One of the worst sins a movie can commit is to introduce an inventive premise and then only follow through on the premise in the most ordinary ways, not displaying any further imagination. Everything Everywhere All At Once does the opposite, continually expanding and escalating the possibilities it explores. It keeps pulling the rug out from under the audience in the most extraordinary ways.
The movie is about a woman with an overwhelming but ordinary life, played by Michelle Yeoh, who is given access to all the other possible lives she could have led in order to stop an evil force from destroying the multiverse. And it’s nice that we live in an age where the movie doesn’t feel like it needs to give us too much exposition to establish this; we’re all nerds now who can accept the idea of multiverses. Instead, it takes the time to establish her family and their interpersonal dynamics, which will all be important to the movie and not just used for generating empathy for the main character. The main cast is all excellent here, getting a chance to play multiple versions of themselves from vulnerable to invincible.
The scope of the movie surprised me. You could say the scope is many full lifetimes, but you can also accurately say it just takes place over one day, mostly at an IRS office. This means it is always propulsive, finding time for quieter moments but never really stopping to catch its breath. The directing duo known as Daniels first gained attention with their video for “Turn Down For What”, and the film has the energy and WTF-ness of that music video stretched over the first hour of the film. It’s also reminiscent of “Scott Pilgrim vs The World” and requires the same deft directing and editing choices to shift between a grounded world and fantastic events. We’ve seen the idea of parallel universes and contemplated their meaning before; the best of Rick & Morty covers the same philosophical points. But the way it’s presented here is novel in tone and style. And it’s a real hoot if you are willing to go along for the ride.
But the style and imagination on display is devalued if the film can’t stick the landing. Without getting into spoilers, the movie balances all the sci-fi and silliness with a grounding humanism. This allows us not to worry too much about the rules of ‘verse jumping, and instead worry about the characters and choices they make when presented with everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s a movie I want to watch again, not to ‘figure it out’ like Inception but to see the complex emotional journey unfold. The philosophical answers provided also aren’t anything new, but it’s life-affirming to see them in action.
Das Fressen 