Review here – the cursed reunion of Forrest Gump is a total horror show | Robert Zemeckis

A Robert Zemeckis' unusually large bet has long followed a swirl of concern and outright fear. Here's a 30-year reunion for his Forrest Gump co-stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. The film, based on Richard McGuire's comic strip-turned-graphic-novel, was billed as the most ambitious use of digital aging to date, following the couple through the decades, from their teenage years to their final days, as part of an ensemble of characters , who have lived in the same room over time. Early stills and a trailer had tipped us off that the film was clearly terrifying, but nothing had really prepared us for how unforgivable the whole thing was boring that would be it too. Here lies the scariest and most embarrassing misfire of the year.

Zemeckis was once a director who knew exactly how to manipulate a mass audience. He was the guy who made Back to the Future, Death Belongs, Romancing the Stone, Lost and What Lies Beneath, a magician of the kind of transcendent movie magic that we just love don't get as much anymore. We certainly don't see it in his contemporary works, be it pointless, subpar remakes like The Witches or Pinocchio, or failed technical experiments like The Walk or Welcome to Marwen (I'll gladly become one of the few defenders his completely entertaining work). 2016 World War II thriller Allied). Here's another confusing folly in the latter category, this time looking like a museum installation crossed with a 100-minute insurance advert. His latest gimmick keeps us stuck in the same fixed spot as he flits back and forth in time, from the dinosaurs to Covid, an ugly sitcom mix of surreal effects, painful exaggeration and boring live laugh-love lessons.

Zemeckis and his Oscar-winning Forrest Gump co-writer Eric Roth (here less on a Killers of the Flower Moon day than on an extremely loud and incredibly close day) take us through the story, told in the shortest and most boring form Snippets. We have several storylines that include a Native American courtship, Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son William during the war, an ambitious early pilot and his worried family, the inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair and his pin-up wife (!) follow The World War II veteran started a family, his son then started his own and kept up with a black family struggling with racial injustice and a pandemic. We move from time frame to time frame with rectangles contrasting each iteration of the house, or, long ago, with the lack thereof, an effect that briefly offers an interesting contrast in the interior design before becoming more and more tiring.

As a digitally altered 18-year-old, Hanks looks less like himself in his '80s slasher debut “He Knows You're Alone” and more like Ben Platt in the equally cursed film “Dear Evan Hansen.” Although he somehow looks even older in his 50s, the real Hanks is in his late 60s. It's not just that the FX work is disturbing, which it really is Really That said, it's also kind of shoddy, not even in a brief moment convincing enough to justify such a bizarre concept. Without a successful gimmick (The Walk had at least one sit-down sequence in top-notch 3D, which was the only real reason it was made) we're left with a hopelessly banal series of life events that are too quick and too anonymous to convey any emotion or interest wake up. When the film tries to address weightier, more recent events, it goes from harmlessly dull to unpleasantly questionable. There's the thrill of watching someone die of Covid in crisp HD quality, something many of us have certainly longed for, and then there's the longest scene of the completely anonymous black family, where the father gives his son explains how he survives a police stop, an empty back – a gesture that means nothing since we don't even know their names (for a far more thoughtful and authentic version of this scene, watch “The Hate U Give” instead).

What little the film has to say about life can be summed up in a series of cheesy fridge magnets – time flies, be true to yourself, if you never try you'll never know – and perhaps that's what Zemeckis wanted Show us the world is and has always been monotonous and empty, then perhaps he has succeeded. His trick of staying in exactly the same corner makes the film seem airless and is always told with a cold distance, a break in a film full of simple, overrated sentimentality. Hanks and Wright can't do much with the limitations of the technology that eerily guides them through time, but they're at least as competent as they come, especially compared to Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly as Hanks' parents, who both acting as if they were in a small town dinner theater production of Death of a Salesman.

In what feels like twice the amount of time we sit, Zemeckis tells us very little and we feel even less. For a film about life, Here is a remarkably lifeless endeavor.