Here

This weekend, Here, the newest film from Robert Zemeckis, released in theaters. Here centers around a single location on Earth as time evolves around and many different individual and family stories are told. The film mainly focuses on the family life of the characters played by Paul Bettany, Tom Hanks, and Robin Wright. I have enjoyed many of Robert Zemeckis's other films such as Forrest Gump and Back to the Future so of course I was interested to see where this film would be good.

This movie definitely took a unique approach to its storytelling. Every moment of the movie was shown as if looking through the window into a singular area. It starts as an undeveloped land and slowly transforms into a modern-day living room. The movie showcases many different stories throughout hundreds of years. I thought this was a very unique way to tell the story and was mostly effective. Through this lens, the movie also does a great job of showing the passage of time and how various people handle the idea of lost time. The Tom Hanks-Robin Wright storyline was easily the best part of the movie. These are the characters that you get invested in and see them grow from young children to old adults. There were a few other stories of characters from other times that were pretty interesting but they were not as prominent as the Tom Hanks story.

The whole premise of this movie is the gimmick of watching everything unfold from the same spot across hundreds of years but by the end of the movie, the gimmick feels a little played out. There is a lot of "cheating" that has to happen in the story for the gimmick to work so there is a lot of suspension of disbelief that has to be had. A lot of events that have no business taking place in this living room (a wedding, a funeral, a birth, a death) have to happen in this living room for the movie to work. Because of this, the movie gimmick just begins to feel cheesy and a bit played out. I also thought that the movie would have worked a little bit better had it been told more linearly instead of cutting between different stories across time. It just made some of the stories that only had about 5 minutes of screen time, feel a bit unnecessary.

Overall, this is a movie that had a lot of solid moments, delivered an emotionally satisfying ending, and had a unique storytelling perspective. However, the gimmick itself required too much "cheating" in the storytelling to make it work in the context of the movie.

Score: 6.5/10 Grade: B- Recommendation: Wait to stream it