[Game Guide] With its camera plunked down in the corner of a
living room for 104 minutes, Robert Zemeckis' Here takes us through the
life of one American family, the Youngs, through much of the 20th century. Using
frames-within-frames to transition
between decades (and provide glimpses of the people who occupied this space before and after the
Youngs), life in all
its hues is captured at a fixed, observational distance. It’s an intriguing concept, but
Zemeckis may be too much of a
sentimentalist to make it work. The technological tinkering that once elevated his filmmaking
but has entirely consumed
it for the past 20 years (seen here in the dire de-aging of stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright)
certainly doesn't help,
but the problems plaguing Here are rooted in its conception. The film is based on Richard
McGuire's 2014 graphic novel
of the same name (and its six-page predecessor from 1989) – an experimental comic that has now
spawned a disappointingly
straightforward dramatic adaptation.