Tom Hanks, Robin Wright are digitally de-aged in this bomb

Robert Zemeckis’ film “Here” is an object lesson in how to take a touching idea and make an extremely annoying movie out of it.

The “Forrest Gump” director’s lofty concept, adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, is that a single camera sits in one spot for the entirety of the film as the action jumps back and forth through time. 

So, the viewers witness decades of scenes play out in the living room of an old house. 

An omnipresent spy-cam observes births, deaths, weddings, funerals, Thanksgivings, Christmases, divorces and reunions all within four walls.

Isn’t that nice?

Cloyingly so, as fashioned by Zemeckis. “Here” is like “Leave it to Beaver” with CGI, alcoholism, COVID and an F-bomb. Even in the nostalgic film’s darkest moments, it’s wholesome as hopscotch. That Tom Hanks stars in it only piles on the powdered sugar.

But it’s not the story of just one family, or even one millennium. The ambitious movie erratically traverses the timeline to make the point that the house you bought has a long-lost history. 

Had “Here” been more thoughtfully written and not acted by automatons, that conclusion could have been profound. Instead, it’s painfully obvious.

The “Back to the Future” director again reunites with Hanks, who plays Richard Young, the closest thing without drywall that “Here” has to a main character. Starting off as an old man, he walks into a sunlit modern living room only for the shot to fade away to the era of dinosaurs. 

Zemeckis whooshes back… to the Cretaceous! The good old days when Pennsylvania apparently had volcanoes. The dinos’ extinction is then followed by the Ice Age and makes a giant leap to the earliest human inhabitants, about 11,500 years ago.  

If you think that’s overwhelming, wait till the PA house gets built. It’s a freeway pileup of cartoonish pseudo-history.

Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate, Loyalist son lives in a huge manse across the street, also populated by slaves, and occasionally the Founding Father drops by for a visit. 

“No one will remember the great Benjamin Franklin!,” his son shouts.

There’s more. In the 1920s, we watch the La-Z-Boy be invented. “The Relax-Y-Boy!,” Lee Beekman (David Fynn) proclaims in a wince of a line, while surrounded by decadent, flapper decor. Never mind that the recliner was actually concocted in Michigan.

In flashbacks to the early 1900s, John Harter (Gwilym Lee) is an airplane enthusiast, a hobby that his suffragist wife (Michelle Dockery) finds extremely dangerous. These stiff sections, some of the worst, suggest that smiles had not been discovered yet.

The story’s primary family, the Youngs, arrive in the 1940s. Husband Al (Paul Bettany), who fought in World War II, settles down with his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly). Their clan sticks around the place for 70-odd years.

Richard is born (many child actors play him at different stages), followed by Elizabeth (Lauren McQueen) and Jimmy (Harry Marcus). 

Angry Al is a “Best Years of Our Lives” type who never comfortably returned to civilian life after serving overseas. He glugs whisky like Poland Spring, and every year he asks for a raise that never comes. 

Bettany moseys closer to the camera to deliver snarling, drunken monologues, which introduces a frequent question brought up by “Here”: What person lingers in the archway between a living room and kitchen?

Hanks is digitally de-aged to play Richard in his teen years. The trick, which has been done to death in “The Irishman” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” looks adequate as ever. 

But the actor’s rigid movement, Mr. Rogers demeanor and noticeably 68-year-old voice don’t fit a teenager. So, the effect is spooky and weird. Another wrinkle is that Hanks is too kind a guy to make Richard, an artist who sacrifices his dream for stability, remotely interesting.

Also rewinding the clock is Robin Wright (Jenny from “Gump”), who fares better as Richard’s girlfriend Margaret.

They have a shotgun wedding after she gets knocked up, and then “Here” gives way to the depressing realities of life: strokes, dementia, marital strife. There are multiple chats about capital gains taxes.

Any family depiction beyond the Youngs, who are banal, is plain terrible. The 1900s pilot and 1920s La-Z-Boy inventor are unbearable “Ragtime”-y skits.

And, in a bid for self-protection, Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth unconvincingly force in some diversity. 

In the future, when the Youngs have left, we see glimpses of a 2010s black family, the longest of which shows the dad telling his son how to talk to the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Almost nothing else is learned about them except that their housekeeper gets COVID.

Hundreds of years in the past, an indigenous couple wordlessly flirt, have a kid and die in the 2,000 square-foot meadow where the Young home will eventually stand. 

These poorly thought out deviations come off as nervous notes from studio executives.

I’ll hand it to Zemeckis and editor Jesse Goldsmith: They make one stationary shot per scene remarkably dynamic and visually engaging. The filmmaking is far from boring. 

Also impressive is that only days later did I realize that the cast includes a whopping 70 actors. It’s so seamless and intimate that its vibe is that of a small ensemble drama.

But sadly it’s a nauseating one. You’d think that the goal of the fly-on-the-wall format would be to present a real portrayal of family life.

Instead, it’s like watching a lousy stage play in which actors, cranked up to 200%, deliver soapy speeches to a wall.