First, a quick attempt to summarize the movie, since you may not have heard of it. (It is, after all, an indie film that has taken weeks to methodically build the kind of box office total that some blockbusters earn on opening day.) Chinese-American immigrant Evelyn Wang is at a crossroads in a life of missed opportunities. Her relationships with her husband, daughter, and father are all strained. Her laundromat is under audit by the IRS (with her mountain of receipts a testament to other dreams unfulfilled). Suddenly, a visitor from another reality arrives to tell her she's the key to saving all incarnations of the multiverse from a powerful evil being that seeks to destroy everything.
It's interesting that Everything Everywhere All at Once arrives as the MCU is spinning up its take on the multiverse -- in particular that it arrived just weeks before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. One critique I had of that movie was that it didn't really live of to the promise of anarchy in its overblown title. In that respect, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the movie I thought I was getting. This is a film in which absolutely anything goes. The conceptual and tonal weirdness is fractal, allowing in everything from lowbrow comedy to the absurd, from intellectualism to action, from parody to drama.
The movie is science fiction, martial arts, existentialism, family drama, and more. Sometimes it lurches from one tone or genre to another and back, while other times it layers them together in the same scene. Yet the balance (or imbalance, as it often is) really does work. The filmmaking always meets the ambitious tonal shifts. Writer-directors "Daniels" (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) change aspect ratios, lenses, and lighting styles. They bring in martial arts consultants and give VFX artists free reign. And it all looks great.
The cast is absolutely perfect. Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn, the only tether the audience has through this wild ride. She and co-stars Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis all have to essentially play multiple characters drawn from multiple kinds of movies, and everyone rises to meet each challenge, no matter how ridiculous. If you've ever liked Michelle Yeoh in anything, you owe it to yourself to see this performance that really lets her shine as nothing has ever before.
But for me, the message and pacing of the movie aren't handled with a fraction of the skill of its "genre mashup" elements. The movie starts a bit slow, and ends really slow, when you consider the breakneck pace of the bulk of it. It all feels long (at 2 hours, 20 minutes). The positive emotional destination it reaches is fitting (and the sentiments mostly hit), but it lingers for a quite a while before that in a weirdly nihilistic place that makes me wonder if the real thrust of the creators' story was something they were forced to undercut with a more "Hollywood ending."
If it had actually registered for me who "Daniels" are before I saw this movie, I almost certainly would have set my expectations at a more realistic level. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are the pair behind Swiss Army Man, and while this movie doesn't instantly run out of runway like that one (there's simply too much creativity here for that to be possible), the feeling was much the same to me: this is a movie in which the creativity itself are the best part. Still, I liked Everything Everywhere All at Once considerably more.
Probably, though, I need not have let hype convince me this was a movie I had to see now, in a theater. Waiting just a bit longer to stream it at home would have been perfectly fine for me. It's very clever, and a tour de force for Michelle Yeoh, but I personally didn't love it as others have. I give Everything Everywhere All at Once a B-.
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