The Big Picture

  • Everything Everywhere All At Once is a multiverse adventure balancing vast scope and earnest kindness in a risky, creative way.
  • The film challenges the viewer to embrace kindness in a world that feels bleak, offering a unique perspective on optimism.
  • In a time where comfort food entertainment prevails, the movie stands out for its ambitious, unconventional storytelling and heartfelt message.

Watching Everything Everywhere All At Once, the glorious movie by directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, it becomes apparent that this interdimensional sci-fi comedy fulfills the promise made by dozens of other movies and TV shows over the past few years. It is the antidote to These Uncertain Times, a blast of joyful creativity that counters the bleakness of the current moment with its own kind of nihilistic optimism. It starts as a story about a harried Asian woman named Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) trying to do her taxes, then it expands into a celebration of the entire universe. If the world is entering a post-pandemic phase - if such a thing even exists - Everything Everywhere is the perfect movie to lead audiences out of this two-year holding pattern.

Of course, audiences have heard that before. Ted Lasso was sold as a beacon of comfort and kindness, becoming a killer app for Apple TV+ and winning a boatload of Emmys in the process. CODA rode a similar path to Oscar glory, arguing that a heartstring-tugging crowd-pleaser was just what moviegoers needed. Everything from Abbott Elementary to the In the Heights movie to Joe Pera Talks to You has been pitched as a tonic for an exhausted, pessimistic audience, bowl after bowl of chicken soup for the soul. It’s a feel-good update of the Trump era’s obsession with “necessary art”: the idea that media should not only be good but, in some way, good for the audience.

Everything Everywhere All at Once Black and White Poster
Everything Everywhere All at Once
R
Adventure
Comedy

A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led.

Release Date
March 25, 2022
Cast
Jenny Slate , Michelle Yeoh , jamie lee curtis , Ke Huy Quan
Runtime
139 minutes

'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Is Warm Without Comprising Its Ambition

Soothing the collective psyche of the zeitgeist is certainly a noble endeavor, and none of the previously mentioned shows or movies are bad. But while nobody can blame audiences for wanting comfort food right now, an emphasis on warm and fuzzy feelings can lead to unassuming, unambitious entertainment. Ted Lasso is frequently delightful, but it’s often too cute by half, using its biscuit-laden charm offensive to make up for plots and characters that are never quite as complex as the show seems to think. Meanwhile, although CODA admirably highlights a marginalized community, the narrative itself is pure boilerplate, and the director makes the obvious choice at every turn. This sort of approach creates an environment where simplicity and cliché are virtues in their own right, where easy uplift can be rebranded as bold and radical.

Everything Everywhere All At Once has been greeted with widespread acclaim, but some have been more measured in their praise, considering the final thirty minutes to be overly pat and sentimental. Everything Everywhere is the kind of freewheeling, irreverent movie that features fanny pack combat, an extended riff on Ratatouille, and an alternate universe where humans have hot dogs instead of fingers, among many other things. Balancing all of that with an earnest plea for kindness in the face of a vast, uncaring universe is a tall order, and the viewer’s mileage may vary whether Daniels pulled it off.

Still, there are a few things that separate Everything Everywhere’s brand of earnest kindness from something like Ted Lasso - and not just because no one was beaten to death with giant dildos on Ted Lasso. Feel-good media is only a problem when it focuses on being broadly palatable without taking any risks; to put it mildly, Everything Everywhere does not have this problem. It’s risky to make an action movie about a frazzled Asian mother trying to do her taxes; it’s risky to set up a complicated multiverse with bizarre rules and rituals and expect the audience to follow along; it’s risky to ask the audience to become emotionally invested in a relationship drama between two women with frankfurters for fingers; it’s risky to make a movie with a universe-sized scope, that requires absolute technical precision (from the editors, from the VFX crew, etc.), with one-eighth the budget of the average Marvel movie. Ambition is not an issue here.

'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Makes Kindness Important

More to the point, Everything Everywhere earns its kindness by grappling with what it means to be kind right now, rather than looking at kindness as an abstract principle. Nobody thinks the world is too kind and generous, after all. It’s easy enough to agree that people ought to be less cynical, or that optimism is a healthy way of looking at things. But when it feels like society is circling the drain towards oblivion? When half the country refuses to recognize the other half as human beings? When optimism feels delusional at best and dangerous at worst? What then?

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Daniels return with one of the most ambitious and bonkers films in recent memory.

Then, as Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) suggests, kindness and optimism are more important than ever. When his wife shatters the windows of their laundromat with a baseball bat, he hums as he sweeps up the pieces. When an IRS agent comes along to repossess the business, he reasons with her and buys them another week. And when, in an alternate universe, his old flame coldly rebukes the possibility that they could ever be happy together, he’s thoughtful and understanding. “You think because I’m kind that it means I’m naive,” he says - and maybe he is. But to him, kindness is “strategic and necessary.” “This is how I fight,” he says, and somewhere in the multiverse, Evelyn takes note.

Maybe there are those who don’t respond well to the ending of Everything Everywhere All At Once. They might find the kill-them-with-kindness approach silly, with Evelyn saving the day through the power of BDSM, human puppetry, and chiropractic medicine. They might question whether Gong Gong (James Hong) would really accept the fact that his granddaughter (Stephanie Hsu) has a girlfriend. They might even shrug their shoulders at the movie’s thesis statement - after all, it’s not the first movie to suggest kindness in the face of oblivion. But it has rarely been executed with such creativity and flair, it has rarely been acted out in such poignant ways, and it has never come at a better time than this. Whatever criteria is needed to “earn” such open-hearted humanism, Everything Everywhere clears every possible hurdle — and cheerfully cannonballs itself onto a trophy shaped like a butt plug.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is available to watch on Netflix in the U.S.

Watch on Netflix