Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
Movie · 2022 · Reviewed on
A symphony only works when each individual instrument is meant for each other and play its best. It’s a marriage of harmonies and melodies, music that rises into a crescendo to make something that moves beyond the experience and touches our souls directly. Everything Everywhere, All At Once, is a beautiful and touching symphony. The Daniels have made an absolute masterpiece in every way.
The Multiverse
Let’s look at the broad strokes first. The plot is about a vast interconnected network of worlds that people can connect to to access their counterparts’ minds, skills, thoughts, and emotions. A multiverse film.
This story element is presented narratively in most films as a lazy way to explain bringing together commercial properties to help sell more tickets; random plot contrivances; or to cover up gaping wide plot holes.
The way it is presented within such films visually is even more lazy or rather generic. The ‘multiverse’ is shown with nothing more than an expensive CGI colour wash that is more spectacle than actual substance. The editing is not stylized to fit the fact that we are seeing multiple realities happen at the same moment in time, and just rapidly cut between scenes the same way a normal film would do. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once is a breath of fresh air standing out among its predecessors and will hopefully act as a blueprint for how multiverses and interconnected timelines should be presented. The multiverse feels organic and personal to Evelyn, and feels like an extension of her journey that is to come.
The multiverse is used to build the conflict even further and drive the character’s journey, rather than as a gimmick.
The Absurdism
Absurdism is tricky to pull off. It adds a sense of whimsicality to the whole story and can quickly get out of hand. In this film, the absurdism is never out of place. In fact, every single seemingly absurd and out of place moment comes together to serve the overarching theme that this story is trying to deliver by the end. This film gets crazy, incredibly crazy, but it never feels like it’s going off the rails somehow. This is because it’s all grounded in character.
It even uses the multiverse concept to help fuel its absurdist ideas, where so much absolutely insane moments and sequences happen.
Originality
There’s not really any film quite like Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, yet it feels familiar in so many ways. It’s like a Frankenstein’s monster constructed from Matrix movies, 80s martial arts movies, Into The Spider verse and a family drama, and it is greater than the sum of its parts. Sci-fi’s one true goal, contradictory as it may seem, is to examine the human mind and Everything, Everywhere All At Once does that, using absurdism and the multiverse to help it do that.
The Philosophy Of Everything Everywhere All At Once
An easy and quick way to examine and understand the theme of a film is to look at what the main character and the villain is fighting for. In this film, Evelyn goes through quite the arc, almost falling to the same ideology as her daughter. The core conflict of this film is the conflict of absurdism against nihilism. The theme is brought about because of the idea that if there are infinite timelines and universes, nothing really matters.
“If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away”
This is the stance that Evelyn’s daughter, Joy, takes. Evelyn’s core belief is that if nothing matters, then we can choose to make our own meaning out of it.
“Maybe it’s like you said. Maybe there is something out there, some new discovery, that will make us feel like even smaller pieces of shit. Something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this noise. And why, no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.”
Being the vast maximalist film that it is, this isn’t the only conflict. The next conflict is between Evelyn and Waymond, who both react to nihilism in their own unique way, creating a new conflict.
Evelyn fights with strength and violence, by being angry and by being uncaring. Waymond fights with kindness, love, and compassion.
“When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.”
The final conflict is between Evelyn and Gong Gong. Gong Gong’s stubbornness to let go of the past is the final obstacle standing between Evelyn and her arc’s resolution. All these three, victories or losses, serve to make Evelyn’s character development complete, and show us how to live in a better world.
In Conclusion
In lesser words, for those who couldn’t sit through this absolute monster of a review… Everything Everywhere, All At Once truly does live up to the title. It has epic action sequences, beautiful visuals, a soundtrack that doesn’t get in the way, an awe-inspiring premise, a beautiful and powerful emotional core and a large dose of goofiness and absurdism baked into every step. It’s one of the most important films I’ve ever seen, and it has informed a lot of what standards that film should be held up to in the future. Never in another film have I laughed this hard and cried this much.
Please Watch it.
