As an art installation, Robert Zemeckis’ “Here” might have worked. As a movie, it’s a noble failure. From “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” to “Forrest Gump” to” The Polar Express,” the director has always been eager to use whatever cutting-edge technology has crossed his path, his curiosity to use the latest gimmick sometimes undermining his better filmmaking instincts.
That’s surely the case here, as the concept behind “Here,” telling its various stories from a fixed perspective, becomes a stagnant, frustrating exercise that ends up being more a curiosity than an engaging cinematic experience. The film touches upon various stories that occur from the prehistoric era to the modern day in the same spot, which eventually becomes New Jersey. As such, the camera never moves, though the setting obviously changes.
We witness the Earth go through its birth throes and the extinction of the dinosaurs, a Native American couple fall in love and have a family, the building of a colonial mansion by Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son William, and the building of a modest home across from that sprawling estate. It is in this home that most of the action occurs, as erratic as it is, with a variety of families living there over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. A turn-of-the-century couple, the Marters (Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery), buy it first, he a pilot in the burgeoning aviation industry, she a domestic worry wart.
Next to take possession are t.
