lol i dont remember clicking submit on this opinion. i stand by it though! Zemeckis is a formative director for me (Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, Forest Gump, Castaway- I even quite like Flight), and I follow his work even when it feels exceedingly phoned in (that recent Pinocchio movie was a pig trough). Here doesn’t function as a complete return to form as it still highlights his hubris concerning tech. Yes, they make old ass Tom Hanks look like an 18 year old, but he still sounds like gravely current aged Tom Hanks. There is also an entirely unbelievable looking (negative) dinosaur sequence that opens the film. Outside of that, the tech works, and the films willingness to be shot from a single angle during its entire hour and forty minute runtime is affecting. i also enjoy that the movie canonizes the events of today alongside those we might learn in history class.
the movie also continues Zemeckis’ opinion that Robyn Wright is too good for Tom Hanks
Finally, a quick word on that tech. Yes, it is AI. It does scrape data in the sense that they took all the footage that exists of young Tom Hanks and young Robyn Wright to recreate what their faces would look like if they were still young today. I guess I don’t have much of an issue with that portion of it because it is their faces and they are consenting to this process. However, there still is the issue of how environmentally harmful AI is. It is tough to say how many resources were used to make this film, but if it is outsized, I for sure condemn that.
Anyway, I do recommend Here, with some caveats.