Category: Personal Favorites

Everything Everywhere All at Once – 2022

Finally!  Finally the Academy had the guts to award the Oscar for Best Picture to a science fiction film.  And if you ask me, it was a worthy winner.  But this movie was so much more than just a good sci-fi movie.  It was a drama, with some awesome dramatic moments, a comedy with some hilarious comedic moments, an action film with some thrilling action moments, and a philosophical movie that really made you think about some deep concepts.  It had all of this, and still maintained a really well-crafted story.  It was an incredible film.  On top of all that, it had a phenomenal cast, some really great acting, the sets were fantastic, the costumes were bold and wild, and the visual effects were top-notch.

There is so much to cover!  The first thing that comes to mind is one of my favorite things about the movie.  It was smart.  It was intelligent.  Some of my favorite movies of all time are movies that make you use your brain, movies that make you really pay attention to the story to understand them.  You see, if this is done right, then everything about the films makes a certain amount of sense, at least according to the concept and mythology of the narrative.  That means that the film has to follow its own rules.  This movie did that.  It is a fantastical movie about a multiverse, and characters using made-up technologies to access skills and memories from alternate versions of themselves, in order to use those abilities at will.  But they have to perform random and bizarre actions in order to trigger them.

In more ways than one, the concept reminded me of The Matrix movies, but was different enough that I wouldn’t call it stealing.  In the Matrix, characters could be given skills by downloading them from a data disk.  Here they can gain the same abilities by borrowing them from themselves in other realities.  The action was highly martial-arts based, with a lot of kung-fu-style fighting. 

Interesting note:  In early drafts of the script, the main protagonist was supposed to be Jackie Chan.  However, when the lead character was changed to a woman, Who else could they get but Michelle Yeoh?  The reason for the gender switch was because the directors thought the drama would be relatable to more people.

Another interesting note:  A fun fact I found on IMDB about Everything Everywhere All at Once is that all the VFX for this film were done by nine people, including the two directors, with the majority of the shots being done by a core group of five people.  None of the VFX team went to school for VFX.  They were all friends who taught themselves with tutorials they found online for free.

 So in order to understand the film, let me give a brief synopsis, as best I can.  Evelyn, played by Michelle Yeoh, and her husband Waymond, played by Ke Huy Quan, are Chinese American immigrants.  Their marriage is in danger, and Waymond is trying to find the right moment to serve Evelyn with divorce papers, as a way to force her to pay more attention to their relationship.  They have a depressed lesbian daughter named Joy, played by Stephani Hsu.  The family owns a laundry business that is undergoing a tax audit.  At the IRS building, Deirdre Beaubeirdre, the IRS inspector, played by Jamie Lee Curtis is threatening to seize their business. 

On their way to the audit meeting, Evelyn is contacted by Waymond from a different universe, as he takes over the body of her husband, to tell her that a villain is threatening to destroy the entire multiverse.  He says that Evelyn is the only one who can stop her, and he gives her instructions to follow that will set her on the path to defeating the evil Jobu Tupaki. 

After that, the chaos begins, and Waymond, after chewing on an entire stick of chap-stick, begins displaying superhuman abilities that he could not possibly possess, like near magical kung-fu fighting skills.  As the family is attacked by Deirdre and a group of security guards, the new Waymond begins teaching Evelyn to access similar abilities by connecting with her counterparts in other realities and using their skills and abilities.  Evelyn’s mind is stretched, bent, and nearly broken, as she experiences multiple versions of herself from different universes.  But she eventually learns that Jobu Tupaki is actually her daughter Joy, who, in another reality has become so depressed that she has found a way to destroy every universe in existence.

But the whole crazy adventure that Evelyin embarks on is just a metaphor for her strained relationship with her daughter.  And after a lot of action, a lot of absurdist imagery, and more than a little philosophical debate, the multiverse is saved as the mother and daughter reconcile and find a kind of peace and understanding with each other.  And in the process, Evelyn’s nearly ending relationship with Waymond is repaired, as well.  That’s where the main drama of the film is really explored.

But that’s just the bare bones of the story.  The movie was so much more than that.  There were the visuals.  The film took the concept of accessing different realities to the extreme, from the mundane, where Evelyn became a celebrated movie actress or a sign twirler on a street corner, to the more absurd and fantastical, like an earth where human beings had hot-dogs for fingers, or an earth where Evelyn and her daughter were nothing more than piñatas.  They even spend considerable time in the existential arena, where life never developed on earth, and the two women were nothing more than stones on a barren landscape, discussing the peaceful meaninglessness of existence.  I actually really liked those sequences.  The hot-dog fingers were amusing, but if you think about it, why couldn’t that have been the dominant trait that survived the evolution of our species?

And then there were the strange and sometimes disturbing triggers that characters had to perform in order to access their counterparts in other realities.  At one point, Waymond had to give himself paper cuts between his fingers, or Evelyn had to proclaim her love for another person.  At one point Evelyn has to put her shoes on the wrong feet.  And not all the triggers were so benign.

There was an absurd combat scene where two men had to shove large plugs into their butts to become master martial-arts fighters.  The first man confuses everyone by slowly taking his pants off, then attempting to sit on the object.  There is a brief struggle as Evelyn fights to prevent the… insertion.  But then a second fighter leaps in from out of nowhere with no pants on at all, soars through the air with his knees held to his chest, and lands squarely on the plug.  Suddenly, he was able to spar with Evelyn as a kung-fu master… with the device dangling from his rear end.  Then the first combatant finds something else to shove into himself, and Evelyn is forced to battle two opponents.  She wins the fight by yanking both of the anal plugs out of the men while they are in mid-air.  I don’t think I’ll ever watch an action sequence quite like this one again.

And I have to talk about the bagel.  The omnicidal Jobu Tupaki says, “I got bored one day, and I put everything on a bagel.  Everything.  All my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every last personal ad on Craigslist, sesame, poppy seed, salt… and it collapsed in on itself, ‘cause you see, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes this: The truth.”  In response, Evelyn asks, “What is the truth?” and Jobu Tupaki’s answer is, “Nothing matters.” And when Evelyn says, “No, Joy, You don’t believe that,” I loved the fatalistic response.  “Feels nice, doesn’t it?  If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel from making nothing of your life goes away.”  So she builds a great cosmic bagel, which, after she herself steps into it, will consume all existence in all universes.

And I think that it was another metaphor for Joy’s desire to commit suicide.  And the whole conflict of the film is twofold.  One is that she doesn’t want to destroy herself thinking that she is alone.  She wants her mother to be there with her.  And the other is that she is hoping that her mother can find a way to save her from her growing nihilism.  It left me with the impression that the movie’s overall message is that the universe is so vast that nothing we do matters, and our lives are ultimately meaningless.

But of course, Evelyn breaks through Joy’s depression and her desire for eternal non-existence, and convinces her that she is not a lost cause, and that despite the fact that she has not made a complete success of her life, whatever that means, love is a good enough reason to continue living.  And just to put a wonderfully touching bow on that gift, it is Waymond who teaches her what love is, and what it can mean, no matter what reality you inhabit.  It was a beautifully crafted message.  I’m sure there are many more things that can be drawn from the philosophical concepts explored in this movie, but that was what rose to the surface for me when I watched it.

But let’s not forget the comedic moments in this movie.  There were some actual laugh-out-loud moments that were shocking and hilarious, like the scene where Jobu Tupaki beads a man to death with a pair of giant dildos, or the scene where a chef is revealed to have a sentient raccoon on his head, controlling his cooking, as in Disney’s animated 2007 film Ratatouille.  When the obviously mechanical rodent is revealed, put into a cage, and is driven away, I found myself with real laughter in my throat.  Or the Butt-plug fight.  Or the pinky fingers of fury scene.  Or the googly eyes on the rock.  There were a lot of genuinely funny moments, and I loved them all.  Again, such a great script!

Now, I’d like to talk about the cast and the acting.  Right away, I need to mention that Michelle Yeoh won the Best Actress award.  Ke Huy Quan won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and Jami Lee Curtis won for Best Supporting Actress.  Stephani Hsu was also nominated for Best Supporting actress, only losing to Curtis.  And though I have not yet seen all the performances in those categories, I think I’m safe in saying the awards were very well-deserved.  They were all incredibly good!  I liked all their performances.  Michelle Yeoh was incredible as she always is, but I think Ke Huy Quan really stood out as phenomenal.  He was so good!  He had several incredibly dramatic scenes that were so profound and impactful to the story.  Well done Quan!

And of course, Jami Lee Curtis was wonderful. I have never seen her in a role like this one.  Not only did she play the part of an over-weight, overworked IRS employee, she also had to do a bit of fighting herself, which, in this kind of a movie, meant a bit of wire-work.  Not bad for an actress in her sixties.  And she handled it all beautifully, proving that she was more than qualified for the difficult role.

There were some great supporting cast members in smaller roles, who were still perfectly cast, and really added to the greatness of the film.  James Hong, who has been around forever as a fantastic character actor, played Gong Gong, Evelyn’s demanding father, Harry Shum Jr. as a teppanyaki chef in one of Evelyn’s alternate realities, and Jenny Slate as Debbie the Dog Mom, a laundromat customer, and one of Evelyn’s opponents, who uses her dog on its leash as a rope dart weapon.  And I have to give special props for Andy and Brian Le, brothers who performed the butt-plug fight scene.  The entire cast did a fantastic job, and there were no weak links.

The whole film was such a great success, from its cast to is visual effects, from its sets and costumes to its choreography.  It was a masterpiece in filmmaking.  But all that greatness had to come from somewhere.  And for that, we have to look to its directors, who were also the script-writers.  Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, otherwise known as the Daniels, really did an unbelievable job in putting together a script that was not only fun, funny, action-packed, and engaging, but smart, as well.  It is a movie that made me think, not just about what was happening on the screen, but also about the philosophical concepts the narrative explored.  As I’ve said before, I do love movies that are epic in nature, and this was certainly that.

I can’t even imagine what kind of a logistical nightmare this movie must have been to film and put together, but they handled it perfectly, and I find myself wondering what other films they have made.  They did a fantastic job, and they really deserve all the recognition this wonderful movie has brought them.  The movie was nominated for eleven Oscars, taking home seven.  It won for Best Picture, of course, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.  That actually makes the movie the highest winning film since Slumdog Millionaire in 2014.  Pretty impressive.

And the fact that it was a science-fiction film, thrills me to no end.  It is about time that the Academy recognizes that a movie doesn’t have to be a drama to be good.  Now, I know I’m generalizing, but just look at the history of Best Picture winners.  This was the 95^th Academy Awards, and of the ninety-five winners, around seventy of the winners have been dramas.  This movie was so well thought out and so well put together.  I think it deserved every Oscer it took home.  Beautifully done, everyone!  Beautifully done!