Late in Welcome to Marwen, there is a series of impossible to miss visual callbacks to Back to the Future. While they are among the most fun moments in director Robert Zemeckis’ latest aesthetically ambitious feature, they also serve as a reminder that this is in fact the guy who directed Back to the Future. Now, more than 30 years later, he’s releasing Welcome to Marwen, easily the biggest blunder in a career that has, frankly, been all over the place. There’s something cynically poetic about a director purposefully reminding audiences of his best film whilst in the third act of his worst, but then there’s also something cynical about the way the director tells this tale.
Following the true story of Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell)—an artist turned photographer after an assault left him with brain damage—Zemeckis splits the film into two visually distinct styles. There’s Mark’s everyday life, photographing his dolls made to resemble himself and the various women in his life (Merrit Wever, Janelle Monae, Eliza Gonzalez, Gwendoline Christie, and Leslie Zemeckis, all with varying degrees of significance and screentime, but none with much of a personality), and then the animated world inspired by Mark’s imagination, as acted by his dolls, chiefly his personal doppelganger, Captain Hogie. Mark’s trauma and road to recovery are turned into Zemeckis’ latest playground for visual effects, which only really succeeds in dampening his inner conflict into something silly.
Source: IGN.com Welcome to Marwen Review