A Reunion That Should've Hit Harder
Look, I wanted to love Here. Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis together again? After Forrest Gump, Cast Away, and The Polar Express? That's a pedigree worth getting excited about. Two hours later, I walked out of the theater feeling like I'd just watched a very expensive tech demo with a Hallmark card taped to it.
The premise sounds ambitious on paper — a single camera position, watching one room across decades of American life. Families move in, grow old, move out. Babies take first steps on the same hardwood floor where someone else just died. That's a beautiful idea. The kind of idea that needs extraordinary execution to land. What it got instead was CGI that made me squint and wonder if Tom Hanks had been replaced by a slightly melted wax figure from Madame Tussauds.
The Uncanny Valley Has a New Landlord
Here's the thing about de-aging tech: when it works, you forget it's there. When it doesn't, it's ALL you can see. Here falls squarely into the second camp. There's a scene early on where a young Hanks is supposed to be gazing lovingly at Robin Wright's character, and instead of feeling the romance, I was mentally cataloging which video game his face reminded me of. (Fable II, if you're curious.)
The technology isn't terrible — it's actually impressive in short bursts. But Zemeckis makes the fatal mistake of trusting it for long, emotionally loaded scenes where your brain is screaming something is wrong. Your eyes know. Your gut knows. And once that spell breaks, you're watching pixels instead of people.
A Camera That Refuses to Breathe
The locked-off camera is the film's most baffling creative choice. The idea, presumably, was to make the room the real protagonist — a silent witness to the passage of time. In theory? Poetic. In practice? It feels like watching a security feed at a museum exhibit. When characters leave the frame, the camera just... sits there. Waiting. Like a patient dog whose owner went into a store.
There's a moment where a young couple dances in the living room — the kind of scene that should make you ache with tenderness — and the camera doesn't even tilt down to catch their feet moving across the floor. It just stares straight ahead, unblinking, like it got written up by HR and is trying to play it cool.
Echoes of Gump Without the Magic
You can feel Forrest Gump's DNA all over this movie. Same actor, same director, same sweeping American backdrop, same sentimental tone. But Gump had a trick that Here desperately needed: momentum. Forrest ran from his porch to the edge of the world, and we ran with him. Here just... sits. Characters arrive, deliver dialogue that sounds like it was written for a greeting card, and leave.
Hanks does what he can. He's Tom Hanks — the man could make reading a phone book feel like Shakespeare. But even he can't sell lines like "Every moment is a gift" with the conviction they need when the de-aging software has turned his left ear into something resembling a cinnamon roll.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here's what makes Here genuinely frustrating, not just mediocre: the bones of a great film are buried underneath all the digital trickery. The script has moments of real insight about how spaces hold memory, how the walls of a home absorb laughter and grief like drywall absorbs paint. There's a subplot about a couple dealing with a medical diagnosis that, in a different movie, would wreck you.
But those moments get bulldozed every time the tech takes center stage. Zemeckis seems so enamored with what his team can do that he forgets to ask whether they should. The result is a film that keeps reaching for your heartstrings while simultaneously tripping over its own shoelaces.
So... Should You See It?
If you're a completist for Hanks or Zemeckis, sure — lower your expectations and go in curious rather than hopeful. There are glimpses of something beautiful here, like light through a cracked window. But if you're choosing between this and literally anything else showing at the theater right now, your time and your eleven dollars probably deserve better.
Here isn't a disaster. It's something almost worse: a film with every ingredient for greatness that somehow baked into something that tastes like nothing at all. The room on screen holds a century of memories. The movie holding that room will fade from yours by next Tuesday.
