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‘Here’ Review: Abandon all hope, ye who enter

Robert Zemeckis and I, it seems, have very similar tastes in media: We both have a fondness for wartime spy-thrillers, found the documentary Marwencol deeply moving, and, apparently, we were both astonished by Richard McGuire’s Here, introduced to it (or reminded of it) by the author’s 2014 expansion of his six-page comic strip. If you haven’t read it, go buy a copy of the novel or at least search for the original (it’s not too hard to find online), and you’ll see why. Here is one of those truly rare artistic and literary masterpieces found within the comic book form, in which the medium is seized by its reins, and its devices – specifically the language of panel-based storytelling – are used to devastating, perfect effect. From a single perspective from the corner of a living room, McGuire charts the course of human history – from the days of the dinosaurs to a lifeless Earth in the far future – while also emphasizing the house’s heyday in the 20th century. You witness nature give way to four-walled construction and the various families that come and go – some shorter than others – with the panels juxtaposing moments from the present, past, and future all at once, emphasizing the ephemerality of time and its preciousness, the moments of life and light acting as flashes of color amid the all-consuming void of time. Think of the segment in Alan Moore’s Watchmen in which Dr. Manhattan recounts his temporally-fucked existence while pondering on Mars; subtract the narration and the superpowers, and you have a work that would make that grizzled old bastard throw the book across the room and yell “You stole it from my bloody imagination!” like Dali did after he turned over the projector at a screening of Rose Hobart.

I highlight this to illustrate how bad of a pairing a source like this is with a filmmaker like Zemeckis, the patron saint of boomer nostalgia and ill-advised applications of faulty bleeding-edge technology to stories that don’t really need it in the first place. The Polar Express would have retained its “magic” had it just been live-action (though Eddie Deezen wouldn’t have caught a paycheck), Beowulf came out at a time in which studios wanted to invest in epic fantasy, and A Christmas Carol has been the subject of a million adaptations, all of which were more successful than whatever the hell he was up to with Jim Carrey without the CGI budget (the less said about Mars Needs Moms, the better). It’s telling that studios have spent a whole lot of time and money figuring out how to perfect blue-screen – think of The Volume, the LED-screen environments that allow near-seamless rear-projection merges between actor and digital landscape – to avoid the creepy and lifeless dead-eyed characters that once inhabited Zemeckis’s uncanny valleys. So, he pivoted: Allied, his last relatively traditional film, had plenty of digital landscapes but lots of real people and was significantly better than anything he’d released since Cast Away. Welcome to Marwen, while a fucking disaster, at least had the sense to try and use that lifelessness smartly by emulating GI Joe textures in its flights of fancy. Now, Zemeckis wants to have the best of both worlds: he’s rounded up the gang from his last jaunty journey through the highlights of the 20th century, with writer Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri, lensman Don Burgess, and star Tom Hanks reuniting together for the first time since Forrest Gump.

The gang clearly hopes that Here’s digital effects — the static shot of this one perspective, with digital de-aging instead of make-up and CGI walls that appear and disappear as needed — will have a similar impact that Gump’s did, but it’s one thing to get artists to digitally manipulate JFK’s mouth from stock footage and place Hanks next to him for a few shots; it’s another to use generative AI to digitally de-age or make deepfakes of its actors the core of the film. If you hated seeing Ian Holm brought back to life in Alien: Romulus, get ready for a slew of articles praising Metaphysic, the AI company who created that abomination, for their work on here. Zemeckis (and Metaphysic at large) struck gold by tapping into the usages of this technology right when the venture-capital iron was hot – interest rates went up, and investors’ checkbooks only came out if they could put “AI or Whatever” in the memo line – and got in, luckily, before the strikes took off, given that this tech was, in part, what the guilds were protesting against.

Much like all de-aging effects, Here looks better one still at a time, but in motion, it still looks off and wrong. Everything is too smooth, the dead-eyed look is still, for the most part, there, and everything feels strangely jumpy and motionless all at once. Even worse are the digital backgrounds, which stick out like sore thumbs when the room is less crowded or become downright cartoonish when dealing with pre-history or colonial times. That said, once the narrative reaches the (relative) ages of the leads, Hanks and Robin Wright, and the rooms become crowded with furniture and other objects, it’s honestly not so bad – a little touch, perhaps, is best. I can imagine it being used well for blemish correction or slight de-aging techniques (if it isn’t already). Or, you know, for entirely fantastical purposes: Geroge Miller used Metaphysic for Furiosa, and you can hardly notice, perhaps because it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Yet the ethical and technical issues are only its most obvious ones, at least at first glance: you haven’t heard any of Roth and Zemeckis’ screenplay yet or watched Zemeckis try to mirror McGuire’s paneling on screen. The latter is a typical failure of cinema trying to emulate the form and function of comic grids, much like in Ang Lee’s Hulk or Walter Hill’s re-edit of The Warriors, without realizing that one can’t really mirror the experience of reading a comic on-screen. When you open a comic and sit down to read, you steer the process in collaboration with the authors – you can stop and observe detail, go back and look again, and, if done right, everything is well-composed and purposeful, helping to guide you where to look without having complete control of your vision – and cinema is poorly-suited by nature to emulate that. So, when panels from different eras begin appearing on screen, juxtaposing the different eras together, it does bring a feeling of nostalgia to the viewer, though not in the way Roth and Zemeckis are hoping for. It recalls the days when you’d have to hard-reboot a computer if you stumbled on the wrong porn site, watching with horror as your screen filled up with pop-up ads for pills that might make your dick bigger but most likely would send you to the hospital. This choice crowds the frame with information, with shots whizzing by you and a cacophony from different eras creating a kind of sonic chaos (another thing you don’t have to worry about with comics), with distracted hands guiding you through time.

Zemeckis hasn’t made nostalgia work on screen since Roger Rabbit (or Gump, if you’re an ardent fan), and Roth has had a more diverse and interesting career than one might assume – he didn’t just write Gump and Benjamin Button; he also wrote The Insider and Killers of the Flower Moon – but put them together, and you get a stew of destructive impulses. Everything is suffused with a significance that’s often absent from McGuire’s comic: it’s not just that a family inhabits the house in the 1910s, the dad (Gwilym Lee) has to be a pilot obsessed with those new-fangled “aeroplanes,” much to the objections of his suffragette wife (Michelle Dockery), who will leave the house after the Spanish Flu strikes. It’s not enough that someone lived a quiet life in the house during FDR’s presidency – no, the inventor of the La-Z-Boy (David Fynn) did, alongside his pin-up wife (Ophelia Lovibond).

It seems that the only unremarkable people to inhabit the house are the Youngs, the family at the core of its story. When purchased after the war by Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), it becomes a dead-end for personal ambition, imparted by the traumatized and alcoholic Al to his son Richard (Hanks), who goes on to live there for decades, even as his wife Margaret (Wright) begs him to leave and do something for himself. She has a point: Zemeckis has to have the plot unfold in the room, so their daughter is even conceived on Rose’s old couch in the dead of night: a pregnancy will later kill Richard’s artistic ambitions and put a kibosh on Margaret’s attempts to go to law school. In true Zemeckis/Roth fashion, Richard’s announcement to his parents comes as the Beatles are about to start playing on the Ed Sullivan Show. Hell, even Ben Franklin’s bastard kid lived across the street! Kids threw tomatoes at him because he was a loyalist!

If one were to accurately capture the tone of McGuire’s comic in an on-screen adaptation rather than just mirroring its form, they’d probably come up with something that looks and feels a lot like The Tree of Life, where Terrence Malick strung together a story of one family amidst the great pageant of time while also taking time to show us selective flashbulb memories. These aren’t the grand, sweeping moments we narrativize; they’re the uncomfortable moments in which we don’t know the context from childhood, our first encounters with beauty, or our first adult shame. They’re a collection of unremarkable moments full of feeling and meaning, relevant and significant because we declare them so, all of which will be eventually lost to time’s sickening crimes (yes, this should make you sad again). The stories contained within those silent walls will disappear once they give way and collapse, but they happened, nevertheless, and we were lucky enough to live through some of them. At its best – and despite its devices and storytelling – Here captures seconds of those moments and their profundity, usually through Bettany’s deep and often moving performance. But it’s telling that Zemeckis omits the far-future bits of McGuire’s story – the depressing moments in which you see the absence of life at the end – and instead ends on a chintzy sweep of the camera, all the way to a chimney, complete with cartoon hummingbird.

One doesn’t want to depress the audience with the revelation that, one day, and through no fault of our own (though potentially hastened by it), there will come a point when our sun swells, and life will cease to exist, fully and permanently, before the star’s mass swallows up our planet. Malick acknowledges this — the beach at the end of Tree of Life hopefully awaits us, even as our bones decay – but Zemeckis refuses to. To paraphrase Dan Bejar, the book Here is enamored with the elegance of an empty room and astonished when someone steps in the frame, understanding its small significance. The film can’t sit still: It wants the room to go from holiday to holiday, from birth to death, from cultural epoch to a paralleled one in the distant past, refusing to let you make the connections, lest you walk away with some measure of self-discovery and satisfaction.

It’s important to remember that stopping to smell the roses is an active choice, not a passive one, an action in which we don’t pause but instead focus on something small, ephemeral, and grounding. It’s funny to think that Zemeckis used a hummingbird as his symbol here: A hyperactive bird who has to stop and smell flowers to find its food, coming across as a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do admonishment. Perhaps a quieter, less flashy Here might have been able to practice what it preaches, but as far as adaptations go, it’s a particularly blasphemous sermon.