I’ll say this for Robert Zemeckis – he’s not afraid of embracing gimmicks. This can work in his favour (the inventive blend of animation and live action in Who Framed Roger Rabbit) or it can stifle the life out of a film (see the hideous, uncanny valley character animation of The Polar Express). Here falls into the latter camp. The gimmick is that the whole film is shot from a fixed camera point, with the action spanning millennia and showing everything from stampeding dinosaurs to the various inhabitants of a house built on the same spot. Time periods are collaged together; central characters Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright) are digitally de-aged to show them as high-school sweethearts through to frail old age. It’s an alienatingly ugly technique and a mawkish tear-jerker choked up with synthetic sentimentality. You start to envy the dinosaurs their extinction event.
In UK and Irish cinemas
