Here | MOVIE MUSIC UK

HERE – Alan Silvestri

November 5, 2024 4 comments

Here is a cinematic experiment film directed by Robert Zemeckis, adapted from a graphic novel by Richard McGuire, which uses the ‘static camera’ conceit to tell the story of a specific place throughout time – from the era of the dinosaurs through the ice age, to the dawn of humanity, pre-Columbian native Americans, and then after a house is built on that spot, the different families who live there, from the Colonial era to the present day. The main story follows the Young family – WWII veteran Al and his wife Rose, who buy the house and raise their children there, one of whom, Richard, marries his childhood sweetheart Margaret, and lives there too. It’s an intimate, sensitive portrayal, a snapshot of vignettes that chart the passage of time in non-linear fashion, and which touches on all that comes with it – birth, death, and all the ups and downs of life in between. Some critics have decried at as being overly-sentimental and mawkish, and while I admit that it does go for the emotional jugular with unashamed regularity, I nevertheless thought it was lovely, a welcome escape from depressing reality. I also thought the main technical idea, where the camera never moves but the world moves around it, worked really well; the way Zemeckis uses overlapping boxes to delineate the shifts in time were especially effective. Read more…