Directed by Robert Zemeckis | Written by Zemeckis and Eric Roth, based on a graphic novel by Richard McGuire | 104 min | ▲△△△△ | Amazon Prime

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised Here is a powerfully retrograde, deeply hokey bit of entertainment — it was made by the director and screenwriter of Forrest Gump, one of the most politically conservative blockbusters of the past 30 years. At least Gump was entertaining — this is just awful, a hot candidate for the worst movie of the year.

The concept is this: The camera is locked down as we flash back and forward in time, from pre-history  with dinosaurs — this is no Tree of Life — to the present day, with plenty of picture-in-picture imagery to provide a sense of time’s overlap. In the early 1900s a home was built on this site opposite a colonial mansion where Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son once lived, and sure enough, we get a cameo from the Founding Father.

We also get to visit various families in this house, primarily Rose (Kelly Reilly) and husband Al (Paul Bettany, miscast), a World War II veteran and an alcoholic. They have a three kids, and one of them, son Richard (Tom Hanks), meets the love of his life, Margret (Robin Wright), when they’re teenagers in the early ’60s. Hard times for Richard and Margaret means they have to live in the house, too. She gives up her dream of work and her own home and he gives up painting and designing to pay the bills. It might be poignant if the script had one original idea in its head beyond the shifting imagery and single camera perspective on this living room.

Of course, Hanks is 68, and Wright is 58, so their return to teenage and then mid-life is done with de-aging technology, which is still not there yet. It’s better than it was in The Irishman, but it still doesn’t span the uncanny valley, rendering the actors as weird Barbie dolls. It is better than this movie’s use of old-age make-up, which is a war crime.

Between the cheesily animated landscapes of pre-history, the problematic visions of early America with a group of voiceless indigenous characters as edenic figures living in an unspoiled paradise, and a token Black family who we never get to know, none of this feels like anything approaching recognizable reality.

The film wants to be about the common experience of families across time — love and heartbreak — but it’s a false Americana, like a bad play, poorly lit and acted, and stagier than a 1950s sitcom with about the same level of progressive politics, made worse with a truly cloying score from composer Alan Silvestri, also a Gump veteran. Here is an ode to a nation that never really existed, so painfully regressive it diminishes my respect for everyone involved.

As in Gump, Wright plays a female lead who is punished with an arbitrary terminal illness for leaving Tom Hanks. In Here it’s dementia, in Gump it was AIDs. The patriarchal nonsense in Zemeckis’ worldview has been a big part of his collapse from relevant, beloved filmmaker who made the Back To The Future and Contact to whatever he is now. I had time for The Walk, but when was this guy’s last unimpeachably good movie? Cast Away in 2000? The fact he’s kept working after so many bombs is an indictment of Hollywood’s old boys network.

I hate to review a movie with absolutely nothing good to say, so I will admit what value this picture has comes from Hanks and Wright’s professionalism, despite the moments the CGI renders them soulless automatons. Their ability to mine a bit of truth in a script as hackneyed as this is to their credit.

One other small pleasure — we visit a couple who lived in the house in the 1940s, Lee and Stella Beekman (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond). He’s an inventor and she likes music and they like sex. Their life together seems fun. I wish the picture was all about them.

And, mostly, I wish the fucking camera moved. It’s so tedious. The movie looks like a bad Windows screensaver from 2005.