Here
by Robert Zemeckis
The twenty-second feature film directed by Robert Zemeckis in a career spanning forty-six years, Here adds another layer to his ongoing challenge to conventional filmmaking, while simultaneously rejuvenating it within a narrative framework. Heartfelt and sentimental, Here explores perspectives, the stillness of imagery, and editing as a means of transcending and redefining time.
Space and Time in Images
A prehistoric plot of land, and the house that will be built upon it. That house will become home to generations of families, from Homo sapiens to Indigenous people, colonists, and finally, a contemporary African-American household. In the living room of that house, lives will unfold—always different yet fundamentally the same—inhabited by husbands, wives, children, grandparents, and grandchildren. [Synopsis]
It had been six years since a Robert Zemeckis film reached theaters, as both The Witches and Pinocchio premiered directly on streaming platforms. The last title from the nearly fifty-year career of the American director to be shown on the big screen was Welcome to Marwen, released in the U.S. during the 2018 holiday season and arriving in Italy the following January. That film was a resounding commercial failure, following the earlier flop of Allied (2016) and the modest results of The Walk (2015). To find a notable box office success from Zemeckis, one must go all the way back to 2012, with the release of Flight.
This somber preamble helps contextualize not the aesthetic or production value of Here, but the blatant indifference with which Zemeckis’ twenty-second creation has been received, first in the United States and then worldwide. It grossed less than $15 million in the U.S., despite a production budget nearing $50 million. Considering the recent history of a filmmaker who once reigned as a box office titan—think of the success of Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and What Lies Beneath, to name just a few highlights—these dismal box office figures shouldn’t be surprising. Nor should the cold reception from major U.S. critics come as a shock.
While Hollywood may literally be burning in these tragic times, its intellectual fire has been raging for years, with no one stepping forward to extinguish it. Here is a film that openly challenges the dominant imagination of today’s Hollywood. It does so not out of intellectual pretension or disdain for the industry—Zemeckis, after all, has been a key figure in it for nearly half a century—but because Here simply does not belong to this time. It doesn’t represent it, follow its codes, or adhere to its habits. Like the cinema of his mentor and elder counterpart Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis’ work inhabits a timeless space where images seem to float, even when—like in this case—they appear unusually static. This artificial atemporality alienates audiences who have been raised on a steady diet of hyper-contemporary content and now find it impossible to step outside it.
And yet, cinema exists here and now, Zemeckis slyly suggests, as if he were circling around the Heideggerian Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and its interpretation of the Latin hic et nunc. In Here, the concept of “being there” doesn’t merely denote physical placement in space but explores how this positioning is concretely experienced within human existence.
The film is based on the graphic novel of the same name, Here, published a decade ago by Richard McGuire. The work garnered significant attention for its distinctive aesthetic, with McGuire incorporating smaller panels within larger ones to reframe the temporal context of the same physical space. The same location traversed eras, evolving not in its original existence but in its meaning (where once stood a forest, there is now the grand living room of a beautiful house, for example), reworking the very concept of narrative design.
Translating this brilliant idea from page to screen may seem straightforward—even in the pantographic sense of reworking and revitalizing it—but this is a naive assumption. While the frame of a drawing and the frame of a camera might share ideal convergences, the notion of actual movement, which is inherent to cinema, makes this overlap impossible.
Thus, Zemeckis’ Here, in its cinematic form, ventures far beyond what McGuire could achieve in 2014. Unlike the graphic novel, the film is inevitably forced to situate itself within the sensibilities of the present day—a present dominated by imagery that is increasingly decontextualized and desensitized. Neutral, and therefore starkly unfeeling, superhuman rather than human.
Zemeckis restores a prehistoric humanity to the image, making it anything but inappropriate—as some critics have wrongly claimed—that the film begins in a geological era devoid of humans, when space was unoccupied by our presence. Time, which Zemeckis has always explored with sharp wit and insight, is not bound by human logic. It precedes us and might outlast us.
The uneven and fragmented narrative of Here follows a primary storyline—the decades-long love story between Richard and Margaret, played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, reunited in a Zemeckis film thirty years after Forrest Gump. Alongside this central thread, the film weaves in other micro-stories, nearly all revolving around the concept of “family.” These include two Indigenous people; the first residents who built “across the street” during the Revolutionary War; a bourgeois couple with a daughter in the early 1900s, with the husband being an aviation enthusiast; a couple from the 1930s tied to the burgeoning reclining chair industry; and finally, the Young family in the present day.
Much like McGuire’s graphic novel, Zemeckis inserts additional micro-frames within the main shot, traversing time while remaining anchored to the same space. However, the effect is inherently different: in McGuire’s ink-and-paper work, this functions as a simple reorientation of the reader’s perspective. In the film, this technique redefines the concept of editing, building it into the shot itself, while also engaging with modern digital aesthetics—social media scrolling, reels, desktop imagery.
This exploration of the immutability of space over time, and the necessity of perspective as the sole human variable against the inevitability of decay and forgetting, is also rooted in contemporary concerns and new visual grammars. Yet it remains deeply sentimental, a hallmark of Zemeckis’ cinema. The much-discussed “de-aging” effect, which renders Hanks and Wright believably in their twenties, thirties, and forties, is not a mere display of technological prowess. Unlike the technocratic ideology associated with figures like Musk, the effect serves a narrative purpose, echoing Martin Scorsese’s use of the same technique in The Irishman. It underscores the fragility of time and its inevitable disintegration—a theme echoed in the fragmented editing, the overlapping of moments, and the fractured, almost anguished aesthetic that resists a linear representation of time.
This disintegration reflects not just human memory but cinema itself. As noted, Zemeckis is cinema’s ultimate chronicler of time and its integration into human memory and life. This has been evident since Back to the Future, and continues in films like Forrest Gump, Contact, and Death Becomes Her. Here represents the culmination of this reflection, elevating it to near-experimental levels that feel entirely unsuited to Hollywood’s commercial norms.
The characters in Here do not seek to live in time but to stop it, to elevate it to a totem. They desire immortality—not of life itself, but of memory, and by extension, of feeling. Ultimately, this means a longing for art, which is nothing more than life transmuted into emotion. A lost object rediscovered within a couch is enough to traverse the oceans of time, reminding us of the stillness of the image and its unimaginable capacity for motion.
Raffaele Meale
Quinlan, January 12, 2024
