HERE we go!

Robert Zemeckis is a weird guy desperately trying to stamp down his weirdness

I haven’t had a chance to see a lot of new release movies this second half of the year. I have spent so much time at the theater I work at, the idea of going to another theater to watch a film was an idea too easy to dismiss. HERE, the latest film by populist auteur Robert Zemeckis, was a movie I was looking forward to seeing. Unfortunately, the film cratered at the box office and left theaters before I could carve out a few hours to go and see it. This will sound hella hypocritical on my part, considering previous screeds I’ve written concerning the post-COVID film landscape, but thank god for shortened theatrical windows because I finally had the chance to see HERE from the comfort of my couch last week.

Zemeckis’s film is an adaptation of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel. McGuire’s HERE expanded a six-page short comic he wrote and drew for the Art Spiegelman-edited anthology RAW. The premise of the short story, the graphic novel, and the movie are all the same - a specific patch of land in New Jersey is observed non-linearly. The lives of dinosaurs, Native Americans, colonialists, and, eventually, suburbanites are charted with clever panel placement (in the comics and the film), juxtaposing the rhyming nature of reality across hundreds of thousands of years. In the comic, this means 304 pages where time and space bend in upon themselves - with panels of dinosaur eggs, pregnant Indigenous women, and nursing housewives sharing the same double-page spread. For Zemeckis’s adaptation, he tries to capture the non-linear, experimental nature of the comic as best he can - with a static camera and floating cutaway “panels” that peak through the wobbly veil of time to achieve the same effect as McGuire’s comic.

HERE is not an obvious choice for a theatrical adaptation - there is no real story to speak of, and the concept and McGuire’s precise, infographic-esque art do most of the heavy lifting. The emotion readers experience while reading the comic book is primarily self-produced. If something stirs inside of you, it’s because you, the reader, are bringing your own resonance in your hand, like a beggar’s outstretched grasp. McGuire’s book is a confident piece of art - not concerned with sentimentality or maudlin whims. In other words, it’s the exact opposite of Zemeckis’s usual MO.

Robert Zemeckis has made some of the most popular films in modern American cinema. His BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy has its place firmly cemented in pop culture history. WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, FOREST GUMP, CAST AWAY, DEATH BECOMES HER, and WHAT LIES BENEATH were huge crowdpleasers. Even total stinkers like THE POLAR EXPRESS have a dedicated fanbase. The guy knows how to make movies that people like. Or, at least, he used to. The last twenty years of Zemeckis’ career have, except for FLIGHT - a movie that received great critical acclaim (even if it features one of the most on-the-nose needle drops ever pooped out a director’s imagination) - has been filled with a series of misses. Here’s the thing, though - a lot of those whiffs are interesting whiffs. BEOWULF was an animated movie for adults that adopted a 1,000-year-old epic poem and featured an early use of the motion-capture performance technology now used regularly in Hollywood. THE WALK was a character-study biopic that was released in IMAX 3D. WELCOME TO MARWEN is an adaptation of a cult documentary that arguably needlessly uses cutting-edge special effects. Compared to the first half of his career, where the filmmaker churned out hit after hit, Robert Zemeckis seems driven by a need to make costly films with limited appeal. And god bless him for this.

Years ago, I had the chance to meet Crispin Glover. The actor, who worked with Zemeckis on BACK TO THE FUTURE and BEOWULF, shared a story about the time he questioned Zemeckis’ pro-capitalist ending for BACK TO THE FUTURE. He complained to “Bob” that the film's lesson was that success is only found in nice cars, expensive clothes, and making your childhood bully wash your car. Zemeckis, upset by Glover’s question, responded that he had made a “weird movie” once (he was referring to USED CARS), and it didn’t make any money. Zemeckis was out of the game of making weird movies. Or so he thought…

Zemeckis’ artistic career is the opposite of Tim Burton’s. Tim Burton is a man who makes weird movies, but if you dig deep enough into his films, you see the Morse code signals of a man desperately wanting to fit in with suburbia. Zemeckis, on the other hand, has tried his best to make normal movies that audiences will want to see, but his weirdness keeps getting in the way.

HERE is not a perfect success. Thanks to the source material and Zemeckis’s desire to stay true to it, the film is wildly ambitious, interesting, and endlessly watchable. Unfortunately, due to Zemeckis’s yearning to try and cover up his oddness with greeting card platitudes, the movie suffers from an embarrassing earnestness that doesn’t work. The actors' dialogue is theatrical and broad, giving the film an artificiality that is only overshadowed by the AI de-aging effects that turn stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright into teenagers. Heck, Zemeckis’s biggest fumble was trying to give the story a plot in the first place. The film follows the ups and downs of a couple’s marriage and the struggles of putting their dreams on hold to raise a kid. It’s a nice story, and the emotions are strong and played acutely, like a musician covering their favorite Beatles song. It’s a story we’ve seen played out repeatedly, but told out of order and juxtaposed with the weight of history; it feels novel and interesting. It also feels wholly forced. It feels like Zemeckis is giving audiences what he thinks they want instead of fully embracing the non-narrative nature of the original graphic novel.

I wish Zemeckis was not afraid of doing things outside the worry of what audiences might think. He’s a talented filmmaker, and his instincts are strong - he has a habit of fumbling the ball when he tries to make normal movies, though. HERE is a story about how meaningless our day-to-day struggles are. We are but specks of dust in the grand canvas of the cosmos. Our day-to-day heartaches and triumphs are just echoes of what has come before and an overture to what is still yet to come. HERE reminds us that it’s all been done before, and all we can do is enjoy the moments while we’re in them instead of worrying about the future or fretting over the past. This is not a movie for norms, yet Zemeckis turned it into one. But here’s the problem - norms are going to HATE the story's non-linear nature, and they will be confused by the dinosaurs and the whole Benjamin Franklin thing. Why, oh why, would you try to make a movie for people who would never like it in the first place?

I like HERE. I wish it were weirder, but I still like it. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since watching it, and that, to me, is a sign of a good movie. I’m glad it exists, and I can go back and watch it or read the graphic novel whenever I like.

I hope, though, that Robert Zemeckis one day finally stops listening to that voice in his head that keeps telling him that he can’t make weird movies. From one Robert to another, Mr. Zemeckis - I give you permission to make your movies as weird as you want them to be.