I can appreciate the sort of artsy style they were going for with this movie and the people that are in the movie do a good job in their roles. I'm not so sure that I think casting Tom Hanks as a young, middle-aged, and old man was the correct choice, because the AI / CGI required to make him look like he is a teenager is pretty dumb in my opinion and while I get that they were trying to convey that Tom is capable of playing all three, the film could have been better if they had been able to focus more on his youth rather than hiding him in the background because he is a man near 70 years old playing a teenager.
When I saw that Robert Zemeckis was directing a film that had both Forrest Gump and Jenny in it, I figured we were going for yet another all out blockbuster and I suppose that is what they were going for. They were likely trolling for Oscars with this one and after seeing it I sincerely hope that they do NOT get nominated for them.
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We're teenagers Dad! Just let us do teenager stuff!
It is clear they are going for nostalgia and trying to pull at our heart strings about how times may change, but in the eyes of the house and the land it sits on, your moment in time in this house and on this land is but a blink of an eye. That much hits you pretty early as they oddly go from a wonderful setup shot of old Richard (Tom Hanks) walking around the house that he is about to sell off and then all of a sudden we go back in time several hundred million years to dinosaurs running around on the same land.
The 5 or so human stories they have going on at the same time, often not being terribly clear about where the transition took place other than a box drawn on a screen, aren't really even tied to one another. Then there are American Indians on the same land in certain scenes and it's so convoluted that I can't really tell if they were trying to achieve some sort of social-justice something or other by including the "message." They also throw in a black family that is warning their son about how to get pulled over and not get shot. That irritated me a bit but hell, it's Hollywood and an activist like Tom Hanks is involved so it must just be protocol.
The main story here is the love story between Richard and Margaret (Tom and Robin) and the other stuff about how the house was originally built and how dinosaurs and American Indian people were at one time on the land, and how they jump back and forth between all of them, just seems unnecessary to the point where it doesn't make sense nor does it have any bearing on the story at all.
For many, including me, the fact that all of the entire movie takes place in a single room is going to be quite boring. Many of you out there will keep watching hoping for it to get good at some point but it maintains a normal slog of a pace and while I can appreciate the fact that it is trying to tell a "normal folks" story, as it turns out normal folks aren't really all that interesting. The fact of the matter is that we want to see a slightly disabled guy grow up against all odds and become a master of industry and help his friend Lieutenant Dan overcome his own life's struggles.
Paul Bettany plays multiple roles in this as well, two of them being the father of Richard (Tom Hanks.) I really like Paul Bettany but there is a real issue with placing him or anyone else as the father of Tom Hanks' character: It just doesn't seem realistic. When they are acting opposite one another including when Bettany is bed-ridden and dying, he seems and acts younger than Hanks, it seems the opposite. I get that they needed someone that was capable of looking old and young but this was the wrong choice. Hell, Hanks was the wrong choice or more importantly, deciding to have Hanks and Robin play themselves at 3 different age-points was a poor choice.
I can't help but feel as though this film was made because Robin Wright played "Jenny" in Forrest Gump so well that the world at large kind of hates her because of what she did to Forrest even though obviously Robin didn't actually do anything other than be a phenomenal actress in that film.
Seeing Jenny and Forrest get married again was nice enough I guess, but even with some extremely manipulative sounds and music to try to get you emotionally invested in this story, the fact of the matter is that by the end of it (or for me, near the middle) you are not at all invested in any of the characters and when they reach their crux at the end you don't really care. Their choice to end the film with a backing out scene just like Forrest Gump was just silly because it didn't bring about good feelings about that epic 1994 film, it made it feel cheapened. Instead of following a leaf (or backing away from it like they did at the end of Forrest Gump) we are following a hummingbird - which much like many other aspects of this movie, had no bearing on the story whatsoever.
Should I watch it?
I will downright say "no", you don't need to watch this. I just realized from watching the trailer again something that I forgot from when I watched it. Even though we are just talking about a background of a living room for the ENTIRE MOVIE they still CGI'd certain parts of it instead of actually changing out whatever items were in that room. Why do that? We can ID cheap CGI and green-screen sections of a movie as it is. It doesn't make sense to do this outside of the bizarre scenes featuring dinosaurs and American Indians which in my mind, should have been eliminated from the movie altogether.
Basically this movie tries to pull at your heartstrings and make you sad about your own, and your family's mortality, but it fails miserably at all of these things. By the end nothing has really happened other than a normal life of some people and that just isn't special enough to warrant a full-length film. This would have possibly been a good thing to have done on a Broadway stage perhaps, but it is wasted on the big screen.
This film can still be watched in theaters and is available to stream on AppleTV+. It can be rented or purchased on Fandango, MS, and Spectrum on Demand
