In the era of multiverse movies, and reboot shows, and a dozen lacking Marvel movies, people have been wondering whether there will ever be an original idea put onto screen ever again.
That’s a bit dramatic, but to be fair, the most popular movies in early 2022 had been Marvel movies, and Marvel shows, and just about anything with Marvel in it.
Then came Everything Everywhere All At Once, which premiered on March 25th. A movie that blew people’s minds and regained their hope in cinema and creative ideas once again.
There’s a lot to talk about with this film. One being the creation of it, with only the use of seven editors, and the cinematography such as the first shot, when the camera focuses on a mirror and a family laughing and then immediately cuts to a dull interior with no one in the mirror.
But I wanted to take a deeper look into the other aspects of the film, like its characters and its meaning, and wonder why exactly people love this film so much. What makes this work versus other multiverse movies before it?
If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend that you do. It’s an amazing movie. Seriously, my friend who rarely gives movies five stars, including movies he claims to really love, gave this movie a five star rating! That means that it’s clearly the best thing ever made.
So, strap in and hold on to your raccoons and googly eyes, let’s dive into the movie itself.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is about a Chinese immigrant woman named Evelyn, who finds out she has many different lives in alternate timelines. She also finds out that there’s a woman crossing the multiverse attempting to destroy all of them and she’s the only one that can stop her. She traverses through her many lives in the multiverse in the hopes of stopping the evil while also saving her daughter, who just so happens to be the evil force wanting to kill every timeline in existence.
One of the biggest reasons this movie is so impactful is because of its characters. Evelyn, her husband Waymond, and her daughter Joy, are the main characters of the film. These characters and their growth occur throughout the entire movie and is the central focus within the madness that’s happening in the multiverse.
The film starts out in a chaotic way, putting us right in the drama between Evelyn and her father. Evelyn is worried about father’s inevitable disapproval of her, running their family-owned laundromat, and Joy attempting to get her mother to tell her father about her being gay.
The beginning goes from shot to shot and effortlessly forces us to place ourselves in the characters’ spots and be just as overwhelmed as they are. As the movie goes along and the multiverse storyline plays out, we become more and more invested in the family as we hope to see them exceed. Not to mention, the humor throughout the film connects the audience and the characters even more. We might be annoyed with Evelyn, but the scene with her attempting to explain Ratatouille and instead thinking it was Racaccoonie, will forever be a highlight of the movie. Especially when the joke is used later on as another life in the multiverse in which a character actually mimics Ratatouille but with a raccoon.
The characters were so well written that during a scene where, in another universe, there were no humans and there were simply two rocks–Evelyn and Joy–talking, I could imagine them actually saying it in my head.
They were so impactful that they made you cry during a scene with hot dog fingers and a man screaming after his raccoon. Not many creators can say that they were able to accomplish that.
Just as I thought that the characters could not be topped, the entire message of the film is what caught mine and many others’ attention. The film focuses on many thoughts, some of the biggest being the idea that nothing matters can actually be a good thing, and that optimism can be a strength. These are all great messages that hit the audience because, especially at this time, people are feeling the weight of the world and wondering what even matters. During lockdown, I think many people were feeling that isolation and lostness of where exactly life was taking them.
What Everything Everywhere All At Once captures are the feelings that most of us have experienced over the years, losing that optimism and asking the age old question of “what’s the point of anything?” And instead of folding into the idea and reinforcing it to the audience, it decides to take a different, more optimistic approach, in showing that ‘nothing matters’ can be more than a depressing 3am thought.
The film decides to explain how, if nothing matters, then you can stress less about the big things and take time to focus on the people around you. And not only with just the people around us, but to strangers as well. In a world of chaos and injustice, we can choose to be kind to those around us, especially when we’re confused and don’t know what to do.
Suffice to say, this movie changed my life. And it’s changed so many others too.
And it made me cry over a bunch of rocks so… yeah, there’s that too.