Everybody fawns over the So Bad It’s Good movie, but where’s the love for features so wrong-headed they’re miraculous? Arranged with heedless enthusiasm and a dubious lack of studio oversight, these rarely seen monuments to egomania, which capture laughter inside a nebulous purgatory between at and with, deserve their own cherished category. 2024 had already seen an all-time example with Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, itself picking up where Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths left off, each channeling their creators’ blustering self-regard into something enrapturing and revolting. Blessed be the cinematic gods for offering us another in such short order, with Robert Zemeckis’ Here immediately joining the pantheon of all time ‘greats.’ The only thing it’s missing is an opening credit that says, ‘Hold My Beer.’

That’s just about the extent of what the Back to the Future director neglected to offer us, with Here’s basic synopsis reading like Bill Hader’s Stefon promoting one of his favorite nightclubs. We open at the beginning of time (no, really), bearing witness to earth’s nascent stages, dinosaurs and the ice age giving way to the first vestiges of human civilization. Quickly reducing the expanse of its swathes of time from millennia to centuries and eventually decades, the film introduces characters from the 1700’s all the way through present day, harboring a particular affinity for the Young family. Initially represented by World War I veteran Al (Paul Bettany) and his doting wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), the focus eventually shifts to their son Richard (Tom Hanks), an artistically-inclined teenager (not a typo) who starts romancing and building a life with Margaret (Robin Wright) inside the confines of the Young’s aggressively average living room.

The parameters are restrictive indeed, all of Here taking place within a solitary, unmoving frame that holds steady on a singular plot of land, refusing to move with the times. Rather than dutifully relaying all happenings in chronological fashion, editor Jesse Goldsmith plays hopscotch across the timelines, moving one glacially forward before doubling back, and affording similar treatment to another. As if the overriding thematic kinship weren’t enough, we also see the assorted arcs bleed into one another, with rectangular, keyhole visages of upcoming narratives constantly fading into and out of existence as a means of transition. By the time you add in the rampant deaging effects, the whole enterprise starts to feel like the olympics of celluloid gimmickry.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This level of high concept apparatus building has effectively bolstered durational, slice-of-life cinema before, most notably in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life, from which Here borrows both its divine sense of nostalgia and scaly, prehistoric beasts. All three weaponize our familiarity with the minutiae and mundanity of daily life to form a two way mirror, in which small scale occurrences are afforded grandeur though their inherent knowability. Recognizing yourself on screen has a magnetism, especially when filtered through casts with an eye on naturalism, but the actorly artifice of Zemeckis’ latest is overwhelming to the point of obvious intent.

Exactly what he’s trying to communicate with these hamfisted performances, each fitted with grievously stilted dialogue, is anyone’s guess, but the synergy removes the possibility of happenstance. There’s no other explanation for the disparate affectations of Hanks, Bettany, and Wright all magically rowing in the same direction, let alone the rest of the expansive call sheet. It all makes for something akin to Masterpiece Theater, or, more appropriately and more damningly, one of the informative videos attached to a local history exhibit. Rather than pursuing believability in any form or fashion, Here seems to suggest that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, though likening humans across such divergent times and social circumstances is more than slightly questionable.

Any white man who folds depictions of indigenous people into his 2024 movie is actively courting criticism, and the silent, revenant display here is no exception. Seen living off the land, forging tradition and community, and engaging in what could only be condescendingly described as ‘love making,’ their scenes are flooded with the type of piety that almost guarantees bad art. They’re also the most clear distillation of what makes Here’s innumerable blunders charming in a roundabout way; Zemeckis and Eric Roth’s screenplay is so foolhardy as to make it all the way through good taste’s looking glass, rendering otherwise offensive stereotyping innocuous in light of their enviable ignorance to our current moment. Grandpa might veer off the conversationally acceptable highway every once in a while, but his heart is (probably) in the right place, and when the utterly hilarious Benjamin Franklin cameo hits, it’s hard to chide a pair of septuagenarians for being so woefully unwoke.

A visitation from American history’s premiere multi-hyphenate is far from the only example of Here driving timeline mile markers so deep into the ground that they risk hitting the earth’s core, an architectural holdover from Zemeckis and Roth’s world-conquering Forrest Gump. References to the invention of flight, the Spanish Flu, and even Covid-19 are littered throughout, mooring us to their contemporaneous moment, but lightning can’t strike twice when the tectonic plates have moved so dramatically. Even if Gump is still beloved in certain circles, its once-galvanizing sense of emotionality is now commonly understood as saccharine sentimentality. Repurposing the formula for modern audiences was never going to have the same effect, especially when glancing ruminations on racial disparity and gender inequality miss their marks so wildly. 

We’re all too jaded now, but Here offers an ethically questionable and technically dubious retreat back to a more innocent time. That it doesn’t really work is somehow less important than marveling at the effort, even when your eyes roll so far back that they come around the other side. There’s an ineffable charm in watching a collective this accomplished trudge their way through material this faulty, made more impactful by the irrefutable fact that a broke clock is right twice a day. Seeing Hanks and Wright, three decades removed from their shared apex in the zeitgeist, struggle and age with digital assistance has an impact that no amount of clumsy scaffolding can fully erase. Like most of the lives it diligently follows, Here is more or less a failure, frequently of the unintentionally comedic variety, but there’s beauty in its bravery. It’s ok to laugh at it, so long as you also have some tissues at the ready.