Once again in talking about a Bob Zemeckis movie, I have to raise the phenomenon of directors who have enduring careers in Hollywood even though they haven't had a hit in ages, completely contrary to the axiom your only worth is the box office of your last movie.

His last successful films were Flight, which most people consider owed more to the presence of its star in Denzel Washington, and Cast Away, similarly thanks to the presence of Tom Hanks, who stars here.

And with that, Zemeckis' latest commercial turkey, making back just $15m from a $45m budget, is here (get it?).

Though it has an inventive visual approach, you can't credit Zemeckis completely for it – the conceit of the entire film being the same static view across the ages, rectangular frames appearing fading slowly in and out to show overlapping scenes as they begin and end, is thanks to the graphic novel on which it's based.

We skip forward and backwards in time from the present day showing an old man entering an empty room to dinosaurs crashing past, one of them planting a footprint in a mound of dirt, along with subplots both major and minor in between.

The man is Richard (Hanks), coming into the living room of a house he's lived in all his life but which he's finally selling, having asked the realtor for one more look.

As the frames enclosing the action in different eras appear and disappear, we learn that Richard grew up there with his parents, his father an embittered WWII veteran father (Paul Bettany). He falls in love with Margaret (Robin Wright), gets her pregnant way too young and they raise their family in the same house.

Margaret never wants to spend their life there, freeloading off his parents, but Richard is too cautious, gradually putting away his dreams of being a graphic artist to work in insurance and constantly telling her they'll move like she wants, they just can't afford it quite yet.

Even through his own mother having a debilitating stroke, his father moving away to Florida and then moving back when he becomes too old to care for himself, the couple are never quite in sync about their life goals despite their love for each other.

Lesser plots deal with the love between two Native Americans in pre-colonial times, family members of Benjamin Franklin who own the estate across the road and never really get along, an aviation enthusiast and his family in the early 1900s, his wife horrified about his hobby and a free-spirited couple in the prewar years, the husband of which invents the La-Z-boy reclining chair and makes their fortune.

A lot of the critics found it mawkish but I thought it did a fairly restrained and effective job of conveying the theme – life will almost never turn out how we think or hope, and we'll all go through as much pain and loss as we will laughter, dinners together, TV watching and everything else that happens when we live somewhere.

More interesting than anything on screen though (considering it later, that is – the film holds your attention perfectly well while it's on) is the technology used to age and deage the actors, depicting Hanks and Wright from their late teens through to their dotage.

After the splash The Irishman made with its de-aging VFX, this is the next technological step, with an AI tool called Metaphysic Live doing the de-aging in camera during shooting. The result is still not 100 percent photoreal, but it's as good as you've seen in VFX so far.

It's also interesting that it didn't whip up a storm of controversy about the use of AI, something Hollywood is obsessively wringing its hands about as I write these words. Maybe if the film had done better with critics or at the box office it would have.

The technology and the formal experiment make it worth watching, even if it's not the most thrilling screen story you've seen all year.