Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and much of the crew that made Forrest Gump reunite for Here, an ambitious undertaking telling a series of stories through time that take place in one specific patch of earth. For most of the film, that patch is the living room of a suburban home.

The film opens with an elderly man named Richard Young (Hanks) being allowed to visit his old home before it goes up for sale. The film then travels back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth and then whooshes through the ice age before taking another time jump to native Americans hunting. All of this occurs in the same spot where the house will eventually be.

Here is comprised of a series of short stories featuring different couples living in the home. In the early 1900s, Pauline Harter (Michelle Dockery) worries that her husband, John (Gwilym Lee), will die in a plane crash because of his obsession with flying. Another set in the late 1930s and early ‘40s shows an inventor and his wife working on what eventually will become known as The Lazy Boy.

The film’s primary focus, though, is on the Young family, Al and Rose (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly), who move into the house in the 1940s after World War II has ended. Al hesitates, but when Rose tells him she loves it and is pregnant, he agrees to buy her dream home. Al goes to work as a salesman and Rose becomes a homemaker and mother of three.

Another time jump shows Richard, now a teenager, bringing home his high school sweetheart Margaret (Wright) to meet his parents. He’s a talented artist who hopes to pursue his dreams until Margaret gets pregnant. He and Margaret, not being able to afford a place of their own, move into the house and live with his parents. To help provide for his new family, Richard takes a job selling insurance and gives up his dream of being an artist.

The Young family’s living room is the setting for their holiday celebrations, family conflicts, and tragedies as time passes.

Based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, Here’s experiment of telling multiple stories in a fixed-framed format and using computerized de-aging on the actors fails miserably. It’s a shallow, thinly scripted story with one-dimensional characters and no pacing. The constant jumping to different stories and eras in the film’s timeline makes it a jumbled mess.

The lack of character development makes it impossible for the audience to connect with or become invested in any of the characters. Paul Bettany’s Al Young is a World War II veteran who drinks too much to drown the memories of the horrors of war but works to support his family. That’s it. There’s nothing else. His character lacks any deeper or more intriguing aspects.

Kelly Reilly’s Rose is even more of a surface-level character, just an average supportive, loving wife and mother of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Marion Ross as Marion Cunningham in the TV comedy series Happy Days had more depth and character development. It’s a waste of an extremely talented actress.

The computer de-aging process that makes the actors, primarily Hanks and Wright, appear younger/older doesn’t work at all. It looks like clay animation and is reminiscent of the same look the animated characters have in Zemeckis’ The Polar Express. It’s creepy.

Sadly, Here is merely a squandering of talented people, time, and money. Don’t waste your time and money on it.

GRADE: C-

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, some suggestive material, brief strong language and smoking
Release Date: November 1, 2024
Running Time: 1 hour 44 minutes