Robert Zemeckis has built a career on technical firsts that serve popular storytelling. Who Framed Roger Rabbit combined animation and live action to a standard nobody had reached, Forrest Gump inserted its lead into archival footage, and Contact and The Polar Express pushed motion capture and digital compositing forward.
Back to the Future remains the cleanest demonstration of his structural instinct. Almost every element planted in the first fifteen minutes pays off later, and the film is frequently taught as a model of setup and payoff.
The motion-capture period, from Polar Express through Beowulf and A Christmas Carol, is the divisive stretch. The technology was ahead of its ability to render faces, and the films sit in the uncanny valley he was trying to cross. He won Best Director for Forrest Gump.
Robert ZemeckisForrest Gump (1994) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A technically remarkable film with a genuinely great performance at its center and a politics it has spent thirty years being argued about, which beat Pulp Fiction and…
Robert ZemeckisTom Hanks performs motion capture for six different roles including the boy, the conductor, the boy's father, the hobo, the narrator, and Santa Claus. The film's central technological achievement and its central technological problem are the same thing.
Robert ZemeckisWho Framed Roger Rabbit is one of the great American films of the 1980s and one of the most substantial technical achievements in animated cinema history. Robert Zemeckis had directed Romancing the Stone in 1984 and Back to the Future…
Robert ZemeckisThe Back to the Future trilogy earns its 9.5 by solving the hardest problem in serialized storytelling: making three films that each stand alone while building a cumulative argument none of them could make individually. Zemeckis and Gale understood something…
Robert ZemeckisContact is a film about a scientist so committed to empirical evidence that she rejects faith, who then has a transcendent personal experience, returns with no physical evidence it occurred, and is expected by the film to continue believing in…
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