Recently, filmmaker Robert Zemeckis It was a bit of a confusing number. The director of beloved films such as the “Back to the Future” series, “Forrest Gump,” “Cast Away,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” has produced nearly as many flops as hits. Take “The Polar Express,” “Beowulf,” “Welcome to Marwen” and “Pinocchio.” An experimenter obsessed with special effects and the dramatic power they can exert in cinema, Zemeckis is always trying something new, especially with motion capture technology. It doesn’t always work: Many of these projects drift into an unattractive uncanny valley. Despite many attempts, he hasn’t quite succeeded yet.

In “Here,” the new intergenerational family drama adapted from Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel (expanded from a six-page graphic novel published in the 1989 comic anthology “Raw”), the experiment is the narrative itself, a family history. Stories that span generations and centuries are all told from one fixed perspective. In his formally creative graphic novel, McGuire used frames within frames to visually represent different time periods within a single panel.

Zemeckis maintains the frame-within-a-frame conceit as a temporary embellishment in the film version of “Here,” but the plot itself is more about jumping through time while maintaining a steady camera. The area has many residents, from a pre-Columbian Native American couple (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) to a young family (Michelle Dockery and Gwilym Lee) moving into their modest Victorian Colonial home. Then the inventor of the La-Z-Boy recliner (David Fynn) and his enthusiastic wife (Ophelia Lovibond) take over the house. There’s also a modern-day black family (Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Cache Vanderpuye) struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

But the story focuses predominantly on one family who lived in the house for most of the 20th century: World War II veteran Al (Paul Bettany), his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), and then their son Richard (Tom Hanks) and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright). And yes, Hanks and Wright are digitally de-aged – this is the first time we see them as teenagers – and no, it doesn’t work at all (very strange things happen around Hanks’ de-aged mouth). Sure, the trio of Hanks, Wright and Zemeckis provide the gimmick of a “Forrest Gump” reunion, but why do we have to de-age Hanks when there are real-life sons Colin and Truman in the house? Even Wright has a lookalike actor daughter, Dylan Penn.

“Here” also has a Gump-like quality, consisting of major historical events lined up with personal stories: Benjamin Franklin (Keith Bartlett) and his son William (Daniel Betts) occupy the Colonial mansion across the street; The pregnancy is announced when the Beatles appear on stage on “The Ed Sullivan Show”; It seems like everything important happens in this godforsaken living room, including weddings, births, and breakups.

The “Here” story surrounding Richard and Margaret is relatable, completely predictable, and utterly boring. They get pregnant as teenagers, they move in with her parents, he gives up art to get a real job, she wants her own space, etc. On the surface, their story is about the ups and downs of life, but ultimately it’s pretty much about how it takes two people a very long time to pursue the things that make them happy. It’s a depressing story, and for him it’s all about getting out of that damn house, even though if he left there would be no “Here” here.

Changing hands over the years means real estate agents come and go throughout the film, and by the time the credits roll, you’re half-expecting a home insurance company’s logo to appear, because that’s what a movie whisper feels like: an ad for homeowners insurance. Honestly, there are 30-second commercials that evoke more tears and emotion than the flat and meaningless “Here.”

Richard and Margaret’s daughter Vanessa (Zsa Zsa Zemeckis) disappears around the age of 16 and never reappears, which is a shame because the more interesting story isn’t the baby boomer story of the parents, but perhaps how the Gen-X daughters or zoomer grandkids are like. They can benefit from the wealth of their generations. “Here” doesn’t want to get into any of the nuances surrounding this. But perhaps property values ​​are where the mind wanders when the story is so unreliable and stale.

This year saw other daring projects from aging filmmakers who experimented with the form and function of cinema on their own terms, including Francis Ford Coppola. “Megalopolis,” and Kevin Costner’s “Horizon.” While the efforts were laudable, unfortunately the results were all failures and “Here” is no exception.

Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic.