You know those sprawling commercials that sometimes run around the holidays offering vague, sentimentalized bromidations about love, family, and brotherhood, brought to you by soulless corporations as part of their annual year-end “We’re Fine, Right?” Campaigns? Imagine one of these stretching to 104 minutes and you have Robert Zemeckis’ “Here,” a hollow and empty paean to the entire human experience that has all the depth and profundity of a generic greeting card. The result is a film that’s not just bad, but baffling – one that deals with virtually every emotion imaginable without ever evoking any real emotion of its own.

The idea of ​​the film, based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel, is to position the camera in one place to illustrate all the events that have occurred in that exact spot throughout history, and using single image frames to transition from one point in time to the next. First, it’s open land, giving us glimpses of everything from dying dinosaurs to Native American life to the home of Benjamin Franklin’s estranged son. As the 20th century begins, the place becomes the living room of a semi-detached house and we begin to observe the lives of some of the people who live within its walls. Set in the 1910s, we witness Pauline Harter (Michelle Dockery) constantly worrying that her risk-taking husband John (Gwilym Lee) will die in the newfangled airplane that seems to be the sole focus of his life. In the 1940s, however, we watch a horny but happy couple (David Flynn and Ophelia Lovibond) develop one of the great creations of the century.

For about 60 years and most of the duration of the film (which, after a while, feels about the same), the house is owned by the Young family. It is purchased shortly after the end of World War II by returning soldier Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), who are raising three children there. One of them becomes Richard (Tom Hanks), a young man with dreams of becoming an artist, but they are dashed when he fucks his high school girlfriend Margaret (Robin Wright) – they marry and Richard gets a job as a salesman In order to provide for his family’s livelihood, he has to take out insurance. With finances tight, they are forced to move in with Richard’s parents, and although there is always talk of getting their own place, Richard never seems willing to pull the trigger. Over the years, we watch the young people observe both groundbreaking events throughout history and everyday things we all experience – birth, death, love, depression, infidelity, marital dissatisfaction, dealing with aging parents, etc and the like – all from this one fixed position.

With “Here,” Robert Zemeckis is clearly trying to evoke memories of “Forrest Gump” by bringing together the key members of that film’s creative team – the package also includes screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri and cinematographer Don Burgess – in the hope that they to get Lightning strikes twice. What it lacks, however, are two things that made this film so good: a compelling narrative and a darkly humorous undertone that helped keep it from being overwhelmed by sentimentality. With the exception of the 1940s couple, who have a strange energy that gives the film the only real spark of life, neither the house’s residents nor their experiences are particularly interesting. When the proceedings actually threaten to develop interest or tension, they are usually undermined by clumsy transitions to another era to suggest that we are all somehow connected – in perhaps the most unpleasant of these, a leaky roof leads to Margaret’s water breaking. Speaking of clumsy, the vignettes about the aforementioned Native Americans and the black family that inhabits the house after the Youngs are particularly jarring – while their presence initially suggests that the film might be touching on more troubling aspects of the human experience, it ultimately seems that it does Case to be Just to make sure it’s not 100% lily white.

As for the formal concept and visual conceit that seem to have piqued Zemeckis’ primary interest, none of these fare particularly well either. While the idea of ​​looking at the entire story from a particular perspective could potentially lead to interesting results in the pages of a graphic novel, where the images are initially static, it doesn’t translate well to cinematic terms – important scenes become clumsy – Staged footage and after a while you have to wonder how many births, deaths, sexual encounters and dramatic revelations will occur in the exact same place where the Youngs have set the extended table for Thanksgiving dinner. What’s even more disastrous is the computer-aided aging process used to make the various actors look younger (and eventually older) than they already are. This technique was criticized when Martin Scorsese used it in The Irishman, but at least there it was used sparingly. Here it’s in constant use, and it never really works – the actors all too often have a plasticine look that is both distracting (which Wright particularly suffers from) and undercuts any emotion the characters are trying to convey.

“Here” is a work so cloying and awkward in its attempts to move you that at some point you start to think that the only thing Zemeckis hasn’t thrown into the mix is ​​a pinprick of “Our House.” and then he does just that. He can still be a compelling filmmaker when he wants to (see the great “Allied”), but here he’s working on a project that’s apparently designed to allow him to do his worst habits, and he drags great actors like Hanks and Wright (for whom about half of their dialogue seems to be some kind of variation on how time passes) down with him. Spoiler alert! There’s actually a key moment in the film where the camera moves – that’s more than we in the audience can say.

This review was submitted from the premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival. It opens November 1st^st.