Movie Review : Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
When Everything Everywhere All At Once came ou in theatre in March, it was met with a tsunami of raving reviews. Too many raving reviews. Anything that is even remotely worthwhile is normally hated by at least a small part of the snooty film nerd community. Not this movie. So, I was immediately suspicious. It seemed to have a good heart, but it was so hyperbolically praised that it couldn’t possibly live up to it. I’m here to tell that I was completely right, but that you also should watch it anyway.
Everything Everywhere All At Once tells the story of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) , a coin laundry owner and mother to an LGBTQ kid who hates herself and every goddamn choices she made in her life. The man she married (Short Round from Indiana Jones), the father she can’t stand up to (James Hong), the daughter who isn’t anything even remotely like her (Stephanie Hsu), etc. When IRS comes sniffing around for a tax audit, everything in her life is about to change. The nature of her reality too.
Fuck you, Kevin Feige
In theory, Everything Everywhere All At Once is really fucking great. But it’s really two movies wrapped up in one and I only enjoyed one of them. Your own overall appreciation will depend on two factors : 1) Your capacity to catch throwaway, 'ha-ha-look-how-funny-and-asburd life is' jokes the movie is relentlessly slinging at you in twelve of its twenty-four frames per second and 2) Your enjoyment of kung fu scenes, because there are A LOT of them.
There's an Everything Everywhere All At Once where Evelyn has to fight waves of random, unimportant character like a beat-em-up video game characters to save the universe from a nihilistic, Thanos-like supervillain who happens to be her own daughter and another one where Evelyn has to sort out her own emotional bullshit and appreciate what she has better. The difference in the two movies is simple: stakes. When the stakes of your movie are too broad, it’s like there are none. It doesn’t elicit emotion.
If you’ve been following this site, you know how much I hate generic fighting scenes that pack nothing but supposedly awe-inspiring technical acumen. It's one of my creative pet peeves. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, these scenes stand-in are really metaphors for Evelyn fighting her own demons because she's too busy fending off characters you’ve never seen and will never see again instead of doing the actual work, which requires about 45 minutes of screen time and little to no physical confrontation.
People might scream at me for saying this, but a film like Everything Everywhere All At Once is, to me, a testament to how the Disneyfication of cinema has colonized everyone’s creativity. There’s even a fucking Marvel Easter Egg at some point (and others I mighta missed) that made me scream internally: "FUCK YOUUU KEVIN FEIGE. LEAVE ME ALONE WHILE I’M TAKING TIME AWAY FROM YOUR MASS PRODUCED CRAP. I’M TIRED OF HAVING THE SPIRITUAL SHITS."
Film Snob presents: Film Rewriting 101
The question that remains is the following: was there a better movie to do with these characters and their very relatable problem? I think so? Because the premise is absolutely fascinating: a woman is visited by other, different versions of her family from the multiverse is confronted to the shittiness of her own choices and decides that changing her mindset could have a beneficial effect on her actual family, which in turn could have a beneficial effect on her. That film is pretty fucking cool if you ask me.
So, instead of being a laundromat Tony Stark and saving the universe, how else could’ve she had encountered alternate versions of herself? By falling into a coma? By having a near death experience? Any reason is good to send Evelyn into an alternate universe because the reasons are not important. The tone of the film is wacky and zany. The important is that she gets to the alternate universe and experience the other, more successful versions of herself. It’s the cool part of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Instead of having to fend off a nihilist force with a love for Bagel, death could’ve been her antagonist. The great nothingness. She could’ve experienced the multiverse without having to fight anybody, but she would’ve gotten them stolen away from her by an all-encompassing void, forcing her to either surrender to it or jolt out of coma, with a better appreciation for her life. I feel like it would be essentially the same movie without any boring-ass kung fu scenes. You can even keep the hot-dog fingers universe if you want.
*
Everything Everywhere All At Once is fun and original, but it’s not as fun and original as it presents itself. It has nuanced characters and ultimately strong stakes, but it is structured like any big budget action adventure movies and I fucking hate that structure. I would’ve expected something more subtle from the director of Swiss Army Man Daniel Scheinert, but it’s hard to argue against its success. This movie is going to be even more praised when it becomes a vague memory to people.
Because it’s alright, but it's not as transcendent as it should be.
