Robert Zemeckis regroups Tom Hanks and Robin Wright

The big appeal of “Here” is the recasting of director Robert Zemeckis with his “Forrest Gump” writer Eric Roth and that film’s stars, Robin Wright and Tom Hanks. You now play Margaret and Richard, a married couple who live in Richard's parents' house. Structurally, they are the protagonists here. But the story of Richard's parents Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly) as he grows up is one of several subplots adapted from Richard McGuire's graphic novel.

The film constantly jumps back and forth in time, sometimes inserting scenes from previous schedules over images already shown on the screen. Zemeckis inserts a series of predominantly white characters into this solid framework. When a black, Latino, or Native American character appears, he or she is so poorly written that they are essentially props.

Other subplots include characters such as Lee Beckman, the fictional inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair (David Fynn), and his supporting pin-up model wife Stella (Ophelia Lovibond); a 1920s aviator named John Harter (Gwilym Lee) and his wife Pauline (Michelle Dockery), who is afraid of airplanes; and Benjamin Franklin and his son William (Daniel Betts). Franklin's timeline precedes that of the house, so his story takes place on a dirt road.

We also meet the Native Americans who lived on the land where Richard's house is eventually built. But they don't even have names – they exist primarily to have sex in the wilderness and find jewelry under Hanks' house. This discovery reminded me of Tobe Hooper's 1982 horror masterpiece Poltergeist – an unintentional and unfortunate coincidence.

Lest I forget the Black family and their Latin maid who move into the house after Richard sells it, we learn so little about them She seem to exist only to suffer or die. The film uses the speech that black parents give their children about dealing with the police so recklessly here that I was seething with anger long after the credits rolled on this completely embarrassing film.

Before we get to any of these characters, “Here” begins with a montage showing the passage of time from the film’s fixed perspective. As Alan Silvestri's syrupy score swells, Zemeckis presents us with dinosaurs and the Ice Age and every other pre-human spectacle the F/X team can bring to the screen. It's meant to be profound, but again, it's unintentionally hilarious – a poor parody of Terrence Malick's similar sequence in 2011's The Tree of Life.

As we jump through time like an out-of-control pinball machine, young Richard is played by several actors before Hanks takes over the role when the character is in high school. Remember that Hanks is 68 years old and therefore needs to be “de-aged” by CGI. The result makes the actor look like he's made of plastic; It's impossible to watch him without a sickening, uncanny valley feeling.

Considering that Hanks has several younger relatives who closely resemble him (including his son Truman, who played the young adult version of his character well in 2022's A Man Called Otto), there was no reason for Zemeckis to do this way to go. Even in good films like The Irishman, this aging process looks terrible. The face may be 17, but the body still moves like it's 68.

Wright fares no better; Her aged CGI iteration looks like a mannequin that escaped from a store window. Are actors so vain these days that they feel like they have to dominate every scene, regardless of the age-inappropriateness of their characters? Are filmmakers so deluded that they think we're buying a rubberized computer effect?

For heaven's sake, Hollywood, please stop using this hellish aging technique.

I'm grumbling, but the aging is the least of this film's major problems. Each actor was instructed to exaggerate while acting out virtually every single dramatic plot device imaginable. Zemeckis and Roth's script covers alcoholism, infidelity, dementia, war-induced post-traumatic stress disorder, illness, failed businesses, divorce, dreams deferred and the bitter taste of failure.

When you combine the broad acting and cliche-ridden script with the fixed-frame format, “Here” comes across as a bad sitcom or, even worse, like a school play by a group of fifth-graders who chose Eugene O'Neill and Death of a Salesman “. Come to think of it, these kids would put on a better, more entertaining show.

½★

HERE

Director: Robert Zemeckis. Written by Zemeckis and Eric Roth, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire. Starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, David Fynn, Ophelia Lovibond, Gwilym Lee, Michelle Dockery and Daniel Betts. At AMC Boston Common, AMC Causeway, Suburbs. 105 min. PG-13 (some F-words)

An earlier version of this review misstated actor Tom Hanks' age. He is 68.

Odie Henderson is the film critic for the Boston Globe.