Film It Certainly Is That
Evelyn, an elderly Laundrette owner, is having a bad day. Her crummy business is being audited, she has no time left to plan her aging father's birthday, her husband is wafting divorce papers around, and she can't deal with facing her daughter's girlfriend. If that is not enough, she is promptly informed that she lives in just one of an infinite number of traversable multiverses, and she is everyone's last hope at stopping it all from being destroyed by a mysterious evil.
Up front, this is the best film I have seen in years. It's cliché to say, but I laughed, I cried... I can't remember the last time I laughed or cried this much over any movie. It's a feast of film, crammed with a bit of every last thing a film can offer. And like a feast, I was thoroughly stuffed and exhausted by the end of it.
What makes Everything Everywhere All at Once incredible is its the sheer ambitiousness in blending comedy, sci-fi, martial arts action, and family drama into a single cohesive story that takes place across a dozens of locations. The film manages to communicate a disorientating premise without losing you, and it's impressive how efficiently the movie gets you into a position where it can stack more and more weird shit onto you, and keep you from collapsing under the weight of all its crazy ideas. Geographically this story takes place almost entirely in an IRS office building, but we're thrown all over the multiverse, hopping into weird and wonderful worlds that will only be ruined if I describe a single one of them to you. I've seen people compare the film to The Matrix and Rick and Morty, but I think Sense 8 is probably more fitting.
The cornerstone to the movie is Michelle Yeoh. She breathes so much life into Evelyn, giving us a character who is simultaneously sweet and cruel; a shrinking violet and a kung fu kicking badass; a total loser and a god amongst men; a loving mother and a terrible parent; a dear wife who does nothing to deserve her husband. This is a career best for Yeoh, who - despite being nearly 60, is still a convincing action movie tour-de-force on top of being an excellent actor.
I could talk all day about the incredible standard that every part of the movie reaches. The action choreography is genius, the comedy is barmy, the emotional elements are overwhelming, the camera work is inspired, the performances are great. Everything is right. All that is left to say is that you should watch this film as soon as you are able, on a big screen, with as many people as you can bring.
Film An absurdly successful absurdist high concept
EEAAO is a film for which "Paprika meets Kung Fu Hustle meets Loki (2021) meets In the Mood for Love" somehow still feels like a lacking description. You are introduced to a relatable everyman loser protagonist, but when the multiversal action starts it does not stop. It also manages to inject visual and verbal humor at the perfect pace: what other film will have an Asian Reality Warper explode two men into confetti with dildos and still not have that as the most memorable scene?
The makers of this film obviously love cinema, and that's an extra treat if you do too. The multiverse shown in the film is absurdly fun, with loving homages to Wong Kar-wai, Disney, and The Wachowskis interwoven between "what if humans had hot dogs for fingers?" and "what if we were rocks.".
But EEAAO's greatest success isn't its technically excellent multiversal sci-fi action. It's how it achieves a strong emotional and philosophical arc under the science fiction trappings. Small-scale, familial relationships are difficult and complicated, immigrant families face unique difficulties, and we are haunted by the possibilities of what could have been. Large-scale, we may contain multitudes, but we are shaped by our environments and the people around us — and in the face of cosmic insignificance, all we have is each other. A hopeful, lovely message for an increasingly shit-filled decade.
That's not even going into how this succeeds from a representation standpoint: Michelle Yeoh gets her flowers, the notion of what Ke Huy Quan's career might have been had better roles for AAPI actors been available... all in all, I obviously loved it. I know we are still early in the awards cycle, but where is the volunteer sign-up for the Best Picture campaign?
Film Funny and sad and awesome and touching all at once
Lets get the negative stuff out of the way first: The first ten to fifteen minutes of the movie feels very slow.
Now for the good stuff. The basic premise (people from another world need an ordinary person's help to save the world) isn't remotely new but the execution is. Evelyn is needed because she's "living her worst life" and has the most potential to access the skills and memories of her other selves. Also, she quickly figures out how to access useful skills. Unlike others who need someone to guide them on what to do to access an alternate self, Evelyn just does "something weird" and uses whatever she gains from it. The fight scenes are absolutely magnificent, especially with how many characters rely on improvised weapons.
For humor, you have comedy gold like Evelyn trying to explain what's happening using Ratatouille, only to insist it's Raccacoonie. Or a Alpha Verse fighter gaining martial arts skills by jumping ass first onto a buttplug shaped trophy.
Sadness comes predominantly from the various Waymonds. One saw his wife murdered by their own daughter. Another became a rich CEO at the cost of being perpetually lonely. Another two have filed for divorce because their marriages are falling apart, and worse one is told by his wife how amazing her life would have been without him (having just experienced a life where she was a movie star). However, others have their own tragedies. Alpha Gong Gong lost his daughter and is facing the reality of having to murder his granddaughter. Deidre is heartbroken in every universe. And even the Big Bad is a young woman whose mind broke and is convinced that nothing she does matters at all, driving her to find a way to finally kill herself.
Touching? Waymond, who has no idea what's going on, talking down everyone by insisting on the importance of being kind, especially when you're scared or confused. This not only convinces Evelyn to show kindness to everyone in the various universes (such as insisting she and CEO Waymond give being happy together a try or telling Deidre she's not unlovable), but to defeat the Big Bad and her minions by snapping them out of their Despair Event Horizon. Perhaps best shown when Evelyn tells an alternate Joy that even though nothing matters and she could go anywhere and do anything, there's nowhere Evelyn would rather be than with her daughter. And if there's only fleeting moments where life makes sense, that just makes those moments all the more precious.
What initially seems like a very wacky Wuxia film instead ends up being a very powerful anti-nihilist message. "Nothing matters, which is why kindness matters."
Film Title says it all, yet it's digestible and even healing.
How to even start?
Evelyn Wang is a frustrated laundromat owner who meets an alternate-universe version of her husband before a tax meeting. Evelyn learns that people can "verse jump" to absorb the experiences of other versions of themselves after performing tiny bizarre actions that could alter their entire life path. Evelyn is being drawn into the multiverse because she's the version of herself who accomplished the least, and thus has the most alternate successful selves anyone could possibly draw from. And her alternate daughter is terrorizing the multiverse by causing aimless emotionless destruction after being broken by becoming a seamless blend of all her selves.
The wild sci-fi premise sells the film short, though. I could just as well say this is a story about generational conflict as Evelyn absorbs her own wounds and places them onto her daughter, driving her away and making her daughter feel like giving up on her family and potentially her life. It's a story about trauma, culture, and suicidality.
It's also a hilarious, surreal comedy with hot dog fingers, sex toys and misremembered Pixar films, and it's a martial arts action film. And a metafiction.
But mostly it's a story about the dangers of nihilism and asking "what if" instead of taking what is. Jobu Tupaki is the name of one of the most compelling villains I've seen. She's campy, blithe, and confident, with outrageous costumes and cartoonish dark ways of killing her enemies, like a Gen Z irony version of The Mask. But Jobu is terrifying because she thinks despairing absurdity is the answer to being overwhelmed by all the possibilities she's seen for herself and other people around her. Her approach to making despair a joke is "a mood", but it's also deeply concerning as we see her slay and slay her way through existence with no sincerity. The ultimate thesis of the film is that absurdity can instead be soulful, a way to uplift in the face of chaos, and the film itself manages to pull off some of its most poignant scenes in objectively bizarre ways. You will cry at overlaid text on static shots of rocks on a cliffside, and there's true literary brilliance in the two very silly metaphors for nihilist coping. It's a film for anyone who feels like their life isn't going how it could have or should, and the message can be phrased as a beautiful absurdity in itself:
The meaning of life is to give life meaning.
Craft-wise, the film aces it. The performances are great, the editing is snappy, stylized, hyperactive, and key to making this everything viewable, and the costumes are legendary. This movie truly showcases how far cinema and storytelling can be pushed and makes its experience exactly what the title promises. I think its awards are entirely earned...though Stephanie Hsu deserved Supporting Actress more.
The chances of another film like this are nowhere, no place, at no possible time.