A swirl of concern and outright fear has long been following Robert Zemeckis’s unusual big bet Here, a 30-year reunion for his Forrest Gump co-stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. The film, based on Richard McGuire’s comic strip turned graphic novel, was heralded as the most ambitious use of digital de-aging yet, following the pair through the decades, from teenage years to final days, as part of an ensemble of characters who have lived in the same space over time. Early stills, and a trailer, had clued us into the film being plainly terrifying but nothing had quite prepared us for just how unforgivably dull it would also be. Here lies the year’s most eerie and embarrassing misfire.

Zemeckis was once a director who knew exactly how to manipulate a mass audience. He was the guy who made Back to the Future, Death Becomes Her, Romancing the Stone, Cast Away and What Lies Beneath, a conjurer of the kind of transcendent movie magic we just don’t get that much of anymore. We’re certainly not seeing it in his contemporary work, whether it be pointless sub-par remakes like The Witches or Pinocchio or misfiring tech experiments like The Walk or Welcome to Marwen (I will gladly be one of the few defenders of his perfectly fun 2016 second world war thriller Allied). Here exists in the latter category, another baffling folly that plays this time like a museum installation crossed with a 100-minute insurance advert. His latest gimmick traps us in the same fixed spot as he flits back and forth in time, from the dinosaurs all the way through to Covid, an ugly sitcom melange of surreal FX, painful overacting and pat Live Laugh Love lessons.

Zemeckis and his Oscar-winning Forrest Gump co-writer Eric Roth (here on less of a Killers of the Flower Moon day and more of an Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close one instead) guide us through history told in the briefest, and blandest, of snippets. We have multiple strands that follow a Native American courtship, Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son William during the war, an ambitious early pilot and his concerned family, the inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair and his pin-up wife (!), a second world war veteran starting a family, his son then starting his own and up-to-date with a Black family dealing with racial injustice and a pandemic. We shift from timeframe to timeframe with rectangles contrasting each iteration of the house or, way back when, lack thereof, an effect that briefly offers an interesting contrast in home decor before growing increasingly tiresome.

As a digitally altered 18-year-old, Hanks looks less like himself circa his 80s slasher debut He Knows You’re Alone and more like Ben Platt circa the equally cursed Dear Evan Hansen movie while in his 50s, he somehow looks even older than the real Hanks does in his late 60s. It’s not just that the FX work is unsettling, which it really really is, it’s also that it’s kind of shoddy, never even in a brief moment persuasive enough to justify such a bizarre concept. Without a successful gimmick (The Walk did at least boast one seat-edge sequence in top-of-the-range 3D, the only real reason it was made), we’re left with a hopelessly banal series of life events that are too quick and too anonymous to evoke any emotion or interest. When the film tries to tackle weightier, more recent events, it goes from inoffensively boring to uncomfortably questionable. There’s the thrill of seeing someone die of Covid in crisp HD, something many of us have surely been craving, and then there’s the utterly anonymous Black family’s longest scene in which the father explains to his son how to survive a police stop, an empty back-pat of a gesture that means nothing given that we don’t even know their names (for a far more thoughtful, and authentic, version of this scene watch The Hate U Give instead).

What little the film has to say about life can be summarised by a series of tacky fridge magnets – time flies, be true to yourself, if you never try you’ll never know – and maybe if Zemeckis was aiming to show us that the world is and always has been monotonous and empty then he has perhaps succeeded. His trick of staying in the exact same corner leaves the film feeling airless and always told at a cold distance, a disconnect for a film filled with such simple, overscored sentimentality. There’s not much that Hanks and Wright can do with the restrictions of the technology that creepily warps them through time but they’re at least as competent as they can be, especially compared to Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly as Hanks’s parents, both shout-acting as if they’re in a small-town dinner theatre production of Death of a Salesman.

In what feels like double the time we’re sat for, Zemeckis tells us very little and makes us feel even less. For a film about living, Here is a remarkably lifeless endeavour.