Movie Review: Everything Everywhere all at Once
The best use of multiverse theory as a storytelling device.
Stories involving the multiverse theory and the possible lives therein are hot right now. The MCU made use of it in three hits: Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Matt Haig writes about it in The Midnight Library (read my review here).
The concept is not new, of course. Jet Li attempts to assassinate variations of himself in The One (2001). In the 90s there was the weekly television series Sliders, in which the characters “slide” from world to world. Both of these inspired my first novel, also about multiverses. The Star Trek franchise has made extensive use of multiverse theory. Perhaps the most famous example is the episode “Mirror, Mirror” in which the crew of the Enterprise is evil and Spock wears a goatee.
The video game Bioshock: Infinite handled the concept better than any other media I have seen - until now. Everything Everywhere All at Once uses excellent cinematography and editing techniques as well as special effects to visualize the multiverse theory. It also uses the concept to explore teenage angst, family drama and existential crisis.
Flip a coin, and our universe divides. In one universe the coin lands on heads. In the other it is tails. So it is with every decision you have made. Blue tie or red? Marry him or date her? Major in biology or jazz piano? Each decision, no matter how small, compounds the effect. The end result is versions of yourself living lives you could not have fathomed.
The movie begins with Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) struggling to run a laundromat business while being audited by the IRS. Her family life is also falling apart. The relationship with her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is strained. Her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), has filed for divorce.
While in the IRS building Waymond’s personality changes. His mind is taken over by the consciousness of a Waymond from another universe called the alpha universe. He tells Evelyn, “There is a great evil spreading throughout the many verses. And you may be our only chance of stopping it.”
The “great evil” is the alpha version of Joy whose mind has been fractured by “verse-jumping” experiments such that she experiences all universes simultaneously. Now called Jobu Tupaki, she creates a blackhole-like thing so that she might end all her lives. Before that, however, she hunts for Evelyn. “I wasn’t looking for you so I could kill you. I was just looking for someone who could see what I see, feel what I feel,” Jobu Tupaki says.
What she feels is the theme and the true inner conflict of the story. Experiencing every universe has given Jobu Tupaki god-like omniscience. She knows every possible outcome from every possible decision. Do you know what happens when you put everything on a bagel? she asks. You realize nothing matters. And since nothing matters, there is no reason to continue the failed experiment called existence. Jobu Tupaki’s nihilistic conclusion about life is a metaphor for Joy’s (indeed, every kid’s) teenage angst.
The struggle to stop Jobu Tupaki from entering the blackhole mirrors the struggle in the mother and daughter relationship: one tries to break away and become her own person but loses her grounding in the process; the other tries to hold it all together in the face of unreconciled emotions, repressed trauma, a generational gap and a looming financial disaster.
To defeat Jobu Tupaki, Evelyn decides she must become like her. She “verse-jumps” until her mind is also fractured. Now being that someone who can “see what I see, feel what I feel,” Evelyn understands the meaninglessness her daughter experiences and is tempted into joining her in the blackhole.
Waymond, however, solves their existential crisis. He says, “When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naïve. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I learned to survive through everything.” Jordan Peterson couldn’t have said it better.
Evelyn saves the multiverse and her daughter by at last reconciling their relationship, as well as those with her husband and father. The movie ends with the Wangs getting a grip on their tax situation.
Everything Everywhere All at Once can certainly be called a visual masterpiece - no small compliment for the writer-director team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (i.e., the Daniels). The special effects are well done, the editing and cinematography superb.
According to Fast Company:
To craft the film’s elaborate fight scenes and surreal visual effects, Daniels assembled an army of independent filmmakers and stuntmen they largely found through YouTube. Later, alongside the dexterous editing of Paul Rogers, they worked until the last minute on fine-tuning the mood and rhythm and pandemonium …
Fast Company also describes the visual effects as “hopscotching into kaleidoscopic worlds …” and “... the camera swiveling and zooming …” I would compare it to channel surfing, only the channels are parallel universes. Sometimes we spend a while in one world, other times we catch a glimpse and move on to the next. All this combines to produce a visual effect that captures what jumping universes might be like.
A particularly excellent example of visual storytelling in Everything Everywhere All at Once is the use of a glass-like splintering of an image to announce when Evelyn’s consciousness is straddling two different worlds or (later) many different worlds.
The acting is fantastic. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a villainous tax agent who hunts Evelyn with superhuman strength. Later, the character becomes more nuanced. James Hong plays the grouchy Gong Gong whose alpha version tries to kill his family. Ke Huy Quan is most famous for his work as a child in movies such as The Goonies and Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. Here, he is a loveable and quirky husband.
Sometimes the intentionally absurd humor is too absurd, yet I can’t imagine the movie without it. So it is that Everything Everywhere All at Once is an excellent film and is the best use of multiverse theory as a storytelling device that I have seen.
I missed the last few MCU multiverse projects, but it does seem that this film is a step above the standard method used to deploy the multiverse concept, with much more at stake, and greater weight to the storytelling style. After a while, though, I thought the special effects and bizarre visuals were distracting, and I left the theater rather annoyed. But perhaps I should give it a second viewing.
My big question is, why is the multiverse experiencing a resurgence of popularity as a storytelling device? If you and your readers are interested, I had a good conversation on Twitter regarding that point, you can find it here: https://twitter.com/william_collen/status/1524391621646815232