Here

Those crazy kids from Forest Gump—Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Robert Zemeckis, and Eric Roth—create another Boomer nostalgia fest, this time a bit more whistful than fanciful. Summarizing their generation's hopes, dreams, disappointments, and unfulfilled longings, the team adapts Richard McGuire's 2014 graphic novel, which was based on a six-page comic he published in 1989 showing a single location at different points in time, ranging from the Jurassic Era to thousands of years in the future. Using the same visual treatment as the comic, Zemeckis's window on the world dips back to the dinosaurs and the asteroid that ended their time on Earth, to the present day, as represented by a Black couple giving their kids "the talk" (which feels about as 2024 Zemeckis as you'd imagine). At the film's center is the life of an "everycouple" played by Hanks and Wright.

After seeing a few folks who occupied this space from the past, like a pair of courting Native American teenagers, the bastard son of Benjamin Franklin, and the inventor of the La-Z-Boy recliner, we meet Al and Rose Young (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly). After Al's service in WWII, the couple buys the house with the big living room where most of this film takes place. They have three '50s-era kids and raise them in this house. Eventually, the eldest son, Richard (Hanks), gets his girlfriend Margaret (Wright) pregnant, and they decide to raise their family in the house with Richard's folks. That living situation is meant to be temporary. However, just as Richard's decision to put off his dreams of being an artist to support his family and Margaret's desire to become a lawyer is delayed so that she can be a stay-at-home mother, it eventually becomes their life.

How one responds to this movie will depend greatly on how old one is and how much one enjoys gimmick cinema. If you're of the same age as these main characters and the filmmakers, you will likely be moved, as there are aspects of Here that are poignant and touching, provided you can get beyond the extreme artificiality of the endeavor. If you're younger than these characters and filmmakers, you will probably, like me, question why the idea of the "everyman protagonist" is still the go-to entry point for this type of manufactured time capsule. The approach made sense back when Walt Disney created the Carousel of Progress for the 1964 New York World's Fair. That attraction has always been one of my all-time favorite stops at Disney World because of its charmingly simplistic, antiquated way of depicting American life. But Here, which is essentially the Carousel of Progress for the digital age, was made in 2024! For the last century, moviegoers have thrived on specificity. Distinctive and extraordinary characters and stories have always been more interesting than bland ones, and the last decades of cinema have shown us countless examples of rich specificity even within lives that, on the surface, might seem ordinary,

One need only look at the brief depiction of the pre-war couple who live in the Here house before the Youngs to see what I mean. David Fynn, playing the La-Z-Boy inventor, and Ophelia Lovibond, playing his pin-up model wife, are meant to be avatars for post-depression-era American ingenuity and industrial-age optimism. Yet the specificity of their characters makes them feel like actual flesh-and-blood people rather than mere archetypes. I'd much rather spend the length of a movie with these two than with Here's "leads," and not just because the early-'40s couple seem happier and more fun.

I guess if you were born in the 1950s, things just seemed so uniform, and the wide variety of life was so hidden away that your go-to assumption must be that everyone experienced the same basic and predictable turns in life. Members of your parents' generation fought heroically in the big war and supressed their experiences, anger, and pain with alcohol and represed communication; you gave up your dreams to raise kids and have an unfulfilling marriage; your kids reaped the benefits but then maybe didn't appreciate your sacrifices as much as they should have; but, in the end, the love you feel for your spouce and children kinda makes up for the loss, and blaa blaa blaa. It's not that great stories can't be made out of that type of ageing-Boomer narrative, but Here is not a story at all. It's, at best, an amusing art installation that might have worked better as a looping, non-linear museum piece than a feature film.

Zemeckis's obsession with envelope-pushing technology that looks dated by the first week of release has hobbled nearly every film he's made since 1989. It is perhaps fortunate, now that digital technology no longer seems all that concerned with photorealisum (the deaged Hanks and Wright don't look any more "real" in this movie than the low-grade-science-museum CGI dinos), that this movie doesn't suffer too much from the curse of the uncaney valley that's plaged all of this director's work since Back to the Future II. In Here, the central gimmick is the whole movie; it's not trying to be anything more than a gimmick, so the fact that nothing looks "real" doesn't matter all that much. What matters is whether or not the emotions depicted feel real. I'm sure that to many viewers, these scenes playing out in this dreary diorama of the typical white working-class Boomer existence will resonate. I'll admit that they got me a few times. But I can't ever really enjoy life being reduced to its most generic beats. I'd rather watch Forest Gump again. Flawed as that movie may be, at least there's a story and some specificity to the characters.