observations about Zemeckis, showing how the boundaries between "high" art and "low" art are really self-imposed and how ideas flow freely and organically across the spectrum. (At least that's the hope.) I'm not expecting much, but I'm still hoping the results end up to be surprisingly good.

[colinr0380]

I'm a bit ambivalent about Zemeckis, especially in recent times, but I think there is a good case to be made that he might be the ultimate director working to produce films that primarily work as cinematic spectacles (that was why a few years back I was so grumpy that Zemeckis was entirely left out of Mark Cousins' Story of Film series). More than James Cameron in the sense that Zemeckis is often producing overwhelming and immersive imagery that will not quite work to the same extent on a smaller screen (which I have a suspicion might be why a film like The Walk hasn't appeared on UK television as yet). Even a film like Flight has that upside down plane sequence as its big set piece, which carries as much weight as, if not more than, the drama going on. Or rather the drama is often best expressed through the spectacle in his films, which makes a lot of the dialogue seem to play more bluntly obviously like heavy handed exposition to paper over the transition to the next set piece. However approached on those terms, the films can be very entertaining. Unfortunately he rather lost me with those nightmarish CGI films of the 2000s, which felt as if they lacked something without at least one foot grounding their flights of fantasy in reality, but I am always curious to see what Zemeckis is going to do next.

Of course I particularly love Back To The Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, since they (and Romancing The Stone) were big films of my childhood, but I also love Contact which perfectly hit for me as a sci-fi special effect spectacle. And I really liked What Lies Beneath, which might emphasise the point hearthesilence made about Zemeckis being an experimenter by taking an insistent turn into very unorthodox shots and camerawork mixed with CGI transitions as the action ramps up in the final section and we get some really strange angles in the slowly filling bathtub, or most notably in the final driving sequence across the bridge (which gets focused on in detail on the DVD extras) which was perhaps the earliest example of a scene tying together many different shots into one seamless looking one, so that it looks like the camera is moving from a wide shot to inside the car, then around the interior and so on. A very similar shot tellingly turns up in Spielberg's War of the Worlds film a few years after that, and then that one scene in Cuaron's Children of Men the year after that. So in that particular case it felt as if the Zemeckis film pioneered a kind of digitally created shot that went on to became common.
___

I have seen it noted that Here is going to be released (in the US at least) in the 30th anniversary year of Forrest Gump, and reunites Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth, Hanks and Wright together for the first time since then, so that at least might be another talking point to bring audiences in to see the film. I was never really the biggest fan of Forrest Gump but have issues with it for complicated reasons. Mostly because I felt that Robin Wright's character of Jenny gets rather brutally punished by her journey through life (the 'normal' person striving to make something of themselves and constantly being destroyed by the situations in which she finds herself) compared to Forrest blithely managing to become the embodiment of the American dream of the mid-20th century without really ever having any kind of calculated ambition about doing so. Which is an interesting contrast but it does also get awkwardly tied up with politicial subtexts, in which the lefty-leaning, modern woman, anti-war Jenny is constantly worn down by fighting; whilst Forrest turns into almost a Republican wet dream of a war hero (and veteran accidentally caught up in the fight for justice back at home), small business owner, stock owning, brand sponsored marathon runner who gets to go on all the chat shows and meet all of the most famous people of the time without ever really needing to think about his actions. That lack of thinking becoming his primary everyman characteristic, as his innate and 'simple' down home instincts are implied to be sounder for getting through the messy business called "Life" without being irreperably damaged by it than any of Jenny's more calculated actions which constantly backfire on her are. But the one thing that saves Jenny is that Forrest does care about her, even if it takes her the entire film to come around to understanding that simple, unchanging fact. Forrest never really moves from his spot, more just stays where he is patiently waiting for Jenny to return to him someday.

Which is to say that I will most likely be looking at this new film through a Forrest Gump lens whether I want to or not due to the casting of Hanks and Wright together again. Hopefully the filmmakers are well aware that many audience members will likely be doing the same and will have factored that in. I suppose we will find out in the due course of time!

[pistolwink]

I don't know about "right-wing politics" (Bob Gale is the right-winger, Zemeckis is your average Hollywood liberal) but Zemeckis seems to have long ago lost trust in the mass audience to understand anything that isn't hammered home in about sixteen different ways simultaneously.

I do think Zemeckis was an absolutely brilliant "natural" filmmaker and, as of The Walk is still capable of some stunning coups de cinéma but I can't think of a film by him I've liked on balance since Cast Away. Dave Kehr's defenses of his subsequent films (and of Forrest Gump) always seemed incredibly willful to me, in the best (worst?) auterist tradition -- elaborate rhetorical contortions trying to argue that these mediocre (or worse) films were somehow "subversive" of their surface intentions and/or that the films were "personal" in some profound way that redeemed them.

As people have alluded to above, there's a moment in A Ghost Story that covers much the same idea as the graphic novel in a few poignant shot/reverse shots.

[Mr Sausage]

As people have alluded to above, there's a moment in A Ghost Story that covers much the same idea as the graphic novel in a few poignant shot/reverse shots.

I think the main difference is that the graphic novel and movie take place exclusively from the same composition/camera position.

[pistolwink]

Right, what Ghost Story adds is the silent witness. But it's a very similar idea.

[The Curious Sofa]

When A Ghost Story came out, some reviews pointed out similarities to Richard McGuire's Here, which (at least in its expanded graphic novel version) had been published only three years earlier. It was one of the few graphic novels to be reviewed in mainstream publications that don't usually bother with the medium, which is how I became aware of it.

I'm curious to see how Zemeckis will make this work dramatically for a feature-length film, but at least this isn't another remake (or uncanny valley motion-capture mess).

[Red Screamer]

Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024) is really a strange beast: Intolerance in the living room. The formalist in me appreciates that Zemeckis really does stick to his concept—one space, one camera placement over hundreds of years, forgoing traditional cuts between the eras to emphasize their continuity—in a way practically no other mainstream filmmaker would. The visual style is sometimes close to the tableaux vivants of early narrative cinema, usually preferring simple blocking to the tricky flourishes one might expect (only one, with a mirror reflecting into the attached dining room, is a truly wild choice but it's used effectively). It's the type of formal constraint that has intriguing, giddy side effects—like making you realize that so often in movies characters stand smack in the middle of rooms for no reason, because here they find a couple dozen ways to bring actors to the corner of the room for equivalents of medium shots and close-ups.

But to make such experimentation palatable to the wide audience that the film is clearly shooting for, it comes with a lot of edge-sanding. Instead of full-fledged parallel narratives, there is one central group to which the others serve as counterpoints, and of course, it's the group of the most "typical", least interesting characters. This sense of anonymous normalcy is exactly what makes it difficult to get a handle on Zemeckis' perspective here. It seemingly runs counter to the film's conceptual expansiveness, but it's not clear how seriously the film takes these obvious surfaces, as it’s poised between while resisting both satire and conventional dramatic investment (the accelerated rate of incident; the waxy digital animation and disturbingly de-aged movie stars that stick out egregiously in such a quotidian setting). At times, it seems to be a personal statement for Zemeckis, touching self-reflexively on some pet themes like technology, alcoholism (the corner of the midcentury living room is, of course, the home of the liquor cabinet), and cultural history. At other times, it comes off as impersonal and as broad as an educational video at a history museum.

The stories are chopped up into tiny vignettes, but often scenes end neatly on a punchline or an ironic flourish—somehow Tom Hanks in a Benjamin Franklin Halloween costume split-screened with an 18th-century conversation that "soon no one will even remember the name of Benjamin Franklin" made it past the first draft of the script; not to mention a moving truck named "Mayflower", The Beatles on Ed Sullivan singing "Remember I'll always be true" juxtaposed with marriage vows, and so on. Plot developments, such as they are, are forecast multiple times with no pretense of subtlety. This structure gives it the feeling of a sketch show more than any kind of surveillance cam realism or rethinking of narrative film that the concept might imply, and it's a technique that Zemeckis doesn't let up on even as Here swings big for pathos—at one point the main characters say "time sure does fly" three times in a handful of minutes.

On the other hand, it ends up being a seriously bleak movie, a procession of unexceptional unhappiness, illness, death, and resentment. The characters talk about the house constantly, as both an object of desire for middle-class striving and as a symbol for the suburban life trapping all of their petty human foibles of materialism, selfishness, self-rationalization, and complacency. Not to mention the repeated cycles across the century of, for example, a work and gadget obsessed husband and an unfulfilled housewife. This might be too niche of a reference, but in this way, it reminded me of a Hollywood version of Georges Perec's Les Choses, a novel hollowed out of all of the sense of life and relationships usually simulated in the genre to write exclusively about the characters' apartments, purchases, jobs, objects, material wants, tastes, and so on. Overloading Here with anecdotes and memorable (Instagrammable?) moments ends up having something of a similar effect, where it feels like a zombie parade of life events with all of the life left out. This of course dovetails with the themes of individual/collective history and the ever-present human/digital divide, but to what end? The ending, which seemed like such a weird choice to me on so many levels that I don't want to spoil it, packs a heavy punch, but I'm still not sure if it's one of blatant, grinning cynicism or piercing misery.

Shame that everyone seems to be skipping this one, as it kind of needs to be seen to be believed.

[colinr0380]

Sony has put up an eight minute section of the film. It is already a bit melancholic to think that the film begins with that tree growing, which probably exists for longer and through more eras that any one character in the film will ever do, yet once it gets in the way of progress it is still summarily discarded in the process of making room to replace it with the house.

[pistolwink]

It's really interesting to compare the film to the graphic novel. The latter is much denser and more astringent -- probably inevitable given that this was a Big Hollywood Movie and a Zemeckis movie in particular. But it also raises some issues of the ways we engage with the two media. The book can afford to be dense because you can flip back and forth, studying each image or set of images at length. The movie unspools (at least in the theater) at a fixed rate, so the filmmakers had to do more to keep things legible.

[Red Screamer]

The MoMA screening of this comes with a write-up that I'd guess has some Dave Kehr fingerprints on it, comparing the film to Intolerance and a World's Fair exhibition, similar to what I said above:

Robert Zemeckis’s ambitious adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel joins the pantheon of deeply resonant films about impermanence and age, alongside Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow and Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Spanning centuries from a single camera position, Here echoes the emotional simultaneity of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, weaving multiple storylines across time. With a playful technical sophistication reminiscent of a mid-century World’s Fair exhibit, its iconographic representation of histories personal and global, and its plangent overtones of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the film presents a tapestry of human experience—from disappointment and loneliness to moments of triumph. Tom Hanks and Robin Wright anchor the film as its central couple, their performances enhanced by innovative CGI aging techniques. Zemeckis, known for his dynamic camera work, embraces the constraint of a static frame, returning to the proscenium style of early cinema. This approach forgoes Griffith-style analytical editing within scenes, instead building tension toward a transcendent finale.

Here offers a meditation on the passage of time, the persistence of place, and the interconnectedness of human experiences across generations. It stands as a testament to Zemeckis’s ability to blend technological innovation with profound emotional storytelling.

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

Dave Kehr does indeed claim authorship of the MoMA write-up on twitter.

[Walter Kurtz]

I claim Red Screamer is Dave Kehr.

[The Curious Sofa]

The way Zemeckis clumsily foreshadows every major event multiple times ends in unintentional comedy, and each family gets exactly one major issue to chew on for the entire film. The de-aging effects are probably state of the art, but sometimes the AI gets it wrong and heads for the uncanny valley. When the characters age past the age of the actors, many end up with hideous old-age make-up, with the Indigenous couple looking the worst. It would have been much better to recast them considering they are in the movie so little, we barely get a grasp on the actors playing them. The final shot, rendered entirely in CGI, looks so unreal it could have come from a Pixar film. Alan Silvestri's cloying score does the rest to convince you that Zemeckis puts no trust in his audience. A Ghost Story really is the superior version of this film.

The only thing that feels authentic is Robin Wright's performance. The film is stacked with great actors, but she plays the one character who doesn't feel merely sketched in. She brings a lot of warmth but also an edge to the otherwise routine role of a frustrated housewife, emotionally anchoring every scene she's in.