Robert Zemeckis has remade the documentary Marwencol as a motion-capture nightmare. If you thought it was too late for a movie to enter the “Worst of 2018” sweepstakes, welcome to Welcome to Marwen! Marwencol told the true story of Mark Hogancamp, an artist who photographs tableaux set in a model World War II–era town he's created in his backyard. The town is populated with dolls that Hogancamp arranges in various dramatic poses, typically of a figurine of a male soldier (representing Hogancamp) and a team of women friends all battling Nazis. The work is therapy for—and an interpretation of—a real-life attack Hogancamp suffered when five men beat him to near-death outside a bar after he professed to liking to wear women’s shoes. Welcome to Marwen thinks that the most interesting parts of this story are the imagined exploits of Hogancamp’s dolls. This means that close to 50 percent of the movie is a nonsensical World War II adventure with lots of exploding bullets, and the characters rendered in Zemeckis’s unspeakably uncanny mo-cap animation. It’s a weirdly wretched and unpleasant thing to sit through, but not for lack of big ideas. Hogancamp’s story—of violence, of art as therapy, of overcoming trauma—has a lot that a skilled filmmaker could latch on to. Zemeckis, unfortunately, is preoccupied with the escapism that Hogancamp’s invented town represents, and that could be okay if he made anything interesting happen there. He does not. by Ned Lannamann