Update: Watch the first trailer here.
Writing about Robert Zemeckis’ Here in our 2024 preview, we noted the potential between source material and director: “it adapts Richard McGuire’s comic spanning a single space from 500,957,406,073 BCE to the year 22,175 CE, and set (somewhat) closer to the latter when it’s a home occupied by generation after generation of tenants.” If a studio-supported feature with movie stars couldn’t possibly live up to that potential, Zemeckis seems intent to buck possibility. In a new Vanity Fair profile it’s revealed that Here is seen entirely from a fixed position––judging by the first photos, a tight corner with panoptic view––while the camera never moves (or even zooms) across 100-something minutes and however-many centuries. (At certain points we see Native settlers and a prehistoric era.) Even Michael Snow’s Wavelength gave you a gradual movement.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright (them, Zemeckis, and co-writer Eric Roth forming a Forrest Gump reunion) appear in-character between late teens and, at least in Hanks’ case, late 80s, though the story goes as far back as his characters’ parents (played by Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly) entering the home in the 1950s. achieved between make-up and de-aging. The rather astonishing effects of McGuire’s comic are seemingly replicated with fades and transitions: as panels appear onscreen, “a 1960s television beside the fireplace will suddenly become covered by a rectangular window into the past, showing a 1930s radio in the same spot,” this process accumulating until another scene starts. Should the effect work, Zemeckis’ known fixation collapsing space in set timelines has maybe found an ideal source material.
Here opens on November 15, but hopefully we have a better look at it shortly. In the meantime, find more stills below:
