Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Review of Everything Everywhere All At Once, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
Yes, I have finally watched this a year after it came out. It’s about time, isn’t it? The people in my life, coworkers, almost everyone have been begging me to watch it, but, on the first day of 2023, I finally stopped procrastinating, sat down, and watched it on a cold New Year’s Day alone in my bedroom.
And it was as glorious as I expected it to be. I had a bit of fun watching this one, and there is definitely a lot of content you can break down with it. As the award seasons approaches, I do genuinely hope that this movie gets the accolades it deserves because I think there’s definitely a lot of heart and soul in it, and I am surprised it did as well as it did. But, at the same time, I’m not.
Life is messy and weird, and so is Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Let’s dive into the review.
An immigrant mother finds her life falling apart, then multiple universes collide with her at the center.
The beginning of Everything Everywhere All At Once sets the scene immediately for the family dynamics at hand we’re going to witness throughout this movie: Evelyn is over demanding and kind of a pain in the ass throughout, while her husband wants to divorce her but hasn’t gotten his guts together to serve her the papers.
Her daughter, Joy, is a lesbian and she can’t seem to accept that. Her father, Gong Gong, who sees Evelyn as a disappoint because she ran away from home with her husband to live in the United States, is overbearing and shouts too much.
The pivotal scene that starts everything in motion for this strange, fun movie is when Waymond, Gong Gong, and Evelyn are visiting the IRS people.
In the elevator, Waymond’s body is taken over by his Alpha version from another dimension, and he warns Evelyn for what’s to come. While they’re sitting in front of their IRS tax collector going over the fact Evelyn committed fraud, Evelyn is warped to other universes, making everyone around her think she’s crazy because of how she has begun to act weirdly.
After hitting Deirdre right after she has given them an extension, security is called, Waymond goes into his Alpha mode and suddenly knows martial arts, and we know now the Alpha version of Joy is known as Jobu.
Her mind broke when she was pushed too hard by Evelyn, and now she hops across dimensions in search of the right Evelyn. She utilizes something as the Bagel, which I took as a metaphor for feeling dead inside and wanting to erase one’s existence from the world.
If one goes into The Bagel, they end up dying for realsies. Terrifying stuff. Anyways, Jobu starts hunting down Evelyn in her daughter’s body, while wearing some fabulous outfits, and thus that sparks a series of battles in the middle of this IRS building.
Gong Gong’s alpha version even makes an appearance, summoning his army from the other universes to attack and try and kill Joy.
Upon exposed to The Bagel, Evelyn acts apathetic and self-destructive in all universes, effectively burning many bridges. It takes that and some other character’s—specifically Waymond—to knock her sense back into herself, take down all the people who are about to enter The Bagel, and make up with her daughter, finally introducing Joy’s girlfriend to Gong Gong.
There’s a lot of hope when it comes to the ending, as it implies that the family will not be as fractured anymore.
There were some plot points I was surprised the movie got away with, but I see why they made the decisions they did. I don’t understand why the tax person would let Evelyn go so easily after her husband talks with her, explaining that he just served the divorce papers to his wife.
I understand there’s that moment of woman to woman empathy between Evelyn and Deirdre, making her seem so much more human than an IRS person, and the fact this is the scene where it makes Evelyn realize the one thing she needed to say to Alpha Deirdre. It just felt very out of place in a way that felt more fragmented than the rest, which is ironic considering this is a movie about fragments.
But Deirdre is set up to be this heartless IRS person and then suddenly flips the empathy switch even after all of Evelyn’s strange, violent behavior.
There’s so much to analyze in this movie. The first thing I’d point out is the power of making decisions in your life and the ripple effects it creates, especially on other people. Alternate Evelyn pushed Jobu too hard to the point where she became vicious and self destructive.
I imagine the alternate universe traveling could be a metaphor for all the failed mistakes you’ve made in your life, and Jobu is just the manifestation of what happens in diaspora communities when you push someone way too hard. I could easily relate to that, even though I am not Chinese-American.
Genre is smashed together in a way that works; as someone who believes the human experience could only be represented in a smashing of genres, I appreciated that in this movie.
I also found this movie to be clearly written by men at times because the humor and plot lines leaned super masculine. Jobu fighting with dildos was something I could honestly only imagine male writers making, as well as the hot dogs for hands.
I think the story is written brilliantly throughout and I don’t pose any major questions to it right now, but some things simply leaned very male-oriented—which is weird for a story largely about women.
Overall Thoughts
Watch it. Support it.
That’s all. I could spend hours analyzing this movie, like I did with my best friend for Nope, but that’s for another time.
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