Cinematography:
Larkin SeipleComposer:
Son LuxCast:
Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tallie Medel, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., Sunita Mani, Aaron Lazar, Andy Le (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led. (Lionsgate US)
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Reviews (18)
Watching this movie felt like downing two meatloaves, half a kilo of pork belly, and washing it down with a gallon of beer. It’s an overload for the senses — a kind of film-induced sensory overload. The entire time, I felt like I was losing my mind. I kept trying to make sense of what I was seeing, searching for some logical thread or anchor point to guide me through the story. Spoiler: I didn’t find it. Yet, for over two hours, I was completely fascinated. The plot stretches logic to its breaking point, and the editing seamlessly blends views from different dimensions into single shots. The performances are incredible: Ke Huy Quan channels a young Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh plays everything from a depressed family member to a kung-fu master with a pinky strong as steel, and Jamie Lee Curtis delivers a performance that’s one big WTF. In fact, the whole film is one big WTF. If it sweeps the Oscars, I wouldn’t be surprised, and I’d actually be happy for it.
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I thought such an unrestrained eruption of creativity was possible only in animation and I’m terribly glad that Dan and Daniel have shown me how wrong I was. On the other hand, no one has ever approached the medium of film with such hyperactive playfulness as they have. While their meta-work is essentially cinematic (in terms of the story being told, the narrative processes and the references), it also personifies the internet in its Web3 phase, with all of its fascinating beauty, pioneering potential, non-linear hypertextual nature and terrifying intangibleness far beyond the possibilities of a single person’s perception. After all, the creative approach of the disparate and yet extraordinarily symbiotic creative duo of Daniels fulfils the principles of decentralisation and blockchain interconnectedness. Everything Everywhere All at Once continues on the path marked out in the field of feature films by the animated movies Spider-Man: Parallel Worlds and The Mitchells vs. the Machines, but its concentration of online popular creativity, both audio-visual and graphic as well as narrative, is breathtaking and rocks the senses by adapting them to the much more production-intensive format of a live-action film. Perhaps it is thus not a coincidence that everything here ultimately revolves around family, though in a completely different and wonderfully imaginative style in terms of family dynamics in relation to the traditional roles of villains and heroes who have to evolve in order to overcome evil. In addition to that, Everything Everywhere All at Once gives Michelle Yeoh the role of her life, in which she puts the experience of all of her previous on- and off-screen roles to good use.
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The first two thirds are an example of first-class screenwriting, where unpredictable moments are strung together like on a treadmill and the rolling train of invention cannot be slowed down. I should be rightly impressed by Tohlle, unfortunately the Daniels as engineers on coke get so carried away that towards the end it becomes a poorly controlled propulsion vehicle that derails and smashes everyone in the wagon. It's a shame, because there's a whole sequence of scenes and situations that you've never seen in a movie before, and that's valuable.
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That's how you put together a rock, a Ratatouille, and the long arm of the tax authority, and you get something between Don’t Look Back, Rick and Morty and Big Trouble in Little China. By all logic, it should be a disparate hodgepodge of half-baked ideas, allusions to anything, originality at all costs, and stupidity². All this in charge of someone who happened to have a solid budget and an impressive ensemble, but no producer to hold the reins. And that's what it is. However unlikely it may be (or maybe we are happy that it worked in spite of everything), it is, worlds wonder, a cohesive and tightly grasped whole, which is undeserving of only a slightly overblown runtime. Thanks to confident direction, and the aforementioned perfect cast, it handily manages to throw up one bizarre scene after another, as well as wringing out emotions in a brilliantly effective "family members finding their way to themselves and each other" equation throughout.
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What happens when you mix some of Marvel's stinking failed comic book movies with a bit of The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, an attempt at a revolutionary depiction of a story about family values (not) fulfilling their potential and totally WTF (read modern) pop culture moments? An absolutely frenetic travesty, where nobody knows what will happen in five minutes, but at the same time nobody really cares.
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