Time and its passage is something I have always been interested in Robert Zemeckis. In his famous trilogy “Back to the Future” he dreamed of traveling between eras, and in “Forest Gump” guided the title character through over half a century of US history. But that’s nothing compared to “Here. Out of Time”whose action he decided to extend from the Mesozoic to the present day, in order to tell the history of America over a period of 65 million years. He enlisted the help of artificial intelligence.
Derived from a graphic novel by Richard McGuire’and the idea for a screen story is very simple. Here, in a static frame, we see the interior of an American house, through which successive families have passed through the ages. Some are born, others die. The landscape is changing outside the window, the furniture, wallpapers and inhabitants accompanying them are changing inside, while the house stands and absorbs all the stories that are happening inside.
The story, initiated in the 21st century, jumps between times, sometimes taking us back to the Mesozoic era, when prehistoric plants grew and dinosaurs chased each other in place of the title “here”. A moment later, we jump to pre-Columbian times to watch the Native Americans who settled here, and then we move to the beginnings of the United States to overhear Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son doubting his father’s political ideas. Like in a photo plasticon, we see subsequent genre scenes, getting to know the entire gallery of characters and being able to participate in their ordinary, everyday lives for a moment.
It is the backbone of this multi-threaded story the lives of Richard and Margaret – model representatives of the first post-war generation of the American middle class. Thanks to Tom Hanks’ digital rejuvenation and Robin Wright we follow their fate from their high school days to the current autumn of their lives. Zemeckis shows them contrary to the Hitchcockian principle according to which “a film is life from which the boring parts have been removed.” The prose of their everyday life pulsates with the usual rhythm measured by calendar pages, and the days are filled with work, family duties and rituals, as well as smaller and larger worries, which, however, we look at without much involvement.
Watching “Here. Out of Time” is like browsing Instagram. Individual frames and genre scenes flash before our eyes. The only thing missing is emoticons with which we could “reward” the characters during the session. It was intended to be a story about the strong, unshakable foundation on which today’s America was built. But it’s as emotional as watching a tea bag burn.
When “Forrest Gump” was released 30 years ago, we were impressed by the screen story, direction, acting, soundtrack, and only finally by technological innovations that allowed us to “magically” place the main character in the company of John Lennon, John F. Kennedy’ego or Richard Nixon. Watching “Here. Out of Time” one may get the impression that the creators suffered from some kind of dementia and forgot about most of the above elements, condemning the viewers only to the digital faces of Hanks and Wright, trapped in the living room of a two-story house as in the demo version of the game “Sims”.
3/10
“Here. Out of Time” (Here), dir. Robert Zemeckis, USA 2024, distributor: Monolith Films, cinema premiere: December 27, 2025. Watch the trailer!