Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.As effects-driven Hollywood movies go, Robert Zemeckis’s Here is positively avant-garde. But its experimentation is as creakily unconvincing as the gait of Tom Hanks, digitally de-aged 50 years to resemble a teenager. Based on Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, Here traces the history of one location, the living room of a New England house, over the years and indeed the millennia. It begins in a prehistoric swamp with rampaging dinosaurs, takes us into the Ice Age, then through the speeded-up blossoming of lush flora — at which point, you expect “AMERICA!” to burst across the screen to a celestial fanfare.Eventually a house is built, and we watch the history of its 20th-century inhabitants — primarily the family of Richard (Hanks), born after the second world war. Over the decades, he and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright) grow older, raise children of their own and experience the human condition, its melancholic ironies writ large.Co-writing with Eric Roth, Zemeckis adapts McGuire’s visual premise faithfully, using a fixed camera and the odd device of frames appearing within the frame. These portals trigger shifts between eras, carrying us from the 1960s back to the 1920s, the 1700s, or the pre-Mayflower amours of a young Native American couple.Here may be a prodigy of hyper-choreographed trickery, but its folksy self-importance suggests a less fleet-footed variant on Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, which was written by Roth, and also paired Hanks and Wright. Notwithstanding some grimmer touches — a Black father instructs his son on how to survive police attention when driving — Here exudes an overwhelming scent of Norman Rockwell and apple pie.Still, full marks to editor Jesse Goldsmith for making sense of the visual clutter, and to production designer Ashley Lamont for rallying more styles of period interior furnishing than any normal film could conceivably require.★★☆☆☆In cinemas from January 17
