Here

As long as I can remember, I've been afraid of time.

My parents tell the story of how, when I was far younger, I was caught worrying about what it would be like when I was old. How our street wouldn't be there anymore, how our pets would die, and how, one day, the people would, too.

While, frankly, the signs of autism should have been clear by then, it was agreed the child was odd and best left at that. Time passed; the worry didn't.

There's a name for that now: chronophobia. The fear of time, an all-encompassing anxiety when you try to picture all that was, is, and will be. As humans, we're not designed for that. We can only understand the past, and even that connection is sketchy at best.

Here, directed by Robert Zemeckis and based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, doesn't pretend to understand the mystery of time. It doesn't depict the totality of existence or the grand fate of humankind. Instead, it is the story of one spot in time. In that location, we see a multitude of stories, each of them unique yet completely alike, as the ocean of time envelops us entirely.

It's a magic trick that pulls the wool over our eyes more than once. We are omnipotent, unbound by time, yet physically unable to move. As if we'd discovered a window that only shows snippets. It is up to us to make sense of it - like life.

McGuire's original 6-page comic is a masterwork of the craft. Originally released in 1989, it expanded into a full 300-page opus in 2014. Both are remarkable variations on the same idea. They are works that elevate comics as an art form and, arguably, only work in that format.

Zemeckis doesn't attempt to repeat what McGuire has done. Instead, like any great artist, he takes the foundation and sculpts it with the tools of his trade. Here, the film, works in a way that a comic never could. Just as Here, the comic, functions on a level film cannot. They are not competing works, nor is one a strict adaptation. Instead, they're complementary pieces of art that showcase how their creators face the complexities of life.

On film, Here is both majestic and intimate in scope. We spend much of the film in the living room of a suburban house in America. But we are also on a field where two Native Americans fall in love a hundred years prior. We witness the desperate final run of dinosaurs as a meteor changes the face of our planet. Lives come and go, each one significant and minuscule. The cast is so diverse and wide that it doesn't matter if you can't remember their names, because it's their lives that leave a lasting impact.

This results in an episodic, almost epistolary narrative. You could choose one storyline to focus on and it would still prove a satisfying whole. Yet Zemeckis has a favorite, featuring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, which forms the foundational arc bookending the film. We see them meet as teenagers, both dreaming of everything they can still accomplish and then down the line as those dreams turn into compromises and different kinds of triumphs and losses.

Elsewhere, a man invents an armchair, another dreams of flight, two lovers find themselves under the stars, and families across time quarantine from deadly plagues. If they'd meet, they might see how similar they all are. But they also might not. The inherent tragedy of time is that we can only understand it in hindsight and distance.

Through the magic of CGI and – sigh – AI, Zemeckis allows his cast to play their parts throughout the years, aging and de-aging them before our eyes. At first, the illusion draws attention to itself, as if to say "I am here, so you best accept it". After that, it never bothered me again. Like makeup, it is unbelievable if you choose not to go along with the story. If you can accept that we can see into the past, present, and future in a single shot, you can accept the actors in different states of digital aging.

In lesser hands, Here could easily have become a case of all-CGI and no emotion. But Zemeckis is a smart and deeply compassionate filmmaker. One whose technical prowess is misunderstood by many for clinical disinterest in the matters of the soul. Here has already faced brutal criticism with some calling it a buffet of American nostalgia. I couldn't disagree more. If anything, Zemeckis is as acerbic and poignant about the past as he has ever been. Look, for example, at how he transitions between idyllic conversations of a white nuclear family in the 70s to an African American one in the present, where they explain to their child the procedure to survive their first encounter with a cop.

Here is a story of multiple Americas, just as it is a story of multiple lives. It is rife with dramatic irony and tragedy. But it is also optimistic and inherently humanist. Some will call it naive for its belief that our intimate hopes and dreams are stronger connections than the divisions we've built between us. It might be, but is that really such a bad thing?

Cinema is an exercise in empathy. To view a film, we must be willing to place ourselves in the lives of others. Here is a masterful vision of the enormity of time and our place in it. Its form is both traditional and experimental, just as its narrative veers between sentimental and satiric. By toying with our expectations of cinematic structure, Here, like its inspiration, is a formal exercise that allows us a safe environment to question our relationship with life.

It is a monumental success that will stand the test of time.