‘Here’ Review: Thanks, I Hate It Here
Robert Zemeckis garishly experiments with Artificial Intelligence in his non-linear, static shot Here, and the results are as baffling as you think they are.
It’s hard to define the ‘late-stage’ era of a filmmaker. Of course, when one reaches a certain age, many are prone to say that this particular director has reached their ‘late stage.’ But if their ‘late stage’ is as good as their early and middle stages, how do we divide their body of work? In the case of someone like Clint Eastwood, whose Juror #2 releases in his 94th year of existence, his ‘late stage’ has been filled with work as equally compelling as his early and middle eras, though one can sense his physical tiredness in films like The 15:17 to Paris, or, more recently, Cry Macho.
One can’t say the same for Robert Zemeckis, whose current era began with the release of the horrible The Polar Express, which led him to experiment with new technologies garishly, often producing one disaster after the next. While many of his films have pushed the boundaries of stereoscopic filmmaking, including the severely underappreciated The Walk, most of his recent output has been more than disappointing. It seems he’s lost the texture that made his earlier movies so revered among the masses, including Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Contact, with constantly thinking that cinema should evolve from an analog to a digital world.
That’s not saying that cinema should remain analog forever and rely solely on practical effects and camerawork (though it does feel refreshing when a Beetlejuice Beetlejuice releases in an era of CGI gunk). The overall advancement of technology has had many benefits in further developing fully realistic computer-generated worlds, which are shown with impeccable panache in James Cameron’s Avatar franchise. But it also introduced the world of filmmaking to Artificial Intelligence. I may get stones thrown at me, but there are ethical uses of AI as an artistic tool that helps VFX artists lighten the load of complicated tasks (exemplified recently in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two). The technology here isn’t misused because the artists working on the film understand the tool's benefits in enhancing the look of an effect or creating one entirely. In this case, one should realize that the task is still performed by a human and not generated by a machine.
Unfortunately, anti-art studio executives tantalize at the prospect of generative AI replacing artists with machines, leading to abhorrent, soulless uses in Ali Selim’s Secret Invasion, Andy Muschietti’s The Flash, and most recently, Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil. This was done to cut artistic corners in favor of a robot that can absolutely emulate many elements of human existence, but will never be able to create anything meaningful and complete with raw feeling. As Michael Bay so eloquently said, “It doesn’t CREATE, it just IMITATES. And will create a whole bunch of lazy people. [sic]”
So why is Zemeckis so insistent on using a technology that will not benefit him or his actors in any way for his latest motion picture, Here? The filmmaker, alongside his star-studded ensemble, comprised of Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, and Nikki Amuka-Bird, are subjected to frightening displays of de-aging and, most uncomfortably, face-swapping, by way of an AI software named Metaphysic Live that will supposedly revolutionize the cinematic language and a creator’s relationship to technology. However, it does the exact opposite.
Like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, the story depicted here is treated through multiple eras. Naturally, de-aging is then used to represent characters at different times of their lives. More clearly, the movie begins in the dinosaur era and ends in a post-COVID society (Scorsese’s gangster film does not go this far). Of course, this means extensive de-aging for Hanks and Wright, who play the movie’s central couple, Richard and Margaret. The two meet as teenagers and spend the rest of their lives HERE, inside a house that has gone through many permutations over time, from a newly-formed couple (Ophelia Lovibond and David Fynn) on the cusp of inventing what’s now famously referred to as the La-Z Boy, or a husband and wife (Michelle Dockery and Gwilym Lee) living during the Spanish Flu pandemic.
This is intercut with the main story of the Youngs, who have bought the house once populated by the aforementioned characters (and before, the spot of land the film focuses on belonged to an Indigenous tribe, before they were colonized, shown in a lens so reductive it led to audible groans at usually quiet press screenings). Throughout their existence, the family has developed a close connection to their house through Richard and Margaret or Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly).
Their connection to the living room, in which most of the movie is set in, is so close that Richard and Margaret get married inside it and give birth to their child. It’s all happening here, though to the detriment of Richard’s desires to become an artist and Margaret wanting to move out of here (just like the audience, after a few minutes of realizing what it will be about and how Zemeckis structures this film).
This is all visually represented in an unbroken static shot, where the camera only moves at the end to reveal the digitized world the characters have inhabited for centuries. The camera transitions through different time periods in a non-linear, almost random way via superimpositions. To be honest, this could’ve been an intriguing experience to witness in IMAX 3D at 60 frames per second. It probably wouldn’t have worked then, but it would’ve at least been an investment in Zemeckis’ time in trying to do something different, technologically and cinematically, for audiences. Zemeckis seems to have soured on 3D, but he’s done some of the most compelling work in the format with Bay and Cameron.
However, there’s one glaring problem that sinks this digitized proposition Zemeckis puts forward. Unlike Michael Snow’s Wavelength, which spends 45 minutes of our time slowly zooming into an actual wall in a tangible, living environment in one unbroken, static shot, Zemeckis’ world is entirely synthesized. The only actual material we see is the basis of the house set (the floor, walls, couches, and folding tables). The rest is all faked, either through green screens, rear projections, or entirely plastic environments constructed within a computer. It’s even worse when we’re subjected to some of the ugliest uses of de-aging seen in the history of cinema, possibly worse than Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, which at least had the 3D/HFR experience going for it.
Few films have made de-aging natural. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Captain Marvel is one such example of a great use of the technology. Unfortunately, Zemeckis’ treatment of its characters is petrifying. The natural, compassionate skillset that Hanks is usually known for is completely removed because the face that we associate the actor with is gone, caked in a computer that has rendered one of the greatest living actors into a character inhabiting a cutscene from Grand Theft Auto III. The same can be said for Wright, who’s responsible for the film’s funniest scene for all the wrong computerized reasons. Since the faces of the protagonists look and feel artificial, and the entire construction of its central set is one large digital file (as Robert Rodriguez would put it), the emotional connection with the protagonists is minimal.
There’s no humanity left in the over-expressed acting showcased here. Bettany, in particular, is the film’s worst offender, often exaggerating each line Al says for extra dramatic impact, while no one believes in Wright and Hanks’ turns because their older bodies don’t match with the younger masks on their faces. None of it feels like it was made by the man who brought us some of the greatest films of the 1980s and 1990s, which meaningfully pushed the boundaries of cinema forward and influenced many of the young filmmakers working today. It also pales in comparison to some of his most sincere ‘late-stage’ work with The Walk, Allied, and Flight.
Worse yet, none of the cross-cutting in superimpositions between the past and present contain any meaningful communication with the main story at hand. It’s almost as if Zemeckis forgot to discuss colonization and slavery that he added these characters at the very last minute of his film, a tacked-on reshoot of sorts so that we don’t forget who this land initially belonged to. That’s fine and all, but there’s no deeper meaning in the non-moving image (until the final moment) that Zemeckis portrays through his different eras other than “time flies.”
It sure does. This critic is four years away from reaching 30, and it terrifies him, especially considering that the bulk of his 20s was sadly spent in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. That would’ve certainly been an interesting aspect to explore (characters have a profound connection to the house, after all). However, COVID takes very minimal time in the movie, other than the masks and elbow bumps, to visually remind us of the era we’ve now entered. All we get from the characters is variations of “look at how time flies,” either from the constant push-pulls between the past and the now or the characters who incessantly remind us of that fact ad nauseam, just like how they say “here” in every two sentences to remind us of the place, and time they are in.
No one would believe you if one would say before the movie that this adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel was written by the same screenwriter who brought Forrest Gump to life, and shot by the same cinematographer, too. There’s little to no life in the film’s perpetual frame (while Forrest Gump had an array of striking images and sequences), and no attention to blocking or experimenting with the on and off-camera environment. Sometimes, Zemeckis will include a mirror in the frame, which reveals a unseen part of the house, but there’s no desire to make the living room we spend most of the runtime into a living, breathing entity.
The result is a bafflingly constructed movie whose only purpose is to demonstrate how far AI can go in de-aging characters and face-swapping them through different, uneven bodies. If this is a showcase of the technical prowess of AI that will lead us into the future of cinema, it has failed miserably. Additionally, as a deeply human drama centering on the passage of time that wants to remind audiences that we must enjoy the time we live in now, here, in this world, before it passes us in the blink of an eye, it’s also a miserable failure.
It has nothing of interest to say; the actors give some of the worst performances of their career, and the overall presentation feels more like a warning against AI than a celebration of a newfound technology that will push the boundaries of cinema forward. If this will push the direction of cinema forward, we need to re-evaluate what on earth we’re doing here, before it reaches a point of no return. For some, it’s already happened. For others, it’s not too late. I believe so, too, but movies like these certainly don’t make the case that cinema is evolving excitingly. We’re getting lazy, and audiences aren’t being duped. When will the people in power wake up?