(This is spoilery, and this is a 2011 movie, so I’m putting a warning here, since you’ve only had, uh, nine years to see it. But honestly I’m not sure this one is ruined by being spoiled anyway — this is one of those movies where having a roadmap going into it is actually helpful so you’re not just all “wtf is happening here.”)

So at its most fundamental level, this is a story about a family — mostly from the perspective of the oldest boy of three, but it starts before he’s born — growing up in postwar middle America. (I guess it actually takes place in Texas, but it’s got a kind of universality to it such that you’d believe it could be just about anywhere.)

Brad Pitt is the model of a kind of mid-century authoritarian father — demanding to be addressed as “sir” by his kids — that you don’t really see anymore, but was part of the cultural script back then. Jessica Chastain, then, is the more spiritual parent, with a long monologue in voiceover about how “living in grace” is the only way to be happy.

Maybe the animating event of the story, early in the movie, is that the younger son dies at the age of 19 (cause unspecified). We see the parents react to it; we see the older son as an adult (played by Sean Penn) thinking back to it. And then we jump back into earlier childhood, seemingly to lead up to explaining it, but in fact… that never really happens. We just see a few years in the life of this family.

But that’s not quite correct, because Malick apparently didn’t want to create an intimate family drama, he wanted to create an epic. And so in between these family scenes, we see… the birth of the universe and the Earth, and life arising and evolving, eventually giving us a scene of dinosaurs before we go back to the family. And similarly, we later have a scene of the sun swallowing up the Earth and the end of all life, and a scene in the afterlife.

I’m sort of torn about this as a creative choice. Because like on the one hand, you don’t need it. You could have just told this story about this family, and it’s so good — so sharply observed, so perfectly capturing the sense of what it was like to be a kid (I grew up like 30-40 years after the setting of this movie, but it still felt a lot like my own childhood). So why add this whole big metaphysical layer into it at all?

But ultimately, that stuff all works. Between those cosmic scenes and the voiceover narration and the non-linear telling of the story, this ends up feeling like it’s not only just a story about these particular people and the specifics of their life, but something kind of universal about the purpose of life.

This has been making “best of” lists since it came out; in fact, the first I really heard of it was on Ebert’s 2012 “ten best movies” list, where it was his one new entrant updating his ten-years-ago version of the list. It’s absolutely worthy of that praise, and is easily one of the best movies made in this century.