As much as I like to harp on how formulaic and soulless the entertainment industry has become, there will be days where all I want to do is pay 10 bucks to have my brain turned off by the latest Blockbuster. So, two weeks before finals, a friend and I bought tickets to “Everything Everywhere All at Once” for some uncomplicated, good old-fashioned fun.
We were expecting a quirky action-comedy, with the paper-thin plot of a Marvel movie and the questionable sci-fi of…well, a Marvel movie. What we got was a meticulously crafted, brilliant mosaic of ridiculous humor and existential epiphany that left us red-eyed and dazed, stumbling into the streets covered in snot and tears and unable to speak to each other because of how hard we were still crying after the credits.
Most movies are like a scalpel: sharp and precise, with a clear arc and a thread of plot that is easy to wind back up into a digestible little ball. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a nuclear bomb. It’s impossible to boil down into a summary and to fully capture the experience of seeing this film, I would have to upload the whole thing here myself.
Here’s my next best effort.
The official synopsis reads as follows: “An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led.”
While all of this is technically true, it’s barely the tip of the iceberg. The action-packed comedy being pitched is the mechanism through which the story is being told and not the true story itself. In actuality, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is not about multiverse-hopping, or defying evil, or saving the world; instead, it’s about regular, ordinary problems that everyday people face, like parenting or getting older, being faced with hard choices and choosing love, over and over again.
Of course, it’s also about mixed martial arts, dimension-jumping assassins, and space bagels. As the name suggests, this maximalist work of art really does have everything, from shockingly crude humor to fantastic action to some incredibly raw emotional gore.
One of the most common criticisms of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is that it is unnecessarily complicated for the themes it presents, but on the contrary, I believe what makes this film brilliant is the juxtaposition between the complexity of its delivery and the simplicity of its message. It takes advantage of its set-up to show that when existence becomes overwhelming and everything, everywhere, all at once, becomes too much, there are still these plain, simple principles to ground us and live our lives by.
As overused as the phrase is, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is quite simply, a cinematic masterpiece. Through amazing script-writing, casting, costume design, and set work, it delivers its message of enduring love and compassion in defiance of an absurd universe in one of the most inventive and complex ways I’ve ever seen.
The movie is a psychedelic explosion of color. It’s tossing a handful of crystal meth into your breakfast smoothie. It is also a warm hug—an amazing love letter to mothers and daughters, to people in their 20s growing into disillusioned apathy and those in their 50s who never quite grew out of it, to every single one of us ants running around on this blue marble with no idea of what we’re doing or where we’re going.
There has never been a movie like it, and I genuinely believe that there never will be again. Do yourself a favor and don’t rob yourself of the experience.