Review: Here

Robert Zemeckis' movie Here is based on Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here, and you only have to be familiar with the work of one of them to wonder how the heck this is going to work. Shock twist: it doesn't, and sad to say the blame lies pretty much entirely on the Zemeckis side of the ledger, because on the rare occasions when he seems to realise he can use the substance and not just the surface of McGuire's work there are glimmers of a worthwhile experience.

Here (the novel) uses the grammar of the comic book - panels on a page - to unfold an experience that remains fixed in space while roaming freely in time. Each page shows the exact same view onto the world, presented randomly from the dawn of time to the distant future as it goes from wilderness to wasteland to jungle to a suburban lounge room and back. Smaller inset panels show other points in time - a person in the 1950's is seemingly handing a drink to someone there decades later while around them a primeval forest thrives, and so on as all of time is layered before us.

How does this work as a movie? Not well; Zemeckis does use the device of panels as windows into different times, but mostly just as a way to transition from scene to scene. The real power of McGuire's book is the way events and situations echo across time, revealing patterns and interactions even as the human scale shrinks down to nothing. Here (the movie) isn't interested in that.

Instead, we're mostly shown moments in the lives of the people living in the house. Or the time before it: there's a bit of dinosaur versus meteor action early on, and both a Native American couple and the residents (Ben Franklin's son!) of the colonial-era mansion across the road get a few scenes as they travel to and fro. But the main focus is on two generations of the one family, led by WWII veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and then his son Richard (Tom Hanks) and wife Margaret (Robin Wright).

Aside from folksy sayings like "time flies" and "there's no place like home", there's not a lot of substance in their stories (suburban life is tough, especially when you're a cliche), and the smaller lives around them don't add much. It seems the house was once owned by the inventor of the La-Z-Boy Recliner Chair, but said chairs play no part in future events (though a new couch and a fold-out bed do).

The rare moment where something does echo across time - the pandemics of 1919 and 2020, for one - provide a brief window into a much more memorable film. Emphasis on brief: it seems much more likely that the driving force for Zemeckis here was the requirement to digitally de-age his cast to cover their decades of puttering around the lounge. The technology used is competent.

Here (the movie) is surprisingly busy - that lounge room sees strokes, funerals, bedridden invalids, sex scenes and a lot more - and yet resoundingly hollow. It tells a handful of cloying, uninspired stories using a conceit that constantly hammers home the small and inconsequential nature of our lives. 

It wants to be a warm look at connection over the years. Instead, its centuries-spanning gaze into a structure that outlasts and erases all who dwell within tells us the opposite: trying to slap a feel good ending onto the march of time is both futile and pointless. 

Sadly for Here, that's not just a matter of perspective.

- Anthony Morris