Everything Everywhere All at Once: An Ambitious and Emotional Adventure

It is very rare that a movie comes out and feels like something totally unique and different from everything else being made today. Not only does Everything Everywhere All at Once manage to be a fantastic science fiction movie that is emotionally resonant, but it manages to do that while having a ton of fun in the process.

It is worth noting that this movie is long, clocking in at two hours and twenty minutes. For a frame of reference, this puts it at just a hair shorter than Spider-Man: No Way Home, which feels like a fitting comparison considering the subject matter. Compounding this runtime is the fact that it feels like two tonally different movies spliced together at about the midway point which some audience members may bump into this. Within the context of the movie, and with the reveal that causes the flip, this change does make sense but it does make the back half of the movie feel like a much heavier emotional work than the front.

The first half of the movie has a kind of surrealist humor to it as Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is quickly thrust into the middle of a multiversal cataclysm and is forcibly conscripted into the conflict by an alternate version of her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). What follows is a chase through an IRS building as Waymond tries to get Evelyn to tap into her alternate lives to learn their skills to help them escape. To do this, Evelyn and Waymond need to do “weird things” like profess their love for their pursuer (played by Jamie Lee Curtis), breathe into someone else’s nose, or swallow a figurine of a frog whole. It feels like the kind of plot one would expect in an episode of Rick and Morty but with a sincerity to it that makes it work on a different level.

The back half of the movie is almost entirely about what someone who has knowledge of and access to all their possible lives across all the possible universes can then do with that knowledge. The antagonist learns this, and it drives them to realize that nothing matters in the world because it’s all just things that are random events completely out of their control. One of the best scenes in the movie is Evelyn and the antagonist going to an alternate universe where life did not grow so they are both just rocks overlooking a canyon. There is no spoken dialogue but the conversation between them is shown on the screen as text. The fact that the resolution of the plot is Evelyn and the antagonist having a conversation across multiple universes rather than someone beating someone into submission says everything that needs to be said about this movie.

Anyone who considers themselves a science fiction fan, or a fan of original movies, should go out and see Everything Everywhere All at Once. Much like Fast Color in 2019, it feels like a totally unique experience that will probably be swallowed up by the litany of much larger releases in the coming months but should not be missed by anyone who loves the genre.

Final Rating: 10/10