Apparently it’s batshit crazy trailer release week! The latest is Here, a movie built upon multiple gimmicks. The first is that it’s a big ol’ Forrest Gump reunion for Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, writer Eric Roth, and director Robert Zemeckis. The second is that the movie takes place in a single setting over the course of hundreds of years. The third is that, to illustrate the passage of time, artificially intelligent de-aging technology has been applied to the actors. Take your time to digest and process this—you have until November 15 to make peace with what you see in the trailer today.
The Here trailer hilariously takes us all the way back to the extinction of the dinosaurs and through time as white people colonize the beautiful natural landscape and erect a solid, warm suburban home. This is the house in which 67-year-old Tom Hanks will one day introduce his new girlfriend Margaret (Wright) to his dad, 53-year-old Paul Bettany. That’s movie magic, baby! The trailer gives nothing away of plot, and instead relies solely on its little tricks and a heavy helping of schmaltz. “You could spend the rest of the night here,” Hanks proposes, to which Wright replies, “I could spend the rest of my life here.” Reading a book to his child, Hanks exclaims, “Right here is where we want to be!” Later, incredibly old Hanks brings his old wife Wright back into the empty room: “This was our home. We lived here.” You get the gist, and probably a toothache along with it.
Someone else can write the treatise on the unsettling implications of this artificial intelligence technology. In this humble newswire, we will note unhappily that the de-aged faces look sufficiently human, it’s nevertheless freaky and strange. In his younger scenes, Hanks looks a bit like Ben Platt in his Dear Evan Hansen wig. You could, like this writer, keep replaying the bit where Hanks asks Wright to spend the night, watching the strange and not-quite-right way his lips move. But to do so would be to ignore the message of the movie which is, we guess, “Time sure does fly, doesn’t it?” “It sure does.”
Let’s be real, the purpose of this trailer was to show off the gimmicks and acclimate the audience to it. We’ve seen de-aging on screen before, but never to this scale, and never to this extent. One shudders to wonder what Forrest Gump would have been like had Zemeckis had access to this technology in 1994. He’s always loved being on the cutting edge (see: Back To The Future Part 2, Polar Express, etc.), and together he and Hanks have taken quite a few big swings. We’ll see if this one pays off.