HERE

Here is the decision in full. Robert Zemeckis has attempted something genuinely daring — a movie built from static tableaus, multiple families across multiple timelines all sharing one spot of ground. The craft deserves respect, and the final scene is moving. But an interesting experiment is not the same as a rewarding one.

The camera never moves until the very end, and that choice drains the drama and humor out of most of what came before. Worse for the family or Christian viewer, the film's soul is empty. It fixes its eyes on the material, the everyday, the psychological — and never once lifts them toward God, Jesus, or the meaning of a life. What it does offer freely is profanity: nine strong obscenities and blasphemies, including two that abuse the name of Jesus.

So here is our answer: skip it. The ambition is real, but the payoff is thin and the worldview is hollow. There are better ways to spend two hours.

One patch of ground in Pennsylvania. Across it, centuries pass — dinosaurs, the rise of mammals, an Indian maiden and her paramour, even a glimpse of Benjamin Franklin's family.

Then, in 1907, a house rises there. From a single fixed vantage point in its living room, we watch the families who live and love and quarrel inside it: an aviator and his fearful wife, the inventor of a famous recliner, and a World War II pilot whose son Richard (Tom Hanks) will spend most of his life under that same roof. One room. Many lifetimes. That's the experiment.

Three stars, and here is what they mean. Zemeckis — of FORREST GUMP and BACK TO THE FUTURE — deserves credit for attempting something no ordinary movie tries: a screen full of static tableaus, layered frames within frames, timelines stacked atop one another as they are in Richard McGuire's acclaimed graphic novel.

The trouble is that a movie is a motion picture, and this one refuses to move. By parking the camera at the back of the living room, the film distances you from the action and produces some genuinely boring stretches; viewers in the back of the theater can't even take in all the visual detail. The final scene finally lets the camera loose, and it's the most powerful moment in the film — which only proves how much the rest needed the same freedom. It may reward a second viewing, but the experiment falls flat as often as it lands.

Here is a film that looks intently at human life and never once looks up. Its worldview is strongly humanist and secular — perhaps even shallow. It cares about the material, the everyday, the psychological, but it neglects the spiritual, the philosophical, and the moral. There are no uplifting, positive references to God, Jesus, or the Bible anywhere in it. What it offers instead is a life measured entirely by what can be bought, felt, and remembered.

The film also carries a politically correct undertone. It takes a critical view of modern American capitalist life, of police treatment of black people, and of race relations in America. And it runs a feminist subtext through Richard's marriage: his wife Margaret feels her spirit stifled by his lack of ambition and his refusal to leave his parents' home, and she eventually leaves him to seek what the world has to offer.

That, finally, is the film's tragedy. It watches generations chase meaning through one small room and never names the one thing that would satisfy them. Scripture does name it: "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36). A movie about the whole span of human life that never asks that question has left out the most important frame.

Zemeckis reached for something no one else was trying, and for the craft alone the reach is admirable. But an ambitious film with a hollow center and nine strong profanities is not one we can send you to see. So here is our answer, the same one we opened with: skip it. Looking for something to enjoy with the family instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.