Everything Everywhere All At Once: A Force To Be Reckoned With

For as much as I appreciate genre-bending films, I don't think I've ever been at a loss to categorize one before. But that was before I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once. 2023's best picture winner from directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan is gloriously weird and unabashedly different. It's also a really, really good movie. To slightly and pridefully turn up my nose, I personally found myself preferring Oppenheimer as far as best picture winners go, but Nolan's epic historical biopic is a really high bar to clear, and this in no way detracts from what Everything Everywhere All At Once accomplished. I hope to make that very clear to you by the end of this review. To give you more information, I actually had seen parts of this movie before with some friends during my freshman year of college, but I hadn't seen the whole thing until recently. So now that I've finished the movie in full, I wanted to give my opinion on it. In short? While it falls just short of essential perfection, what's certainly certain is that it's a very good movie, and if you haven't seen it, it's one I think you could get a lot of value out of. Its vision is completely unparalleled, so much so that I occasionally found myself wishing that the film had cut back on that vision just a tad, as surprising as that may sound coming from someone who fancies himself to be an artist. The film wrestles with some interesting questions and philosophies, and more importantly, the ways in which it portrays those questions and philosophies are largely narratively integral and structurally sound, mostly preventing the movie from falling into a sense of pithy theme-reliance. This film can also just be a lot of plain old fun when it wants to be, and I count myself thoroughly entertained by just about every minute of it. On top of all of this, I found myself strangely and unexpectedly moved by Everything Everywhere All At Once at times, and this really just lent yet another dimension to a movie that already has plenty of them. That's the (relatively) short of it. I get a feeling that I'm going to derive great pleasure from delving into the long of why I like this movie, and I hope you do too.

Distributed by A24, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a 2022 absurdist-comedy action film that follows Evelyn Wang, a Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat with her husband Waymond. One day, a series of strange events heralds Evelyn's sudden discovery that not everything is as it seems, and she is forced into a multi-dimensional adventure where the existence of the universe itself hangs in the balance.

I want to start by commending the unbelievable creativity on display here. This movie is so creative, I'm not sure I'll be able to do how creative it actually is justice with words on a screen, but I'm sure going to try. The film includes a pervasive amount of post-modern elements in just about every aspect of its visuals, and while this may tire some, I personally appreciated this approach, and that's because the writers actually found legitimate narrative reasons to include these elements, and didn't add them to the mix just because America happens to be a free country. There's a lot of intelligent and even humorous symbolism in this movie, and the absurdity and humor of the film are two elements that coexist really well with each other without ever feeling hammy, strangely enough. Also, can I say that this film really, legitimately does care about the characters that inhabit its world? This was really refreshing for me to see, and I appreciate the filmmaker's obvious dedication to and empathy for its characters. The movie takes a satisfying amount of time to acclimate us to the "normal life" of Evelyn and Waymond before throwing us headlong into the plot, and I salute its patience and dedication to strong and even intimate characterization. As for the plotting of the film, it's almost entirely a win, and I like this film's approach to developing everything that happens. Just about every revelation and plot beat builds on what came before, giving the film a sense of development that keeps it from ever feeling stagnant. In addition, the scale of this movie can be quite massive, but its scope is very small and centered right on Evelyn, what she cares about, hopes for, and fears, and what she wants for Jobu Tupaki, otherwise known as Alpha Joy Wang. Jobu is Evelyn and Waymond's nihilistic daughter, and the film is pretty much an abstract display of the tenets of Evelyn and Waymond's uncertain but hopeful optimism vs Jobu's safe but hopeless nihilism. Best of all, the film rarely lets these philosophical questions overshadow any semblance of plot and is unfortunately at its weakest around the third act, when it briefly lets its ideas inform the plot rather than letting the plot inform its ideas.

But taking us back to a practical and positive level, the performances from everyone here, but especially Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, are just phenomenal. Better yet, every character in this film has a distinctive voice from any other character, and this adds a lot of depth to a character-centric story that would have suffered greatly from having characters that felt similar to other characters in the film in really any way at all. The film grounds a lot of visual and narrative chaos around a sense of order by keeping the story about Evelyn and what she cares about rather than letting itself get exclusively dominated by spectacle (although a lot of the strange things you will see in this movie are just unspeakably creative, strange, funny, and even poignant), and this is what sets it apart from other blockbusters and even other absurdist blockbusters. The writers of Everything Everywhere All At Once obviously care deeply about what each character involved is feeling and thinking, and so we as the audience do as well. The end of the movie is just so unexpectedly sweet, and really catches you off-guard in really satisfying ways as the film draws to a close.

Despite getting the sense that the film occasionally leans too heavily on its themes and ideas at the expense of some narrative integrity and otherwise strong practical plot development, this movie is very good, and I believe that this particular and temporary misstep may be the only real flaw in Everything Everywhere All At Once. I found myself disagreeing with the relatively common complaint that this movie tacked too many elements onto itself, and I loved its unapologetically weird vision because it had true intention, and also because it showed me something that I had never seen before. Now, I must say that Oppenheimer is probably the better Best Picture winner of the two, but is that really saying much at all, given how virtually untouchable Nolan's outing was? Make no mistake: Everything Everywhere All At Once is a true force to be reckoned with. However, do be aware that it also does contain a pretty decent amount of objectionable content. There's a steady stream of crass, R-rated language as well as a pretty decent amount of weird if intelligent sexual jokes and gags in the movie. For instance, in one scene, a character beats some bad guys to death with a couple of sex toys. There's also one brief, blink-and-miss-it same-sex kiss. So even if this film might be a very good one, I can perfectly understand that some people would want to steer clear of it, so that's why I put this section at the end. It's for those of you who might be put off by content like this to the point where the bad outweighs whatever benefits you might get from watching it. But ultimately, despite containing some content that it could have done without, I was able to appreciate Everything Everywhere All At Once for being what it so desires to be: a truly unique, undeniably intelligent, and surprisingly heartfelt spin on multi-verse movies that takes a familiar and much-maligned concept and decides to do something legitimately intentional with it.

Everything Everywhere All At Once - 9/10

Ephesians 6:1-3