“Here” and Now: Hollywood’s Dubious AI Wager

Joshua Glick explores how Robert Zemeckis’s unsatisfying dependence on AI in “Here” reflects the state of our culture.

By Joshua GlickFebruary 11, 2025

• Film

THERE WAS A PARTICULAR kind of hype surrounding Here (2024). The film appeared to have all the elements of a hit, if not a full-blown blockbuster: a high-concept adaptation of an acclaimed graphic novel in which viewers see 60 million years of history from a singular vantage point in Perth Amboy, New Jersey; the reunion of Forrest Gump (1994) co-stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright; and the guiding hand of auteur Robert Zemeckis, who, after a series of misfires, looked to use cutting-edge AI to devise a fresh take on the multigenerational family melodrama. The American Film Institute featured Here for its 2024 Gala Screening at its annual festival and honored Zemeckis for an accompanying Director’s Spotlight event. The prestigious showcase aimed to remind the industry and its audiences that Here exists within a tech-savvy cinematic tradition, and that its director has been one of its key visionaries.

Despite this anticipation, the media response was swift and uncompromising. Critics described Here in terms of a room with not much worthwhile to view. The film was derided as the “saddest Zillow ad” and a “blinkered gimmick,” a “banal story,” a “generic greeting card,” the “biggest pile of schmaltz you’ll see this year,” a “total horror show,” and “the year’s most eerie and embarrassing misfire.” Moviegoers caught wind of the dismay. The $50 million film only returned five million at the opening box office.

Given all of this, it would be easy to dismiss Here as simply another case of directorial hubris or a platform for cringey VFX. The narrative and stylistic tensions in the film, however, tell us a lot about the state of the film and television industry. Here reflects an aspiration of Hollywood executives and some above-the-line talent to wield AI to create big films on (relatively) small budgets and help them skirt the headwinds of craft labor backlash. At the same time, the ways AI surfaces on-screen demonstrate the messy realities of its deployment within a star-driven narrative economy, and the emphatically risk-averse tendencies of a system that reinforces rather that challenges staid storytelling conventions.

Here’s gambit was to project a host of sweeping temporal transformations, from the prehistoric to the present. And although the film’s central storyline unfolds from the late 1960s into the 1980s, the concerns it raises—the difficulty of finding emotionally fulfilling employment, the impossibility of homeownership without generational wealth, the precarity of future plans, and the impact all of this has on men in particular—feel decidedly contemporary. Here’s conservative messaging about the sanctity of the family, and the ability of care work to successfully combat threats to its integrity, belies a sense of impasse and exhaustion that haunts the lives of its characters. The frustrated forward motion that we feel serves as an apt depiction of an embattled film and television industry in dire need of creative reinvigoration and struggling to find a path forward in our contemporary media landscape.

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Here plants viewers on a single plot of land, from which they watch life unfold. An anchored long shot opens onto dinosaurs in a swamp. The plot then becomes a forest where a Lenni-Lenape couple cement their love, a colonial village where loyalists gripe about the impending revolution, and a living room that multiple families refashion according to changing tastes during the 20th and 21st centuries. Inset panels that drift in and out of the establishing frame offer windows onto the future and the past. The film continuously returns, however, to the rocky, 60-year romance between two baby boomers, Richard and Margaret Young (Hanks and Wright).

Here gestures toward macro-level environmental shifts (a comet colliding with earth, resulting in the Ice Age), as well as geopolitical disruption (the American Revolution) and what can be considered the progress that results from social movements (a wealthy Black family living in a home in the same place where slaves once labored).

Throughout the time-shifting, the mise-en-scène captures a sense of material change and, especially within the context of the house, expresses the personalities of the inhabitants. The densely cluttered interior of the fun-loving 1940s-era inventor, Leo (David Fynn), and his pinup wife, Stella (Ophelia Lovibond), is lavishly decorated with cushions, drapes, mirrors, and plants. The darker, more austere and formal furniture of aviator John (Gwilym Lee) and his wife Pauline (Michelle Dockery) signals their more sober status as members of the upwardly aspiring bourgeoisie.

However, rather than focusing on the differences between the Holocene and the Anthropocene or charting a historical trajectory of liberal progress, Here centers experiences that resonate between families and time periods: shared courtship rituals; birthdays and holiday celebrations; the mourning of loved ones; the bickering of couples, as well as between parents and children; their subsequent reconciliations. Zemeckis emphasizes this continuity through graphic matches and matches on action that smooth transitions from one scene to another. For example, a shot of the Lenni-Lenape man (Joel Oulette, credited as “Indigenous Man”) showing his newborn child the moon outside dissolves to Richard performing much the same gesture by the home’s picture window.

The range of domestic technologies scattered throughout the interior provide a means of pleasantly killing time, making productive use of it, or capturing it for posterity. In the 1940s, Stella dances to big-band jazz on phonograph records while she vacuums. In the 1950s, Richard and his siblings are glued to The Three Stooges on television. During the 1980s, Richard and Margaret’s daughter Vanessa (Zsa Zsa Zemeckis) exercises to Jane Fonda aerobics by way of a VHS tape. Richard’s father Al (Paul Bettany) is the family documentarian, and is constantly goading his family to sit for photographs and gather around a sheet screen on which he projects 16 mm movies.

Current events enter the domestic space through media, but there never seems to be much acknowledgment of their historical weight and significance. John Daly’s 1941 radio bulletin of the Pearl Harbor attack and the Beatles’ famous 1964 Ed Sullivan Show performance are broadcast to absent or distracted listeners within the space. While there are occasional references to outside friends, politicians, and employers, these conversations come off as the faintest brushstrokes sketching an outside social reality. There is minimal investment in connecting the Youngs to a neighborhood, religious community, or nation.

The frictions that permeate Here are, instead, either economic or existential: the Young family patriarch, his son, and, eventually, his daughter-in-law all find themselves forced into jobs they do not enjoy to make ends meet; couples struggle to grow together and care for one another in the face of disease, bouts of frustration and longing, accidents, and impending mortality. The material insularity of the room emphasizes the social insularity of these conflicts. In these moments, as interpersonal conflicts play themselves out in a fixed setting, Here takes its cue from the TV sitcom. The sanctity of the family is paramount and Here posits that all can be overcome by some kind of care work. Humor ameliorates tragic moments, like Al telling his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) that “at least he died laughing” after their friend literally drops dead reacting to a joke. Tender recollections do the same: Richard and Margaret dance to their song, “Let It Be Me” by the Everly Brothers. We witness reconciliation in the midst of grief. Even when Margaret ends up leaving Richard due to her desire for independence, the two reunite during the onset of Margaret’s Alzheimer’s disease. The outstretched arms of family prove inescapable for everyone except the youngest Young—Richard and Margaret's successful lawyer daughter.

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The use of CGI was critical to much of the world-building that takes viewers through this tremendous sweep of time. Zemeckis was operating on familiar ground, even if his recent projects were major critical and commercial missteps. He had honed his craft under the mentorship of neoclassical Hollywood auteurs such as Steven Spielberg, then made a name for himself putting emerging tech to use in genre-bending melodramas that bled into sci-fi, fantasy, and action-adventure. His Back to the Future trilogy (1985–1990) combined computer graphics with live-action. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) mixed live-action with hand-drawn animation. Forrest Gump, which swept the 1995 Oscars and began a decades-long collaboration with Hanks, used digital VFX tools to project its protagonist into archival footage, allowing him to interact with presidents and celebrities during key historical moments. More recently, Zemeckis’s forays into motion capture led viewers into new recesses in the uncanny valley. His cinematic adaptations of children’s literature, including Polar Express (2004), A Christmas Carol (2009), The Witches (2020), and Pinocchio (2022), failed to balance technology, plot, and performance; on the whole, these were creepy and at times disorienting films that lacked narrative depth.

For Here, VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie coordinated a fleet of boutique companies to carefully 3D-model, texture, light, and render both animate and inanimate elements throughout the film. CGI ranged from the large-scale prehistoric land of the dinosaurs and the 21st-century suburban neighborhood to a reappearing hummingbird and, of course, the faces of Richard and Margaret over the years. The turn to AI involved using machine learning algorithms that recognize patterns from large custom-designed datasets to create new images. Zemeckis saw AI as a toolbox to make possible the multi-decade romance between Hanks and Wright’s characters; it also provided a means to capitalize on the affection audiences felt for the on-screen rapport of Hanks and Wright in Forrest Gump. Poster advertisements and trailers foregrounded their romance, showcasing the pair’s youthful faces. In interviews, the cast and crew spoke fondly about reuniting Hanks and Wright (along with composer Alan Silvestri and writer Eric Roth) in terms of “getting the band back together.” They also came across like tech-evangelists, claiming that the synthetic media not only made the film financially feasible but also enabled new kinds of character interaction.

To de-age Hanks and Wright, Zemeckis worked with Metaphysic, Hollywood’s best-in-class synthetic media VFX house, whose co-founder, Chris Ume, first arrived on the public’s radar in 2021 with viral Tom Cruise deepfakes. While generative AI has been largely seen in terms of a threat to the livelihood of actors, writers, and animators, Metaphysic has tried to position itself as an artistic collaborator rather than as a supplier of tools geared toward automating design. Still, some of Metaphysic’s high-profile efforts to breathe life into deceased characters (the humanoid robot, Ash, for last summer’s Alien: Romulus, the Bullet Farmer for last spring’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), have inspired accusations of “grave robbery” and the crossing of ethical and aesthetic boundaries.

Metaphysic designed custom machine learning models of younger Hanks and Wright, trained on past photographs and footage of the actors. It then integrated these models into the workflow of the shoot through their “Live” tool, which allowed for a more instantaneous approximation of how the de-aged performances would look on-screen. In essence, the de-aging happened in real time during the shoot and could be viewed on a parallel screen next to the camera’s image monitor, rather than created during postproduction. Zemeckis affirmed that the ability of the technology to seamlessly transform actors ultimately led to more directorial flexibility during the shoot. Wright echoed Zemeckis’s enthusiasm, while assuring audiences and the industry of her own creative agency: “We were acting physically, raising the octave in our voice, to be a 17-year-old. But A.I. gave us the innocence in the eyes and the youthful skin. And got rid of the saggy neck.”

The result does in fact look better than some of the early de-aging experiments; for example, the laughably cartoonish face of a youthful Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy (2010). Still, the performances suffer from some of the same incongruities as that film’s more “advanced” peers such as Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) and James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023). Beyond the too-soft and shiny skin of Hanks’s and Wright’s youthful faces, there is a fundamental dissonance between the alignment of their respective body parts during specific moments in their lives. Especially during those early scenes of courtship, when they are both supposed to look and act like spritely teenagers, what we see are mature, thirtysomething faces atop awkwardly moving older bodies.

But the issue is not just that this synthetic treatment of Hanks and Wright looks strange. It is that the pursuit of AI-enabled facial realism will always be a disquieting endeavor. The simultaneous flaunting and erasure of fabrication leads to ever more alien effects. A more productive creative route with this technology has involved making otherworldly characters look more human in their range of expressivity, drawing viewers into the character and narrative: for example, Digital Domain’s engagement with actor Josh Brolin to help fashion Thanos for Avengers: Infinity War (2018). But in Here, the technology distracts, ultimately separating the synthetically treated individual from their storyworld.

The uncomfortable rendering of Hanks and Wright also points to the fact that, as scholars Tanine Allison and Christopher Holliday have argued, these ostensibly innovative tools are being used to reinforce rather than challenge racial and gender biases. At a time when studios are navigating intensified contraction and trying to goad audiences to theaters, they are turning to a small cadre of well-known, aging, white actors, stretching their star personas back in time rather than expanding the field of talent. The Indigenous couple and the middle-class Black family might have indeed been interesting subjects to explore, but they received far too little screen time, appearing as emblems of diversity at the beginning and end of the film. Their surface-level depiction is indicative of another Hollywood conundrum: the professed liberal desire to “represent” diverse communities, and a lack of commitment to exploring them with any depth or complexity. Thus, while Here aimed to be a proof of concept for how AI could be ethically applied to a project at a moment when labor unions, cinephiles, and a wary public have risen up against it, the film once again exposed its fault lines.

Here’s use of AI resonates with a larger tension in the film and the media industry that green-lit it. Despite the power of family ties, a feeling of stalled or frustrated motion haunts most characters’ lives. Numerous scenes feature a stumble, fall, outburst, or even a death: the dinosaurs running in vain from the oncoming Ice Age; Benjamin Franklin’s loyalist son, William, sharing his counter-revolutionary views with his wife; Al’s career as a traveling salesman being cut prematurely short by corporate downsizing (and his own PTSD and alcoholism); Rose tumbling from a ladder after suffering a stroke; and Richard’s crippling anxiety about risk and debt inhibiting him from buying a home of his own. Even the industrious inventor, Leo, finds success and heads westward to California only after creating the La-Z-Boy chair: a piece of furniture designed to keep living room television watchers immobilized.

The structuring device of Here further accentuates this sensation. The constant transition between inlaid panels at once propels the film forward and doesn’t allow for any meaningful development within the scenes. Individuals make proclamations, exhibit vulnerabilities, and pursue common rituals and routines, but nothing lasts longer than 30 seconds. Characters are at times cut off mid-sentence or mid-action during the film’s relentless rotation. While Zemeckis aimed to devise an epic cinematic tapestry to be enjoyed in a theatrical setting, the speed through which we move between vignettes and the disparate array of formal and narrative styles on display make the scenes feel like distinct audiovisual worlds. We toggle between a CGI-rendered Mesozoic-era animation, a Revolutionary War period docudrama, a post–World War II and late 20th-century sitcom, and a contemporary after-school public service announcement in HD. In this way, Here doesn’t so much offer a fresh take on the blockbuster as on the central threat to Hollywood in the battle for viewer attention: short-form video, accessible through mobile devices. Here feels most like a simulation of social media, with its bursts of spectacle and varied genres.

Watching the closing minutes of Here, I was reminded of the late-1910s aviation enthusiast, John, who convinces his suffragette wife, Pauline, to buy the house because they are “less than a mile from the new aerodrome they are going to build.” Seemingly intoxicated by the promise of new technology, he exclaims that they are all heading into “the future,” that “it’s the only direction we’re headed. And it’s happening right now, right here.” Perhaps most chilling is not the irony that he dies of influenza (an echo of the COVID-19 pandemic that briefly surfaces later in the film) rather than in a plane crash (Pauline’s recurring fear), but the fact that aviation was so easily mobilized as a decisive weapon during World War I. “The future,” it would seem, is no guarantor of progress. In this way, the gimmicky banality that so frustrated viewers of Here may actually read as a fitting allegory for the precarious and unsettling nature of our own cultural moment.