If, god forbid, filmmaker Robert Zemeckis were to kick the lunchpail tomorrow, the headlines would inevitably read, “Forrest Gump director has passed,” name-checking the most widely lauded film to bare his signature. His latest, Here, marks an aggressively earnest attempt to recapture the lightning in that particular bottle (misshapen though it now looks with the gift of hindsight), and make an American statement/opus that explores the life of a typical working class everyman through the melancholy lens of time. And perhaps it’s a reflection of a much more cynical, skeptical age we’re living in, but where Gump managed to steal a nation’s heart with its hokey aphorisms and up with people outlook, Here actively repels with its generic insights into the evolution of family, society, civilisation, the whole bit.

The concept of the film is that the fixed camera eye transcends the ravages of time and chronicles the life of its own frame – something you could actually do if ginormous digital hard drives had existed back in the Cretaceous period. So we have fragments of fiery pre-history, dinos at war, native American tribal ritual, the spread of white colonial society and, eventually, the three generations of a family growing up in a plush suburban stack.

The story of the boomer-tastic Young family makes up the rump of the film, with all the other little flashback elements providing little more than novelty context. Much of the history is very convenient, such as the fact that the asteroid that marked Earth’s first major extinction event apparently landed right where the car port would’ve been on the Young’s house some 66 million years later. It’s cute, but it pushes the film’s intent further away from anything even approaching authenticity and seriousness.

Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly star initially as Al and Rose Young: he a decorated World War Two veteran looking to invest his wages in property; she a doting, softly-spoken housewife who has to deal with the negative effects of her husband’s PTSD. Soon there are kids, one of which, Richard, grows up into a daffily de-aged Tom Hanks who, unfortunately, acts and sounds like Tom Hanks in his 60s. The film charts the wavering fortunes of the family, including Richard’s marriage to Margaret and his conceptually fortuitous decision to not want to leave the family nest.

On paper, Here sounds like a wholesome and original offering, particularly for something that sells itself as a mainstream effects movie. However, it’s all so contrived that it’s hard to accept the emotions in earnest, especially when Gump scribe Eric Roth is constantly trying to ratchet the sentimentalism stakes to dangerously untested new levels. The arc that the Young family experience is modelled to reflect universal experience, yet the film is so self-conscious in its pursuit of what is an essentially unattainable goal, that it all ends up coming across as re-fried soap opera.

There’s also a heavy “uncanny valley” aspect to the whole affair, to the point where it felt strange watching it in a cinema. I wondered if the best place for Here would be as a special video exhibit in the Smithsonian museum (or local equivalent) where patrons could pass through it, just as its characters are passing through their lives.

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