It is difficult at first to grasp just how wrongfooted ‘Here’ is as a movie. Its director, Robert Zemeckis, has made groundbreaking movies before, in the vein of ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Forrest Gump’, and this one has a similar premise in that it deals with the evolution of time and the extent to which the same place when delineated in different historical epochs can yield quite different emotions and sensibilities, as when Hill Valley in ‘Back to the Future’ is a cauldron of humorously different energies and politics in the different eras in which it is visited by Marty McFly in his DeLorean. In ‘Contact’, too, Zemeckis plays with questions of life, death, grief, science and immortality, finding room for alien contact along the way, and ‘Here’ feels like the zenith of his career, even bringing back together Tom Hanks and Robin Wright from ‘Forrest Gump’ as the couple at the centre of this ensemble.

But this is where ‘Here’ unwinds, as what unfolds is like a glib pastiche of all these ingredients, with Zemeckis showing us the same physical space – a room in a duplex – across the centuries, even showing its pre-history when the plates and rocks collided at the beginning of time, as well as its site as a battlefield during the American Civil War. There is a technically proficient use of the screen accommodating the different eras, and the families living in it, at the same time through frames-within-frames, and there is no linear aspect to this film. We flit backwards and forwards throughout, but it is not difficult to ascertain the basic threads whereby families are shown in their various configurations, growing, falling out, reuniting, dying and moving out all in the same room.

From this singular location we are privy to all the problems that beset families, from illness to therapy to rock and roll to television to pregnancy to divorce and so on. Whereas Forrest Gump was a man at the centre of all the world’s major events from the 1950s through to the 80s, here the same conceit is used with physical space. The idea is that everything that happens to everyone happens in this single space, with the camera at a fixed point of gravity in all the different eras. As an idea, and as a masterclass in technical filmmaking with AI de-ageing used to show Hanks and Wright from teenagers through to old age, it is a masterclass.

But emotionally this is way too manufactured and glib to have the same impact as Zemeckis’s previous efforts which felt more cutting edge. The life lessons on display here are greeting card-like, with references to making the most out of life, how time flies, following your dreams, tying up loose ends, etc. But there is a distance to this movie, which doesn’t really trade in real emotions, and the score is straight out of ‘Forrest Gump’ (it was even composed by the same musician, Alan Silvestri), which adds to the sense that what is being channelled is something ersatz and a facsimile of a better movie made by the director at his peak.