Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

 

Two decades ago, Evelyn and her boyfriend Waymond eloped from China to the United States, where they got married and had a daughter, Joy.  

It has all been downhill from there.  Evelyn has a tendency to cope by avoidance, and her ability to duck and weave has finally been exhausted.  She avoided filing correct tax paperwork for the laundromat she owned, and now the IRS is auditing here.  She avoided dealing with the fracture of her marriage to Waymond, and now he feels the only way to make her talk is to ask for a divorce.  She avoided acknowledging her daughter's sexuality and non-Chinese partner, and now they are estranged.

All in all, Evelyn really, really doesn't have time to deal with anything else going on in her life.  But she's going to have to, because she's about to find herself at the centre of multiversal martial arts madness.  It seems in a parallel reality to her own, another Evelyn invented technology that allowed people to transfer their consciousness between realities.  Unfortunately, that Evelyn's disregard for safety splintered the mind of her best agent.  Jobu Tupaki, as this agent is now known, experiences all universes at once and can verse-jump and manipulate matter at will.  Alas, this has left her as filled with rage and madness as she is with power.  She seeks to destroy the multiverse as the only way she can know peace.

How can this Evelyn; the greatest "failure" of all Evelyns in the multiverse, a woman who cannot even save her laundromat; possibly hope to save the multiverse?

Everything Everywhere All At Once was a surprise commercial success.  It initially opened in only 10 theatres.  By its third week, it was in over two thousand.  It would ultimately recoup somewhere between five and ten times its production budget in worldwide box office.  The variation in that multiple is due to conflicting reports as to what the film actually cost.

One number that is quite firmly known, however, is the number of Academy Awards the film won: it picked up an astounding seven Oscars.  And not just the low profile technical awards, either.  It was in fact shunned in those categories.  Instead, it picked up Best picture, Best director, Best Original Screenplay and no less than three of the four main 'best actor' awards.  It got a lot of love in other awards ceremonies, too: this is a movie that has an entire Wikipedia page just to list the nominations it received.  

Clearly, a lot of people enjoyed the film, and I'd certainly count myself among that number.  It is not, however, a movie that I would give an unqualified recommendation, because I definitely don't think it will be to all tastes.  In particular, some people will not appreciate the film's absurdist humour. It gets very out there at times. Some viewers will be left entirely cold by this, and that will almost certainly spoil their enjoyment of the movie.

For my own tastes, not everything was a hit, but there were multiple moments I found extremely funny.  I particularly liked the script's willingness to build on a joke.  Things that seem like a passing, inconsequential gag like Evelyn's misunderstanding of the movie Ratatouille come back in unexpected ways.  Ways that don't necessarily massively impact the plot, but which do serve to flesh out and illustrate the true diversity encompassed by an infinite multiverse of possibilities.

In fact, the film does has a consistent pattern of starting quite small with most of its concepts, and then growing more and more wild as time goes on.  The 'improbable things' people must do to trigger their multidimensional powers, for instance, start with pretty minor stuff like 'wear your shoes on the wrong feet' but ... well, let's just say they escalate from there.  

This is a clever structural decision since it eases the viewer in, step by step.  Smart stuff.

However, despite all the wackiness, the science fiction plot trappings, and the martial arts sequences, at its core Everything Everywhere All At Once is a quite thoughtful movie about life, love, family and the human condition.  What the film has to say about these things is perhaps not particularly novel or surprising, but it says them quite well.

Ultimately, some people will love it, some (me!) will like it, and others will be pretty "meh", or even flat out hate it.  Heck, if you're feeling adventurous, it may be worth seeing the movie just to find out in which category you fall.  You're probably not going to see anything else like Everything Everywhere All At Once! Unless of course Hollywood decides to trot out a bunch of copy-cat projects, of course.  Though the recent WGA and SAG strikes have probably stymied or at least delayed, any such plans.