Everything Everywhere All at Once is a pretty remarkable and interesting film that has both lofty and human ambitions. I went in knowing only that it had something to do with the multiverse and that it starred Michelle Yeoh… which was good enough for me. And, for the first half of the film, I thought it interesting and creative, but hardly much more. I just had to go further up and further in to see the brilliance.
The film is about a family led by Michelle Yeoh who run a failing laundromat. During an IRS audit, the framework of reality crumbles and alternate identities from other realities inhabit our characters and we learn there’s a struggle with an entity who sees everything all at once. And this thing wants to destroy Yeoh’s rather average character for reasons she can’t understand.
It’s a Big Idea movie and, for awhile, it is simply happy to play in a sandbox of fun and absurd ideas. Do something random to connect your mind to a version of yourself that knows kung-fu or professional wrestling? Now you are a kung-fu master (or pro wrestler). Have a fun chase and battle through IRS corridors, face beings that can alter reality on a whim. Sure. Keep it under budget and just go wild.
It’s all in good fun and the martial arts and visual effects are pretty neat. And if that’s all the movie was, it’d be good enough. But there is more to it and soon the film gets even more absurd and beautiful and beautifully absurd. We see worlds with divergent evolution, a mundane item that transcends existence, movies within movies, and all sorts of other wibbly-wobbly ideas. The multiverse is really having a moment.
The movie gets philosophical, sublime, beautiful, existential, and both nihilistic and life-affirming all at once. It introduces even bigger ideas, deeper philosophies, and greater absurdities. I was entranced, it was quite beautiful…. on both a cosmic and human scale. It was thrilling and I was grooving on the editing and the imagery.
And yet… this isn’t a five star film. It approaches it, but there’s something holding it back. On a big idea philosophical level, there was just something – a small thing – that felt crafted or manufactured about it. It didn’t flow quite as smoothly, feel quite as natural as it should. I think what it came down to is that the final act was so chock full of ideas and moments and things that I could start to see the film-making artifice showing. The careful crafted editing mixed with the mélange of ideas. It didn’t POP quite as naturally as I was hoping for. Very close, but not perfect.
On top of that, the film deals with ideas of family connection, love without reservation, and the like. And it does an ok job with it – but it would have been so much better had we spent more time with this family before things went haywire. I couldn’t help but feel they were trying to deliver on something that hadn’t quite been setup well enough. And, at an already length two hours and twenty minutes, that might have been tough to stuff into the film.
But those two complaints don’t kill the film. The philosophy and the silliness and the kung-fu and the third eye googly are all enough to still give this film a lot of love and a great rating. It doesn’t achieve, for me, everything it wanted to, but it comes close and that’s good enough. And, hey, if it makes you think about life, the universe, and everything, then that’s more than 99% of films do.
Score: 91