Robert Zemeckis turns back the clock on Tom Hanks

In Hollywood, most films tell stories. But not “Here”.

Adapted from a conceptual graphic novel by Richard McGuire, in which the perspective is the same on every page – the living room of a centuries-old American home – while rectangular panels in each frame reveal actions from different years, if not entirely different eras, at ” “This” is about an idea.

Have you ever sat in a place – perhaps a hotel room, a park bench, or a secluded clearing – and wondered what happened there before? How many people kissed at this exact spot? Or fought or in love? And what does it say about the human experience that people can be connected through shared actions and places can hold both memories and secrets?

Deep thoughts can be found down such rabbit holes, and a film version of “Here” points in roughly the right direction, but is sidetracked by a handful of far more superficial threads – namely the disappointingly generic lives of four families living in the same room at different times . Director Robert Zemeckis reunites with “Forrest Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth and the film’s leads, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.

For Zemeckis, the question is not how many existential truths he can squeeze into (or extract from) a traditional New England living room, but whether he can manipulate the age of his actors on screen across more than half a century . Technically this is now possible, even if the results look anything but natural and the already confusing range of events is expanded to include another distancing feature.

From Who Framed Roger Rabbit to The Polar Express, Zemeckis' superpower has always been his pioneering spirit, while his kryptonite embodies a penchant for unearned sentimentality. “Here” fits this pattern perfectly, as Zemeckis devotes his energy not to creating fully dimensional characters, but to pushing the kind of “digital makeup” that Martin Scorsese used to rejuvenate the cast of “The Irishman,” thereby making the Project effectively drained the very thing he wanted to celebrate: life.

“Here” begins with fleeting images of the house in which it all takes place, glimpsed through a series of neatly framed rectangles, before taking us back more than 65 million years to a moment when dinosaurs viewed this clearing as a suitable place to lay their eggs Eggs identified. Then comes an asteroid (or maybe it's a volcanic eruption), followed by a time-lapse ice age that swells and thaws in a matter of seconds.

It's hard not to be reminded of “The Tree of Life” in this moment: where Terrence Malick reflected on how lives that feel so important to those who experience them, in the context of creation, dinosaurs and can seem inconsequential given the sheer enormity of the times. McGuire tried something comparatively radical in his book and expanded the comic form. Rather than telling a sequential story, he combined different time periods into a single scene, allowing complete strangers to repeat each other's thoughts and actions in a shared space.

Most “Here” viewers will never have seen McGuire’s graphic novel, and even those who have will notice that Zemeckis and Roth have a different strategy. The film is less about finding unexpected connections and more about crafting clever transitions while trying to reconcile the arcs of multiple generations. Its goal is simple: to help make logical sense of a complicated, nonlinear collection of scenes. And yet the strategy of overlapping images tends to blur the lines between the various families involved, trapping us in a CG snow globe as the virtual seasons change and time marches past the wide bay window. While our view of the outside is limited to the colonial house across the street, many of the characters' dreams lie behind these walls.

John and Pauline Harter (played by Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery) are the first couple to live in the house, which is proven to have been built in 1907. Pauline is constantly worried about her husband, who has his head in the clouds, a reckless aviator who she is afraid will crash one day. Without giving away the fate of this early 20th century family, it should be said that there is no point in worrying in “Here.” In fact, it can be punished in an ironic way, as if to show that obsessing over the future is the surest way to miss the present.

This attitude extends to Hanks' anxious character Richard Young, who gives up his career as a painter to provide for his family. Little Richie hasn't yet been born when his father Al (Paul Bettany) and his three-months-pregnant mother Rose (Kelly Reilly) agree to buy the two-story house in 1945 for a whopping $3,400. It will never change hands again for 60 years, making the Young family and their three children the people we see most, while the African Americans who buy it from them and the Native American tribe that lived there long ago, largely symbolic – the dramatic equivalent of a recognition of indigenous land.

When Hanks first appears, digitally aged to look like he did in his “Bosom Buddies” days, it gives a little more attention to what can feel like an endless PowerPoint presentation. When he introduces his teenage girlfriend Margaret (Wright) a few scenes later, her status as a movie star is a clue that we should pay attention – and not to the terrible-looking face-replacement technology that's more reminiscent of high-resolution Sims than the doesn't look like the actors' younger selves, but rather these two characters.

As with Richard Linklater's Boyhood, looking at so many of an American family's milestones longitudinally invites us to reflect on the universality of these experiences. Still, “Here” lacks the specificity that could elevate such scenes beyond mere cliche, leaving it to composer Alan Silvestri (another “Forrest Gump” veteran) to convey the emotion. While it's true that much of life takes place in living rooms, Roth misappropriates events that should take place elsewhere to stage a birth, a death, a wedding, and three sex scenes in the same room where Christmas and Thanksgiving are celebrated.

Zemeckis gives the whole thing a slightly corny, Currier- and Ives-esque feel (particularly in several colonial-era vignettes featuring Ben Franklin), as if he's competing with the vintage Saturday Evening Post covers to portray a quintessentially American family to capture. But the location where he placed his static camera – at a slight angle, with the couch facing the screen – suggests a far more pervasive visual reference: that of the classic sitcom.

The blocking constantly reinforces this model, and since Zemeckis doesn't cut or do close-ups, he forces his actors to move closer to the lens whenever he wants us to see their faces. After ninety-four minutes, the director finally decides to unlock his camera again and turn to observe a key moment between two characters. If Zemeckis had built “Here” as a museum installation rather than a film, the fixed perspective probably would have made sense. But we have come to be moved, and for that to work, the camera has to be there too.