Here
Robert Zemeckis
On release in UK and US cinemas
Artificial intelligence was on the minds of film-makers years before it arrived in daily life, with movies like Blade Runner and A. I. Artificial Intelligence warning of its potential. The use of machine learning, however, is less common in the making of films. Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Ang Lee, Colin Cairnes and others have taken early steps with a variety of technologies, but often met a backlash around copyright and job losses.
So what happens when a film’s whole premise revolves around de-ageing tech? In Here – the latest venture by Robert Zemeckis – a 67-year-old Tom Hanks and co-star Robin Wright are transformed into teenagers and, gradually, retirees, using face-swapping and ageing effects mapped on as footage is shot.
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Zemeckis reunites some of the cast and many of the crew of his 1994 hit Forrest Gump for this time-travelling tale that combines advanced digitisation with an everyday love story. Like Scorsese’s The Irishman, the machine-learning model behind Here was trained on the stars’ back catalogue. But while in The Irishman, frames were altered after shooting, with Here, the result was instantaneous.
Here is an adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel of the same name. It follows the wildlife and people who live on a small plot of land in what is now Pennsylvania, from Mesozoic dinosaur days to the covid-19 pandemic. Although it flits back and forth in time, the film is anchored by a fixed perspective camera placed in what, in modern periods, is a corner of a living room. From there, we witness births, deaths, funerals, weddings and daily life through brisk vignettes.
This ambitious scope means Here doesn’t hang together easily. The film could have used more of the dark humour of Forrest Gump, and less of its schmaltz. But neither mode really works given the momentum with which it cycles through its roster of characters.
On that small plot, the dinosaurs rise and fall, and an Indigenous couple, settlers and even Benjamin Franklin’s estranged son put down roots.
Sometime in the 1910s, John (Gwilym Lee) and Pauline (Michelle Dockery) move in, with Pauline fretting over John’s seemingly dangerous excitement about the novel innovation of aviation.
Eventually, our central character, Richard (Tom Hanks), arrives, an aspiring artist who settles for selling insurance when his high school sweetheart Margaret (Robin Wright) announces she is pregnant. Soon enough, the family expands and Margaret, stuck with her in-laws, hankers for their own home. But Richard can’t tear himself away from his childhood abode. This central storyline stresses the theme of missed opportunity.
In this narrative, there are shreds of comedy: Richard overzealously pretending to be spooked by his son in a ghost costume; the fire department mistakenly being called as Margaret goes into labour. Some moments are cringe-makingly heavy-handed, others just fail, such as when a house guest drops dead from a heart attack after hearing a joke. Overall, the combination of the fixed camera and often stagey acting suggests Here might have found a better home in the theatre.
But the weirdest aspect of the film is its attempt to marry sincerity with an artificial aesthetic. Most of all, it is ugly: the strangely smoothed faces of the de-aged actors undermine their earnest delivery. And as their faces age or de-age, their voices remain the same, which seems odd.
Ultimately, one wonders whether the film’s epic aspirations are just a tactic to hide a mundane, simplistic story. Zemeckis’s ambition is his greatest flaw, and Here‘s daring, tech-reliant narrative device comes over as a misfiring gimmick.
Miriam Balanescu is a writer based in Cambridge, UK
