Robert Zemeckis is still lost in the uncanny valley. Can he be saved?

It was only a matter of time before Robert Zemeckis got around to playing with de-aging technology, that modern cinematic magic trick of making veteran movie stars look kind of, sort of like their younger selves. The director of Forrest Gump and the Back to the Future trilogy has spent most of his career dabbling in the possibilities of digital effects — and, in several cases, advancing them. Inevitably, that vanguard preoccupation has led him to the same CGI fountain of youth from which unnervingly de-wrinkled, waxlike hologram phantoms of Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, and — going back to the curious and rather Zemeckisian case of Benjamin Button — Brad Pitt have previously emerged.

Naturally, it’s Tom Hanks who Zemeckis has given the Dorian Gray treatment. Here, the director’s new movie (now in theaters, though probably not for long, given how badly it flopped this weekend), plants the Oscar-winning star of Forrest Gump in a single house, watching from a single, mostly static camera angle as he grows from a teenager to an elderly man, alongside one-time Gump love interest Robin Wright. To allow the two actors to play characters much younger and eventually a little older than themselves, Zemeckis has deployed the latest in age-altering tech: an AI face-swap program called Metaphysic Live, which deep fakes them in real time.

The illusion isn’t seamless. An effects expert might be able to explain how this new instant-render approach is more fluid or convincing than, say, what fellow state-of-the-art pioneer Ang Lee used to re-create a young Will Smith in Gemini Man. But it’s still difficult to accept the visual reality of the supposedly teenage versions of Hanks and Wright in Here. They’re a little too shiny. They don’t quite emote naturally. They’re like imperfect memories of what the two looked like decades ago, like mirages of their youth. And their vaguely artificial quality speaks to a larger problem for Zemeckis: the way he’s continued to fixate on pushing the limits of motion-picture technology at the expense of the humanity of his stories.

Thanks to its two stars, a script by Eric Roth, and a plot that works in a lot of American pop-culture iconography, Here has been sold as a spiritual 30th-anniversary Gump reunion. But it just as readily functions as a 20th-anniversary companion piece to a less beloved Zemeckis picture: The Polar Express, which also turned Hanks into a digital facsimile of himself (or rather several, given the various roles he occupied in the movie, including jolly ol’ Saint Nick). In retrospect, that 2004 yuletide family film, which turns 20 later this week, marked a regrettable turning point in the director’s career of Hollywood blockbusters — the moment when he first fully stepped into the uncanny valley. 

Warner Bros. Pictures

As far back as his big breakthrough, Back to the Future, Zemeckis has kept his feet planted on the cutting edge of effects technology; arguably only James Cameron has devoted more time and resources to chasing new frontiers of digital wizardry, to finding new ways to wow us. But Zemeckis’ movies used to thrillingly blend the real and the fake. They deployed jaw-dropping green-screen trickery in service of stories and characters audiences could care about. Forrest Gump was a veritable smorgasbord of groundbreaking effects — it won the Oscar for those moments that inserted Hanks into old newsreel footage — but those effects never distracted from the film’s emotional arc, however facile and schmaltzy it may have been. The digital spectacle was icing on the baby boomer birthday cake.

Buena Vista

Maybe the most clever and ingenious pop fantasy Zemeckis ever dreamt up was Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which used then-revolutionary techniques to deposit Bob Hoskins’ prototypical noir detective into an alternate 1940s Hollywood where humans coexist with cartoon characters. Here, Zemeckis achieved a handy metaphor for the best-case scenario of his gee-whiz entertainments: By bouncing Hoskins’ tough-talking private dick off literal walking special effects — the animated cutups of Toon Town — Zemeckis proved that he could anchor his dazzling eye-candy extravaganzas to the personality of a flesh-and-blood star. He could make a grand smoke-and-mirrors experiment with a soul.

But the ratio of real to fake in Zemeckis’ work has shifted into severe unbalance over the years, with the filmmaker sometimes letting the human dimension be swallowed by his aspirations to technologically innovate. Early signs of trouble arrived in Back to the Future Part II, a reasonably fun sequel that replaced the magical-realistic charms of his original with a rather empty exercise in convoluted, time-jumping misadventure — including a closing act that finds Zemeckis splicing Michael J. Fox into the climactic events of the first Back to the Future (a dry run, of sorts, to the archival Forrest-meets-Kennedy money shots of Gump).

Of course, it was The Polar Express (and its dead-eyed CGI marionettes) that plummeted Zemeckis into a new realm of synthetic digital entertainment. For a few years, all he made was experiments in motion-capture animation, starring vaguely lifelike pod-people versions of movie stars like Hanks, Jim Carrey, and Anthony Hopkins. Beowulf and A Christmas Carol have their pleasures, but they’re doled out via exercises in mid-2ooos computer-abetted invention that uncomfortably blur the line between live action and animation. They’ve aged quite poorly, and look today like dated products of a bygone era, prescient mainly for how they anticipated the bumpy path Zemeckis has taken over the years that followed.

Universal Pictures

He hasn’t completely lost his ability to craft a human-scaled drama. Flight and Allied, for example, are star-driven grownup entertainments that rely only marginally on their (considerable) effects budgets. But much of his post-Polar output plays like tech reels in search of movies. While there’s plenty of Zemeckis in The Walk and The Witches, the impression of some idiosyncratic authorial intent can’t dispel the sense that the raison d’être of both was playing with toys — of messing with perspective and scale, respectively. And no amount of semi-fascinating auto-critique makes up for how he transformed the achingly human true story of Mark Hogancamp into an unsightly special effects movie, the misbegotten Welcome to Marwen.

Here, likewise, is neither soulless nor impersonal. Zemeckis uses his central gimmick — a conceptual gambit awfully daring for the multiplex, which may account for its box-office failure — to simultaneously revel in more Gumpian generational touchstones  (like The Beatles on Ed Sullivan) and to tell an increasingly sobering tale of deferred dreams and lives wasted. Spanning literally millions of years, committing to the spatial limitations of one camera setup, it’s certainly the most adventurous movie he’s made in ages, and the most plainly his own.

Sony

All the same, it’s difficult to escape the familiar feeling that Zemeckis is more interested in the technological how of his movie than in the what it’s showcasing. Forever the effects pioneer obsessed with pushing the medium forward, he’s made a film audacious in conceit and rather remote in execution. His characters are like digital figurines, nearly as plastic (in appearance and personality) as the animated therapy dolls of his Marwen. Though it’s hinted to be situated in Pennsylvania, we never learn exactly where the house of Here stands. Its real location is the uncanny valley, a place Zemeckis too often calls home.

Here is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.