Normally we try to be peppy about even the worst-looking trailers, but there comes a time when someone just knows and likes a thing too much to enjoy an adaptation of it. Sometimes it’s deserved, sometimes it’s not, and of course it’s all still bias, but it’s better to admit all this upfront than to nurse shit like until release day. What we mean is: You’re going to read a lot over the next few months about how epic and ambitious Robert Zemeckis’ Here is, and you should regard it with the same frustrated skepticism that everyone’s had about his work ever since he made The Polar Express. Why? Well, it’s because there is basically no way that he can capture what made Richard McGuire’s high-art comic book so devastating and moving. Seriously, you can find the original six-page story online, and it’ll give you a sense of what the work is supposed to feel like: Haunted, tragic, anything other than the kind of boomer nostalgia circlejerks that the man seems terminally attracted to.
Here is the story of a single room in a family home, presented from the same perspective as time passes, told in non-chronological fashion. It’s the kind of comic that is made specifically for that medium, and the translation to screen is most likely going to fail at capturing what makes it special, specifically in its pacing. You control the speed at which this “story” — more of an assemblage of details one can slowly piece together into a narrative rather than something structured — unfolds, lingering on whatever you’d like to focus on. As much as he should be praised for his ambition in trying to hew to the specifics of the work like obstructions assigned to him by Lars Von Trier (good thing Tom Hanks and Robin Wright wanted to star, because that couldn’t have been an easy conversation with the studio), he’s already overcomplicating it with that horseshit digital de-aging and garish production design. Print up a nostalgia bingo card based on this trailer that dropped earlier on Wednesday. We’re guessing you won’t even need a free space to fill at least two of the lines.
Peep it:
There’s no synopsis fitting for a project like this, so we just recommend you go ahead and check out the book. Or, maybe don’t, because you’ll wind up jaded and frustrated with this ordeal like we are.
Anyway, Here hits theaters on November 15. We promise we’ll keep an open mind, at least now that we’ve gotten this out.