"This Heart Rest" adjusts the face model through AI face swap technology, showing the appearance changes of the male and female protagonists from youth to old age, allowing Tom Hanks and Robin White to complete a wonderful performance spanning decades. The picture shows a still from "This Heart is at peace".

Do you still remember the forrest Gump who was always optimistic and tirelessly running 30 years ago? The original cast of the classic film "Forrest Gump" has reunited again. The movie "This Heart Rest" directed by Robert Zemegis and starring Tom Hanks and Robin White has been launched in Chinese theaters this month. This film, adapted from the comic of the same name by Richard McGuire, interprets the eternal propositions of family, time and love.

As of press time, the cumulative box office of "This Heart Stay" in China was only 4.82 million yuan, and the screening rate fell to 0.8%. Even though it has a good reputation of 7.4 points on Douban, this movie that focuses on emotional precipitation and narrative blanking is still not favored by the audience in the face of the trend of watching strong plots and fast-paced movies.

"Time container" under fixed lens

Unlike the traditional linear narrative framework, "This Heart Stay" adopts the technique of fixed camera positions and time jumping, and uses the living room of a century-old house as the "stage", which unfolds the story from prehistoric times to modern civilization. The pioneers of the colonial era, the inventor of the industrial era, the ordinary families after World War II... Fragments of life from different eras are presented one by one in this small space like a time capsule.

Zemegis edited through unique picture-in-picture formats, cleverly blending different time and space. Parts of the latter picture often appear in the previous picture in the form of a photo. The seasons outside the window are circulating and day and night change. The decoration style of the living room has changed several times, and the firewood in the fireplace is burning and extinguishing. Vanessa was born here, Ted died here... The stories of each era are full of emotions shared by human beings, giving this space a heavy sense of history and the warmth of life. "I hope to convey the symbiotic relationship between time and space through a fixed perspective, the invariance of the house and the flowing people in it just outline the dislocation and intersection of human emotions." Zemegis said that he hopes that the audience will watch this film in a way that they have never felt before. In this small space, he contained the greatest emotions of human beings.

Can AI technology create "eternity"

"This Heart Rest" adjusts the face model through AI face swap technology, showing the appearance changes of the male and female protagonists from youth to old age, allowing Tom Hanks and Robin White to complete a wonderful performance spanning decades. “It’s exciting to be able to render their youthful appearance on the set, and it’s a big breakthrough we have made,” Zemegis said. When Hanks walked through the living room with his face from Forrest Gump, the audience seemed to be dragged back to the memory scene of 1994. The development of technology allowed fans to complete the reconciliation with youth in tears.

At the same time, there are different voices on the Internet: "No matter how advanced the technology is, it cannot restore the eyes of Tom Hanks when he was young." It is the "imperfection" that looks like in reality that gives humans real warmth. This technological carnival inadvertently became the extension of the film's contrast between "flowing time" and "unchanging space" in the real world, reminding us: the more perfect the AI ​​face-changing technology replicates youthful face, the more it highlights the inviolable law of time.

"It is still doubtful whether AI technology can effectively serve narrative." Zemegis remained sober in technological exploration. In his opinion, the age reduction of numbers is not to show off skills, but to analyze the fragility of life - allowing us to see clearly how the body is changed in time, and how memory becomes the last refuge. "We can only stay in the 'back to the face of the past'. Time continues, no matter what means we use." A netizen with the ID of "The Hesitant Pig" on Douban wrote.

When Margaret, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, said in an empty living room, “This is our home, our favorite home”, memory compresses into eternity deep in consciousness. Perhaps the real "settlement of this heart" does not lie in the youth reappeared by technology, but in the torrent of time, the courage that humans had stayed wholeheartedly for a moment.

At the end of the film, Zemegis lets the camera rise from the living room to the sky, contrasting with the feathers floating in the air in "Forrest Gump". We finally understand this original intention of creation that spans 30 years: those moments of individual joys and sorrows are intertwined with the changes of the times, forming eternity. (Wenhui Daily intern Zang Yunjie)

[Editor in charge: Tang Wei]