MOVIE REVIEW

The Movie of a Generation

Everything Everywhere All at Once: purpose, connection, and transcendence

Describing Everything Everywhere All at Once is no easy task. To say that the epic film lives up to its name may even be an understatement. There have been few movies in history to attempt something so wildly ambitious.

Summarizing a masterpiece is rarely an easy task. To summarize even average work can sometimes present a challenge. But where Everything Everywhere All at Once is concerned, it renders summaries all but pointless. I could say that it’s an off-the-walls, thoughtful, philosophical, raucous adventure through the multiverse, but it wouldn’t capture all that the film manages to muster. I could say that it impeccably crams humor, action, love, and the search for life’s purpose into a single movie, but that would still fail to embody the masterful assault on the senses that is Everything Everywhere All at Once.

To really delve into much of what takes place within its nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime would simply sound ludicrous. In that way, it’s a movie that truly needs to be seen in order to be believed.

Both Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, the actors playing the film’s two lead protagonists, had all but given up acting prior to accepting the roles. Yeoh had actually been told to retire before agreeing to play “Evelyn.” Quan hadn’t played a major acting role since as far back as the 1980s, with The Goonies and Indiana Jones.

The role “Evelyn” was written specifically for Michelle Yeoh to play, and she joined the film largely because of a personal relationship she’d formed with the two directors, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan. Learning, too, of Jamie Lee Curtis’s involvement with the project was another key deciding factor for Yeoh.

Quan was so unsure he’d be able to excel in the role he’d landed that he was reluctant to tell anyone in his life he was even filming it. It wasn’t until the trailer was about to release that he finally told his family the news.

In spite of Everything Everywhere All at Once’s unlikely inception and the unconventional story it had to tell, it went on to receive awards and nominations for accomplishments in nearly every category in every major award show, breaking records in the process. Quan and Yeoh’s performances won the pair a bevy of Emmys and Oscars, including awards for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor.

Watching the film, it’s not difficult to see why it was so loved. In its explorations of the abstruse, the mundane, the action-packed, and the everything in between, it’s a spectacle left largely open to interpretation. The plot leaves dangling the purpose of life in the universe and the meaning of everything in it — in every different form of it.

But to the soul-stirring quandaries it obliquely poses, it presents a platter of answers. In its dazzling, confounding, all-encompassing climax, it allows the viewer to decide whether life’s meaning is to love, to let go, to connect, or to find purpose in its utter lack of purpose.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a sweeping culmination of everything that it claims to be. It’s a movie that speaks to the very nature of being alive in this ever-evolving world filled with people, places, things, and ideas. It seriously and comically introduces the viewer, as well, to the multitude of other universes and the infinities of complexities that they’re each home to. It powerfully explores the desire to travel life’s untaken roads at the same time that it seems almost to diminish them. It traverses hypothetical realities in a way that’s both inconsequential and dire.

The film is every bit as poignant and introspective as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and every bit as climactic and mind-bending as The Matrix. It’s as ungrounded as Inception and as hard-hitting as Interstellar. It pokes fun at decades worth of pop culture in its delivery of this unrelentingly novel, hilariously circuitous rollercoaster of a movie.

Everything Everywhere All at Once delves into some of the most important concepts that I’ve ever seen explored on screen. While it’s not the first to explore life’s purpose and existential dread, it’s the first to do it with such an impassioned, bombastic gusto. It fires on all cylinders as the dizzying, dizzying ride of a plot unfolds.

It’s a flickering, pulsating, and over-stimulating extravaganza of a movie, but in its overwhelming nature, remains pointed toward a larger end. While that larger end is difficult to put into words, the varying interpretations of it are a testament to the quintessential achievement that is Everything Everywhere All at Once.

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